The Lettuce Song and Its Vagaries: A Pop Song in Three Eras. Bernard Arps, Leiden University

BERNARD ARPS SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

The Lettuce Song and Its Vagaries: A Pop Song in Three Eras Bernard Arps, Leiden University Few song titles have provoked as much unease in Indonesia as ‘Genjer-Genjer’. This song from Banyuwangi in easternmost Java has lyrics in the local Osing language (closely related to Javanese) and a musical structure typical for Banyuwangi popular music. Composed in 1953 by music teacher Mohamad Arief and at first popular in Banyuwangi in the repertoire of the angklung genre (whereby angklung is a xylophone, not the shaken bamboo tubes called by this name elsewhere in Indonesia), it became a nationwide hit in the early 1960s. ‘Genjer-Genjer’ was strongly associated with Lekra and the Partai Komunis Indonesia, serving as a signature tune of sorts. The lyrics are innocuous by any standards, however; they describe yellow paddy-field lettuce (genjer) being harvested by a woman, sold in the market, bought by another woman, cooked, and eaten with rice and meat. After 1965, ‘Genjer-Genjer’ was banned. Throughout the Orde Baru period, it was no less than taboo, its political connotations boosted by its use as background music in certain gory scenes of Arifin C. Noer’s movie Penumpasan Pengkhianatan G 30 S PKI (1982). After Reformasi, ‘Genjer-Genjer’ enjoyed a rehabilitation of sorts, not least in its place of origin. Besides several renditions from the early 1960s which have been put up on YouTube and broadcast over the radio (sometimes sparking protests from Muslim action groups), also new renditions circulate, as well as songs clearly inspired by it and alluding to it. There are even versions around performed by non-Indonesian bands, including one sung in Khmer. In this paper I trace the vicissitudes of ‘Genjer-Genjer’ with a focus on its changing status, connotations, and forms in Banyuwangi over the years since the fall of Suharto.

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BART BARENDREGT SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite. 14-6-2010

Pop, politics and piety in the Digital Age Bart Barendregt, Leiden University

This paper focuses on young urban Muslims in their articulation of what has been called market Islam, or more derogatively ‘15 minutes Islam’. This newly styled Islamic popular culture is expressive of and connects with the rise of a Muslim middle class chic, many of its participants young and welleducated, but also to particular political and technological constellations. Decline of the authoritarian New Order regime in Indonesia, and to a lesser extent the upsurge of Malaysia’s civilizational Islam, has coincided with a world wide digital revolution. Combined with an almost chauvinist back to Islam sentiment after 9/11, this has in Southeast Asia resulted in publicly very visible expressions of a young, self conscious Muslim generation. Nasyid music is the auditory component of their newly styled Islamic popular culture, blending the politics of Middle Eastern hymns with the close harmony singing of Western boy band music. Muslim Malay modernities are sonically articulated through the clever use of new digital possibilities provided by small portable studio equipment and samplers. However, this contribution will focus on new means of distribution and especially the larger Southeast Asian market that is targeted in all of this. Nasyid aficionados have been at the forefront of using peer to peer digital platforms and social media in exchanging their music,but have also been among the first to release music as mobile ring and ring back tones, today an industry which is more lucrative than the conventional sales of cassettes and CDs. In sum, the nasyid industry not only caters to but has been very instrumental in shaping new needs for an ever growing audience of Modern Malay Muslim youths that do not shun away from commercial interests, as long as it is ‘funky but shariah’.


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EMMA BAULCH SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Modern love: Pop Melayu in the new century Emma Baulch, ANU In recent times, the term Melayu crops up more and more in various genres of performance. In feature films, advertisements and the compositions of indie bands, images and sounds of Melayu from decades past are starting to appear. Sometimes Melayu is presented in fond light and nostalgic register, as in the films Laskar Pelangi and Sang Pemimpi. In Laskar Pelangi, (Rh)oma Irama makes an important appearance in the form of a poster. He serves, it is intimated, as a proxy political leader, and as a sartorial guide for Ikal’s first romantic foray. In Sang Pemimpi, an orkes Melayu vocalist in dazzling attire mentors one of the main teenage protagonists in matters of the heart. The tutelage is successful; in the end, the youth gets the girl, although she remains at a distance. These examples suggest an interpretation of Melayu that has much in common with the Rhoma Irama story of the 1970s - resistance, survival and success resulting from dogged determination. Another male dangdut star of that decade, A Rafiq, stresses in his compositions a different interpretation of Melayu: despair, hopelessness, longing, pining, a sense of things being beyond reach. But A Rafiq makes no appearance in the films. Apart from these nostalgic references, other appearances of Melayu in contemporary performances are very much in the here and now. See, for example, the recent clutch of pop Melayu boy bands, with Kangen Band, ST12 and Wali being the most successful. Whilst Laskar Pelangi appears to have enjoyed a broad appeal and critical success, some critics have met the rise of pop Melayu with great ambivalence. In a separate paper, I have discussed and analysed these derisive reactions to pop Melayu. Here, however, I want to start to try to get a sense of pop Melayu on its own terms. Eventually, I will consider broader questions around gendered and classed engagements with pop Melayu. In this paper I just want to share some of my general observations of pop Melayu based on available literature and some textual analysis.

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The paper begins by relating the story of the emergence of Kangen Band – their appearance in recordings and on television in 2006, and rise to national prominence in 2007 after signing a recording contract with Jakarta- based recording label Warner Music. I analyse the band’s embrace of the term ‘kampungan’, highlighting their humble beginnings and celebrating both lower classness and masculinity. I go on to compare pop Melayu with dangdut, bringing out their differences as well as similarities, while highlighting the key feature they share. Pop Melayu and dangdut both serve as sites, and sometimes as tools, for constructing a sense of lower class identity. The comparison is useful for pondering some significant changes in this construction process.


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ALEXANDRA CROSBY SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite. 14-6-2010

Alternate arts collectives and the festival phenomenon Alexandra Crosby

In Indonesia, the intertwined histories of art and activism have generated a range of very particular cultural practices that emphasize collectivity and community engagement.1 These cultures of resistance in combination with the climate of greater political freedom over the last decade have prompted the formation of a number of art collectives that agitate for environmental change. Two such collectives are Tanam Untuk Kehidupan (TUK), based in Salatiga, and anakseribupulau, based in Randublatung. As part of the session ‘New Cultural Spaces and Forms’, this paper examines the festivals produced by TUK and anakseribupulau. These festivals generate fresh cultures of protest, open up new spaces of public engagement and provide viable alternatives to gallery-driven curatorial processes for the artists involved.

Placemaking: When is a kampung not just a kampung? This paper looks at some of the ways that the collectives described above organise their identities in order to generate and express imagined localities. The formation of the identities of events such as Festival Mata Air and the Forest Art Festival are site-specific, adapting rather than adopting general ideas such as ‘community’, ‘art’ and ‘nature’. In teasing out how this adaptation occurs, I consider the imagination of a shared locality as the prelude to its expression (Appadurai 1996). In the cases here, this expression occurs through festivals, which I regard as collections of associated cultural practices. The festival sites are defined by participants in the context of these imaginaries. Each festival is, in a sense, a temporary enactment of an imagined place. In this way, the

These histories have been traced by a number of others during this conference, which add context to this paper (Halim HD, Brett Hough, Nuraini Juliastuti). 1


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festivals produce and reproduce this context. This reproduction occurs through a global flow of local identities in hybrid networks of analogue and digital exchange. For example, digital videos and photographs are made during the festival that are then distributed off site: online as well as offline. Songs are written, referring to places, that are digitally recorded and distributed as well as sung and transformed in the more shared physical spaces. Global theorist Arjun Appadurai calls this the ‘context-generative dimension of neighbourhoods’ and points to its importance in providing ‘the beginnings of a theoretical angle on the relationship between local and global realities’ (Appadurai 1996). Appadurai argues that these continuous processes are necessary to the production and reproduction of ‘neighbourhoods’ as the way in which locality is imagined. In Java, while the physical boundaries of such neighbourhoods are defined through a kampung system, the actual identities within and between those kampung shift with dynamic cultural practices, in these cases, facilitated by activists. These festivals, as forms of collective struggle and creativity, reveal the possibilities of ‘what a neighbourhood is produced from, against, in spite of, and in relation to’ (Appadurai 1996).

Tapping the Springs of Salatiga Water is an undeniably important part of the identity of Salatiga. The city is dotted with hundreds of fresh water springs connected by canals, rivers and creeks that provide water for much of the lower altitude regions of Central Java. As an initiative formed out of a collective concern for decreasing water quality and quantity, Festival Mata Air has involved scientific research as well as artistic expression. Retrospectively, it can be viewed as a series of events that map the water sources and streams in Salatiga. Each incarnation of the festival has focused on a particular spring. However, the map is multi-dimensional, also telling the story of


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community relations driving the movement of the collective from one point to another around the city. Senjoyo, was the site of the first (2006) and fourth (2009) festivals. It is the main source for the municipal water supply and the two textile factories in the city. It is also used for irrigation downstream of Senjoyo river and has a public swimming pool. Although largely regular, the people that use Senjoyo do not for the most part reside there. Like the activists, they are transient, guests who share and activate a common locality. The second Festival Mata Air was staged at a kampung in Salatiga’s CBD called Kalitaman (river park in Javanese). Kalitaman is located below both a large shopping centre and the ‘main drag’ of Salatiga, where many residents work, and from which large quantities of waste makes its way through the kampung waterways. One of Kalitaman’s springs, traditionally used as a public bath for men only, has dried up completely. Two springs remain, one of which has been converted to a public swimming pool with an entrance fee, owned and run by the city council. Like at Senjoyo, the other spring is used by kampung residents (men, women and children) for bathing, laundry, washing dishes, and relaxation. Kalitaman was chosen by TUK not only because of the environmental problems it faced, but also because the kampung had already fought for its water rights in the 1990s, when an outside company had tried to take over all three springs (Crosby 2007). The 2008 festival was held at Kalimangkak, (which ironically translates as ‘dirty creek’). The waterway is managed (or mismanaged) by a co-operation between no less than four separate RT2. On one side of the creek are privately-owned rice fields, irrigated by the creek itself, and a TPSS (Tempat Pembuangan Sampah Sementara), council-run temporary rubbish tip that is used to sort and store rubbish that is then be transported to the main city tip.


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Community friction While the focus of Festival Mata Air has been water sources, TUK’s strategy has been to connect to the communities using them through cultural development. The journey of Festival Mata Air to three neighbourhoods, Senjoyo, Kalitaman and Kalimangkak, is a story of multiple tensions between activists and local communities. Despite the best intentions of public engagement, TUK’s activities have sometimes shown that kampung communities in fact view themselves as subjects rather than agents of social change. The most revealing of these relationships is between TUK and the kampung of Kalitaman. The internal politics of the kampung that hosted Festival Mata Air 2007 forced a redefinition of TUK’s collective identity, challenging the way they imagined themselves as a ‘local’ organisation. TUK’s mistake at Kalitaman was to assume a common imaginary. For TUK this imaginary (actually a counter-imaginary) was based partly on the activist history of the kampung, particularly the resistance to the sale of the spring in 1994. While this is publicly known, it obviously does not mean that the community’s resources were forever ‘safe’ from privatisation. The RWs imagined the location, and the festival, as a source of potential profit.

Performing place Part of the work done at festivals however is to develop representations of places that can then be transported and reformed. These places can then be recreated in different physical spaces. One way this is done is through the reproduction of language. The remarkable process of expressing place through music is described by geographer Sarah Cohen as: 2

'Rukun Tetangga. the smallest administrative unit of Indonesian society.


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… stimulating a sense of identity, in preserving and transmitting cultural memory, and in establishing the sensuous production of place. Individuals can use music as a cultural ‘map of meaning’, drawing upon it to locate themselves in different imaginary geographies … and to articulate both individual and collective identities (Cohen 1995, p. 286).

This process of creating locational identities through language is akin to the complicated processes of representation and replication described by Judith Butler as the ‘performativity’ of the subject. In an interaction between identification and disidentification (in this case with a particular city), identity is less about what a person is than it is a process of becoming, a flowing interaction between ‘self’ and place (Ross 2008, p. 5). These linguistic practices encouraged by the spaces and forms of the festivals can be read as a form of resistance on two levels. The first, and most obvious, the use of local languages and dialects rather than the Indonesian national language is an assertion of local identity that is independent of the state. Secondly, the layering and interaction of the languages demonstrates an awareness of any sense of ‘the local’ being generated by constantly shifting translations, forming identities based on cross-cultural exchanges and belonging, rather than static, externally-determined notions of ‘indigenous’ or even ‘exotic’. As activists are increasingly mobile, they identify less constantly with their singular place of origin (asal), than with the places they find themselves, the places they have been, and the places they are going or want to go, in short, with their movement between places. Sometimes these include both domestic and international destinations, evident in the way that words from other languages, such as English, French and German, also become part of the layering of their languages. They also include digital places which involve no physical movement but rapidly flowing language.

Hutan-Kota in Randublatung In making The Forest Art Festival, anakseribupulau enacted a shared imaginary of the place they lived. They knew it was a complicated process, but by collectively


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envisioning this place, the activists imagined themselves coexisting with wildlife and hundreds of varieties of teak living there until they are adult trees. This was not a pure vision of a wilderness, nor was it National Park-style rehabilitation. This was their forest, with all its contradictions, a ‘hutan-kota’. The Forest Art Festival, like Festival Mata Air, was also based on a counter-imaginary, a way to challenge the binary distinctions between wild and cultivated, hutan and kota. They also wanted to challenge images of their 'desa' being reliant on urban centres and less progressive than other parts of Java.

Loving Alam In the chapter of Friction titled ‘Nature Loving’, Anna Tsing describes the phenomenon of Indonesian pencinta alam (nature lovers) as ‘a training of internal agency, desire, and identity; it is a matter of crafting selves’ (Tsing 2005). The ways in which environmentalism is drawn into the identity of Randublatung activists is a good example of localization. The collective identity of anakseribupulau is patched together from many sources. Although they clearly identify as environmentalists, the romantic image of the heroic nature loving warrior, which is part of the national psyche of Indonesia, is neither clearly adopted nor rejected. In this case, the global idea of environmentalism, and the appreciation of nature as external to culture, becomes Indonesian, or Javanese, or even, in the example given by anakseribupulau, drawn into the local identity of being ‘asli Randublatung’ (from Randublatung). There is also a trajectory in the opposite direction. Commencing from a sense of place in the immediate sense, there is a movement to imagining and envisioning one’s sense of environmental responsibility globally. Environmentalism, however, like other seemingly global ideas, also has a specifically Indonesian history. The rise in popularity of nature lovers clubs at the end of the Sukarno regime usually appears historically as a calm antidote to the tension of national politics. Anna Tsing’s accounts for the way Gudang Garam and Phillip Morris, in the vein of America’s ‘Marlborough man’, adopted in the 1980s and 90s the virile risktaking image of nature loving adventurers in their advertising in Indonesia. But the International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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campaigns went further than putting manly models conquering mountaintops on their billboards. In 1997, Marlboro ‘organised a new confluence of nature loving concerns’ by sponsoring pencinta alam groups, setting up exhibitions displaying products and coordinating trips (Tsing 2000).

Split personality activism It was in this context that anakseribupulau and Rapala–Randublatung Pencinta Alam (Randublatung Nature Lovers) were simultaneously founded in 1998, by many of the same individuals, to express different local identities of the same environment movement. Rapala organized camps with local high school students in the forests surrounding Randublatung, bird watching, identifying tree varieties, and mountaineering, navigating its way through town bureaucracies for permission. This was a standard formula, as Tsing points out, a ‘cosmopolitan’ vision of human harmony with nature. But many Randublatung activists had just directly experienced the overthrow of Suharto. On the streets of Yogyakarta and Jakarta they learned the necessity of direct action in bringing about political change. They were serious about anarchism as well as about the mountains, rivers and forests. Anakseribupulau became the name of this side of their identity. Rejecting definitions, it was a punk band, an artist collective, a website, a gathering place, and performance troupe. More than the romanticism of the Pencinta Alam identity, anakseribupulau objected to its masculinity. They described (in English) the ‘sexism’ of nature lovers, referring to the way they boasted about mountains they had climbed, adventures they had completed and territory they had marked. And they were frustrated by the lack of women in most groups, including their own Rapala. They worked hard to make the activities they organised safe for women, to secure permission from families for overnight trips, to faciliate meetings inclusively. But the resistance was overwhelming. As Tsing explains, the


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masculinity evoked in imagery meant that ‘… women were expected to consume as admirers of virile men’. This was not the movement they had wanted to be part of. Was their emergence from the era of pencinta alam as environmental activists driven by a reaction to the popularization of the imagery in advertising and the mainstream acceptance of ‘loving nature’ as a legitimate hobby on a national and international level? Or was it a real response to the crisis in their local environment of Randublatung? Perhaps both are true, and one way of reading the Forest Art Festival is as a case of activists claiming the difference. Imagining the Hutan Kota was about making a place where all these identities could coexist.

Conclusion These stories, the mobility of TUK’s created locality around three Salatia kampungs, the interpretation and strategic adaption of environmentalism by anakseribupulau, and the expression of place through language practices, hopefully unravel some of the complexities of producing place in new cultural contexts. These activists are shaped by the geographical places in which they work, but their struggles also define the identities of those places. Understanding festivals as more than mixes of traditional and contemporary culture, or art and activism, but as cultural practices that actually do something, generating place every step of the way.


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REFERENCES Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Baulch, E. (2007). Making scenes : reggae, punk, and death metal in 1990s Bali. Durham, Duke University Press. Crosby, A. (2007). "Festival Mata Air: A community takes a fresh look at water." Inside Indonesia 90. Hatley, B. (1980). "Blora Revisited." Indonesia 30: 1-16. Kisawa, W. (2005). Dari Forest Art Festival di Blora, Tak Ubahnya Perkawinan Seni dan Lingkungan. Suara Merdeka. Jawa Tengah. Riza, R. (2005). Gie. Indonesia, Sinemart Pictures: 147. SuaraMerdeka (2007). Kompleks Pemandian Kalitaman Direlokasi. Suara Merdeka. S. Merdeka. Semarang. Toer, P. (1994). Cerita dari Blora: kumpulan cerita pendek, Hasta Mitra. Toer, P. A. and M. Lane (2007). Arok of Java : a novel of early Indonesia. Singapore, Horizon Books. Tsing, A. L. (2000). "The Global Situation." Cultural Anthropology 15(3): 33. Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction : an ethnography of global connection. Princeton, Princeton University Press.


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HALIM HD SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite

14-6-2010

‘Community’ in its various meanings Halim HD

As far as I can recall it was only in the middle of the 1980s that I heard the word ‘community’ being used frequently by many friends. I myself was attracted to this word, as I was by the word ‘forum’. For example, there was the expression ‘the Sasanamulya community’, ‘the Mesen community’. Meanwhile in Semarang , perhaps a few years earlier, the word ‘family’ emerged as a term for arts associations, like ‘the Semarang writers’ family’ ‘ the family of writers of Javanese literature’, ‘the Semarang theatre group family’. I don’t know why the word ‘family’ came to be used so often, likewise also ‘community’. Was it because of the influence of the bureaucracy or organisations in the government sphere which were growing more swollen and rigid, and the ‘familial’ quality which was often mentioned in relation to these organisations? Familial qualities also appeared in the names of regional/ local organisations such as KKSS , Kerabatan Keluarga Sulawesi Selatan, the South Sulawesi Family; all ethnicallybased local organisations used ‘family’ terminology. Maybe it was also because of the growing strength of paternalism embodied in bapakism in the 1980s, as in the term bapak pembangunan ‘father of development’ created for Suharto by Ali Murtopo, and continued by Harmoko in the expression menurut petunjuk bapak ‘according to Father’s orders.’ Meanwhile in arts circles the term ‘community’ apparently developed from the notion of meetings and interactions between people with the same ideas and similar working plans. But I’ve also met many groups which used the word as the name of their group. Apparently ‘community’ can be used for anything. For interactions, and also for a group where there is one figure who determines the direction of the group and controls its management and finances, like Komunitas Suket’ The Suket Community’ led by Slamet Gendono who established it in the mid-1990s. Recently in Solo, particularly in dance circles, the word ‘company’ has become popular. The ‘term ‘company’ need not have any connection with an


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organisation that involves ‘management’ of a large number of people. One person can come up with a name, then add the word ‘company’ after it, for example ‘Mugiyono Dance Company’ where only one person and his wife after he married look after everything. There are examples involving only one or two people, such as the ‘Independent Exploration Company’ of Bobby and Agus mBendol and many more. The word ‘company’ is apparently connected with the strengthening influence of ‘professionalism’ in the performance world, particularly dance. Interestingly, the word ‘company’ in the Solo area is identical with dance. There are no theatre or music groups who use the term. But, he, he, he, there is the group ‘Raditya Art Community’ from the Surakarta palace which apparently needs to declare and label itself a community, and seriously ( read ‘acting seriously’) enter the market for funding like arts groups and communities. Most recently they performed a new dance and gamelan work Tumadhah at the Central Java Arts Centre in Solo and at the Tembi House of Culture in Yogyakarta. ( Note: the terms rumah budaya ‘house of culture’ and rumah seni ‘art house’ are being used increasingly. ‘Art house’ was pioneered by Cemeti as a contemporary arts gallery beginning in late 1989 and the early 1990s. Recently, in January 2010, RSY, Rumah Seni Yaitu, ‘That Art House’ in Semarang closed its doors.) I don’t know how the politics of language influence a group and how this group chooses a name to strengthen its identity and how, too, they apply it in their practice. But what I see is that, however the name is instituted and used by them, this process can take place along with changes in social and economic conditions. Apparently arts groups or artists are moving ever more strongly in directions influenced by funding. Emphasis on aesthetics, in the sense of artistic quality, is strengthening, and political substance is declining. Artists and their work are apparently turning towards themselves, as issues and themes concerning the body are busily discussed, along with questions of lifestyle.


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BARBARA HATLEY SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Staging Identities, Constructing Communities in Contemporary Indonesian Theatre Barbara Hatley, University of Tasmania Theatre performances take place today in Indonesia in conditions seemingly very different from the Suharto years, when New Order state was the all- determining force in cultural production. Today there is no single, authoritarian body prescribing ideological values and constructing national identity through its arts policies and funding. Similarly there is no one all-powerful repressive force for critical theatre to demonise, nor a broad-based opposition movement to work with. Instead the regional autonomy system, replacing state centrism with increased government powers at the local level, focuses public attention on local social issues and promotes the celebration of local cultural identity. And the ideology of democratisation fosters the notion of active community participation. At the same time global cultures flourish and spread through the expanded, liberalised mass media and new technologies. In some areas, under these conditions the contemporary performance scene appears lively, dynamic and eclectic. In cities like Yogyakarta and Solo, constant festivals and parades promote a celebratory, carnivalesque mood. Rediscovery, reinvention and celebration of local identity has become a new creative focus. To expand access to the arts and communicate with wider audiences, performers work with community groups and stage events in sites other than theatre buildings – in house yards, on a neighbourhood badminton court – while spreading news about these activities through the global media of websites, email lists and facebook. Performances in Indonesian societies have long brought people together at the time of important community events, reinforcing shared values and celebrating cultural identity. Modern Indonesian language theatre has had a mission of contributing to the building of the emerging nation through social and political critique. Against this background, what can be said about the kind of social meanings being generated by performances today? What insights do they provide into the way people are experiencing and responding to the new social and political environment? How is ‘local identity’ understood and why is it seen to be important? What sense of belonging is expressed through the focus on ‘community’? Amidst the exuberant celebration of the local, what International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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place is there for the nation? Is there a still broader, international frame for contemporary Indonesian social experience and performance – the sense of dizzying change and fluidity created by 21st century modernity, against which local identity and community are asserted as reassuring markers of a stable, ongoing order? The following discussion documents and analyses recent developments in performance, and presents some preliminary observations. It looks briefly at festivals, as the major sites of contemporary performance, then at how theatre groups constituted in varying ways interpret local culture and create links with community. Finally the directors of three of these groups, key participants in the contemporary performance scene, talk about their work and give their views on the topics of identity, community and change. Festivals, Parades and Carnivals Festivals, parades and performance spectacles marking public events are by no means a new development in Indonesia. Today, however, they occur with greatly increased frequency, and there is a new diversity of sites and types of performance. Some festivals aim to actively involve local communities as performers and spectators. The 2008 Festival Kesenian Yogyakarta, for example, involved the staging by 9 kampung communities of performances about their history and experience; in the Festival Teater Jogja 2009 young local groups presented plays in kampung neighbourhoods rather than theatre buildings. At the other end of the scale are the grand spectacles, the street parades involving hundreds of performers and thousands of spectators which are now a familiar feature of Yogyakarta life. In the post-Suharto era, public space, once tightly controlled, becomes newly available for popular participation and display, and for promotion of visions of collective identity. The Jogja Java Karnaval which took place in October 2009 to mark the 253rd birthday celebrations of the founding of Yogykarta provides a telling example. A wildly eclectic mixture of participants – traditional Javanese dance groups, huge effigies of wayang shadow puppets, stilt-walkers, mime artists, transvestites, Chinese lion dancers – paraded along the main street, Malioboro. Dignitaries waiting at the end of the route were entertained by spectacular jathilan folk dance accompanied by hip-hop music and other blended acts. Official speeches at the Karnaval event enthusiastically endorsed its representation of Yogyakarta culture as a diverse, dynamic, fusion of images and traditions. International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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The Sultan and governor of the Special District of Yogyakarta praised the arts as a site of creative interaction between traditional, local and modern global cultures. In place of the resistance expressed by government officials in Suharto times to the threat to national identity posed by global culture, now the approach appears to more inclusive  adjustment and incorporation rather than rigid exclusion of the new. The picture of Yogyakarta as a tolerant, multicultural Javanese city, with deep cultural roots but also progressive and dynamic, is widely celebrated. It arguably dominates the local ‘social imaginary’, as defined by Chris Hudson in her paper for this workshop. And the perceived importance of the arts in constructing this imaginary provides performance groups with opportunities to display their skills, celebrate themselves. One risk for Yogyakarta performing groups in participating in festival events is arguably co-optation into a self-satisfied, self-referential representation of the city’s identity – an empty, a-political celebration of the local for its own sake. Yet the festival context can also be very productive. The kampung theatre program of the 2008 Yogyakarta arts festival, for example, stimulated much ongoing local activity. Overall the festival scene seems a dynamic site for contemporary performance, providing space for groups to display their skills, express their own styles and themes. So what are the themes and concerns of contemporary theatre and other performance genres? As mentioned earlier, reinventing and celebrating the local is a key focus of attention. In doing so contemporary performance groups often draw widely and eclectically on local genres and styles. Javanese classical poetry is presented in rap form, to accompanying hip hop music, stories from the Mahabharata epic are played out with contemporary reference in kampung settings, the refined, revered female court dance, srimpi, is rendered playfully and humorously by dancers dressed as grey-haired market sellers. Local genres are produced in a self-conscious, deliberate way. Arguably interaction with the global Other leads to enhanced awareness and appreciation of one’s own distinctiveness. Many plays focus on actual local events and experiences. Recent productions by Garasi theatre include a monologue about young Javanese women who became overseas migrant workers and Gunawan Maryanto’s exploration of the phenomenon of a boy in Jombang, East Java, who suddenly developed powers of healing. The play Mak, Ana Asu International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Mlebu Omah ( Ma, there are Dogs coming into the House!) concerning a long-term struggle over land in the Yogya kampung of Minggiran, was staged in the very neighbourhood where the events concerned had taken place. Staging performances in spaces of everyday social interaction fits within a focus on connecting with and building communities. For some this concept is fostered among performers themselves, for others it involves also community outreach. Some groups stage performances in villages and kampung, to bring local people together in shared enjoyment and solidarity. Others involve community members themselves in performance activities. Teater Gedag-Gedig in Solo started taking its simple, humorous, ketoprak-style shows into neighbourhoods around the city after the violent ethnic and class-based riots that swept Solo in 1998. At this time of heightened inter-group tension and suspicion, they felt that performances gathering neighbourhood residents together in shared entertainment could play a vital bonding role. Since then the group has performed each year at Independence Day at various locations in and around the city. Teater Ruang, also from Solo, has a more purposeful approach in taking its shows on the road. The leader, Joko Bibit Santoso, speaks of bringing theatre to people who normally would not have the chance to see it, as part of a mission of budaya gerilya ( guerrilla culture), challenging the dominance of television and other mass media in modern society. In another form of community theatre, neighbourhood residents join activities in the studio (sanggar) of a theatre group. At Teater Ruang’s base, local people rehearse and perform Javanese language plays, and to play the gamelan orchestra. The experimental dalang Slamet Gundono, leader of Komunitas Wayang Suket, likewise opens his sanggar to neighbours to practice gamelan and traditional Javanese dance. Once he took them to the glamorous, multi-storeyed Solo mall to stage a fragment of wayang dance drama, in order to overcome their intimidation by elite spaces and people, and to give middle people a taste of vital, humorous lower-class life. The largest and longest-established of community-based contemporary theatre groups is CCL, the Cultural Community of Ledeng, located in Bandung. The leader of the group, Imam Soleh, suggests that CCL members learn from their neighbours about the attitudes and concerns of ordinary people, and draw on them in performances. The production Air (Water), for example, combined movements from rain-making and water-divining rituals, huge, innovative puppets and


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filmic backdrops of waterfalls and oceans with simple statements about nature and the centrality of water taken from discussions with local residents. Shared themes, political perspectives. Imam Soleh nominates the environment as the most important of several key issues for CCL. Environmental themes feature prominently in contemporary performance, both in individual events and at festivals like those described in Ali Crosby’s workshop paper. Some commentators also see theatre engaging with ‘identity, gender, capitalism, religion’ and reinterpretation of recent history, in a more subtle and complex way than activist theatre in New Order times.1 But contemporary performance and art has also been described as lacking political content, preoccupied with celebrating the self and the body. For those involved in oppositionist theatre during the New Order, the practice of contemporary performance, as groups display and promote their work in festivals and new arts spaces and on facebook and the internet, is perhaps unfamiliar and jarring. But what this implies about the political role of today’s performances, and about the consciousness of theatre groups, is too big and complex a question to be addressed here. Instead, in the full paper I report the views of several key participants in this process, three actor/ directors of differing backgrounds and contrasting performing styles – Slamet Gundono, Yudi Tajuddin leader of the Garasi theatre company, and Andy SW, writer and director of the play about a kampung land dispute mentioned above. Here I will just make some very broad comparisons. Both Slamet Gundono, steeped in Javanese cultural forms and ways of thought, and Yudi, intellectual and cosmopolitan, describing himself as culturally ‘rootless’, endorse the dynamic syncretism of Javanese culture, condemn essentialism and ‘fanaticism’ and see artists as responsible for addressing major social issues. Slamet calls on performers to reinterpret ‘our culture’ in ways which will assist communities swamped by global influences; Yudi speaks of the need for a new, pluralist form of nationalism. Andy S.W identifies with the contemporary kampung in all its discontinuities and disruptions, yet also its warmth, freedom and cheery, stoic sense of survival. He describes himself as telling local stories, staged in local settings, rather than addressing big social and political issues in a confrontational way. Yet the performances he 1

See Andy SW and Muhammad Abe ‘Theatre of Life’ Inside Indonesia ( forthcoming – August 2010)


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is involved in picture a world also affected by the ‘big issues’ which other theatre groups tackle more directly. Concluding thoughts In many contemporary performances Indonesian life is depicted as fast-moving, fastchanging, threatened by social fragmentation, domination by the mass media or destruction of the environment. But these issues are addressed through a diverse range of theatrical idioms, sometimes relatively seriously, often farcically. For no longer are social problems attributed, as in New Order times, to faults in one big, evil System, to be exposed, combated and resisted. Now they are portrayed as aspects of local life, highlighted for attention and action, or wryly satirised in their everyday familiarity. Some performers feel a sense of mission to go beyond the local, to engage explicitly with national themes. Many groups focussing on local expression do so in a highly-constructed way, very conscious of the surrounding context of global media and international cultural influence. Yet rather than being asserted reactively, in resistance to a threatening Other, local identity is portrayed as something dynamic and flexible, taking in and making use of the new. How far this position can be maintained and developed will depend on what happens in Indonesian society more broadly. For performance remains very closely integrated into its social and political context, albeit in different ways from previous decades.


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BRETT HOUGH SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Balinese cultural communities and scenes Brett Hough, Monash University

This paper argues that as a result of Bali’s unique social structure and religio-cultural characteristics, the end of the New Order has not led to substantial changes in the production or performance contexts of the arts. Balinese continue to maintain a range of cross-cutting groups that provide a focus for social and cultural activities, hence no need is felt to create new communities amidst the fluidity and uncertainty of modern life. There has been no discernible emergence of groups that see themselves as ‘communities’ (komunitas) in a qualitatively different sense to those which have long been a part of the performing arts landscape. After 1998 the performing arts in Bali continued to be generally directed towards the needs of local adat and the tourism industry. Regional autonomy and associated democratisation has brought greater scope for asserting local identity and publicly discussing local issues, and allowed local and regional

politicians and

officials to enhance their reputations through support of the arts. But there has been no significant mobilisation of the performing arts for political purposes. Instead many groups and individuals work in varying ways to preserve and revitalise traditional genres, some address the perceived rigidity of male and female roles, while all express an intense pride and belief in the performing arts as intrinsic to Balinese cultural identity and social transformation. This paper discusses the contributions to contemporary performance of a number of groups and individuals, then looks briefly at key arts institutions and at the roles of arts festivals. Some of the groups reviewed are located in specific communities, others come together on an ad hoc basis, while one, the Arti Foundation (Yayasan Arti), is avowedly supra-Balinese. Theatre director and composer Kadek Suardana and three colleagues established Arti in 1998 as an organisation for the conservation and development of Balinese performing arts through creating contemporary works and incorporating

traditional forms into new pieces. As a

foundation (yayasan) rather than a traditional studio (sanggar), Arti is not limited to training and performances but also organises festivals and workshops and produces


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publications. The group Sanggar Çudamani, by contrast, is a professional company with a firm community base, explicitly committed to community outreach, which holds classes for local children and teenagers and contributes to local social and religious activities. Topeng Shakti and Luh Luwih consist of all-female members, who are committed to pushing the boundaries of accepted performance practice by venturing into hitherto male terrain. The Bali Arts Festival (Pesta Kesenian Bali), long the centrepiece of the provincial government’s involvement in the arts, remains an immensely popular annual event. With much of the program devoted to traditional genres and a focus on providing locally-based performance opportunities and entertainment, it can be said, however, to to give little space or creative leadership for more experimental performance. A new development in the regional autonomy context is the appearance of more regionally-based festivals that aim to celebrate local diversity. To appeal to tourists and ex-patriot residents, many of these festivals consist of sporting events and competitions, food and fashion shows, plus a ‘cultural parade’ for local colour. An exception is the Denpasar City Festival which began in 2008 to promote Denpasar as a Kota Kreatif Berbasis Budaya Unggulan (creative city based on superior culture). Here traditional and modern performances and displays highlight the artistic heritage of the city, while the active inclusion of non-ethnic Balinese groups acknowledges the multicultural makeup of its population. Although the performing arts scene in Bali has not changed in any noticeable ways since 1998, creativity abounds: there is no sense that the arts are struggling to survive. The more interesting activities are those which seek to rework, reinvigorate or reinterpret traditional forms. The groups and individuals whose work is reviewed here do this to varying degrees depending on their artistic visions, their community and institutional embeddedness and their responsiveness to audience demands. All remain firmly anchored in place and artistic space, even those who actively engage with the wider world beyond Bali.


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CHRIS HUDSON SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Understanding the Symbolic Power of Arts Festivals in Asia: Some methodological considerations Chris Hudson, RMIT University, All nations have undergone transformations in the ways they are imagined in response to historical developments and constraints, and all nations must now be represented and imagined in a global environment. The global and the national are neither mutually exclusive, nor formed in opposition to each other; rather, they are engaged in an ongoing process of cultural negotiation and accommodation. International arts festivals are now one of the preeminent means for the nation to position itself in the global political and cultural economy. They are also the sites for the emergence of a new social imaginary through which the nation is re-imagined in its engagement with the regional and the global. The arts festival in Asia is a site for the production of culturally specific social imaginaries conflating the global, the regional and the national. The political and cultural practices associated with arts festivals in Asia can offer insights into the ways in which the global and the national are synthesized to engender locationspecific social imaginaries. Arts festivals can be imagined as a new kind of metatopical space—a common space, both local and non-local, and imagined as somewhere in the fluid movement between the global, the national and the regional. The new social space of the arts festival is neither extrapolitical, nor outside power; on the contrary, it is a space of the condensed power of the global market—in particular the post-industrial cultural economy—in its engagement with the political power of the nation. Since arts festivals are almost always in major cities, they are also the nodes in a network of cities that are anchored in the nation, while at the same time bypassing the nation to connect with and global culture. Major events such as festivals construct a city’s image or brand. Image making and branding creates an emotional map through which the experience of the city or country is shaped by a script that prescribes forms of knowledge and emotional response. The lived spaces of the city become spaces of the global, national and regional through a narrative that encourages emotional attachment to the national, while at the same time orienting the individual to the global. If there is no global institution in which people actually live, no common name, no collective traditions through which it can be constituted, how can individual existence be projected on to a collective global narrative? One approach is to investigate the process by which the common name, traditions and past of the national and the local can flow into and merge with the global to produce a new social imaginary. The arts festival is one space where all spatial scales are constructed in mutual accommodation and negotiation with each other.


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NURAINI JULIASTUTI SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

23-6-2010

The perspective I propose here concerns two modes of performativity of knowledge-the practice of knowledge production and knowledge accumulation--as forms of travel. The first is viewed as the journey of ideas or imagination. The latter is viewed as physical travel. Drawing on such an approach I aim to disentangle the complex relationship between journeys of imagination--mediated by the diverse existing knowledge products and physical travel--which enable further encounters and deeper conversations. I will examine how alternative spaces and those who move the local landscape of arts and culture fulfil their performativity as the producers of discourse or local knowledge institutions. A closer examination of two modes of performativity of knowledge shows that both are supported by certain imaginations which have been fortified by constant movement from the level of imagination travels to the physical one. From the perspective of cultural production strategy, it is part of a wider imagination project seeking position at both local and global levels.


EDWIN JURRIËNS SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Indonesian video art: Discourse, display and development Edwin Jurriëns , UNSW@ADFA.

Video currently enjoys broad acceptance as a tool of creative expression in Indonesia. Video applications on cameras, iPods and mobile phones have become widely available, especially among the Indonesian middle-class youth. Youth in the main cities of Java and Bali have organized themselves in their own art spaces and video communities. Video art is not just a medium of visual expression, it also makes youth talk, by directing their thoughts to topics that are inspired by the techno-cultural features of the medium. A vital aspect of contemporary Indonesian video art is the discourse it generates. In this paper, I will discuss three forms of discourse concerning Indonesian video art: 1. discourse about the concept, history and development of video art, 2. discourse about the creation, institutionalization and display of video and other art, 3. discourse on broader sociopolitical issues, including television, consumer culture and community development. After reviewing analyses of different types of video art – video as installation art, as an alternative type of film, as consumer culture etc – I look at the activities of several video arts collectives, including Ruang Rupa, Ruang Mes 56 and the Bandung-based Video Lab, and video art festivals, particularly the bi-annual OK video arts festival in Jakarta. Some art critics draw an unfavourable contrast between the video arts pioneers of the 1980s and 1990s and today’s generation, whom they picture as self-absorbed and a-political. I would argue instead that many of the younger artists are concerned with politics not in an overtly ideological sense, but in more subtle and varied ways, by critically addressing such themes as the body, gender, historiography and mediation. Some Indonesian alternative media initiatives focus on the production of short video documentaries in collaboration with local communities. They use video to represent issues such as local governance, health and the environment, and to reflect on the politics of today’s information society and enhance people’s media literacy. Video art has arguably brought about a greater diversity of actors and themes than any other medium in Indonesia’s art history. It is not restricted to specialized artists and art critics, but also involves students, workers and other ordinary community members. The discourses it has generated range from the history of art and the impact of consumer culture to issues of identity and social development. It has renewed important debates on the institutionalization and function of art, which had reached stalemate under the New Order regime. Considering its short but impressive history, Indonesian video art seems to have the potential to bring people together and make them talk about socially and artistically relevant topics for many more years to come. International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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KHOO GAIK CHENG SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite. 14-6-2010

The Politics of Reformasi: independent film-makers re-imagine citizenship in Malaysian Gods and Project 15Malaysia Khoo Gaik Cheng Australian National University This paper focuses on independent film-makers in Malaysia who, for the most part, can be characterised as cosmopolitan in their focus on humanist subjectivity rather than on challenging or commenting on the state of national politics. While some display a ‘cosmopolitical’ stance in making documentaries which critique state developmentalism, corruption, human rights violation and environmental devastation, most indie film makers avoid narrow ethnic affiliations, while fulfilling their own desire to make either art films or commercially viable works. However, recent political upheavals that led to the Opposition Pakatan Rakyat winning over four states and denying the Barisan Nasional its traditional two thirds majority in the March 2008 elections, while elements within UMNO continued to attempt to weaken the Opposition, seem to have prompted independent film-makers to take up explicit political issues in their work. My paper analyses Amir Muhammad’s recent documentary Malaysian Gods (2009), then I include brief glimpses of other indie films to give a broader view of the indie filmmaking movement as a whole. The original Malaysian Gods has an unnamed narrator walking along the same path that the Reformasi demonstration took, from Masjid Negara to PWTC on September 20, 1998. Shot in real time in one long take, it was screened to commemorate the tenth year anniversary of Reformasi in 2008. The film-maker then made a completely new film still set against the backdrop of the 1998 Reformasi movement and interviewing Tamil-speaking Malaysians who work in or occupy areas in Kuala Lumpur, where anti-government Reformasi demonstrations took place. The film draws links between the current political awakening of Indian Malaysians with Reformasi, which had heralded the birth of political consciousness in Malaysia eleven years ago. Project 15Malaysia, a set of 15 short films that were made in 2009 by fifteen filmmakers, emerges out of a 2008 anti-racist independent music video called “Here In My Home” produced by a group called Malaysian Artists For Unity. Among the group of musicians, theatre folk, volunteers, etc. were indie film-makers like Ho Yuhang and Yasmin Ahmad. 15 Malaysia, the follow up, reflects indie film-makers’ cosmopolitical and civic engagement with current discourses in the nation about race, religion and social International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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justice. Diverse and creative, these digital films open up space for dialogue and provide an alternative expression about what it means to be Malaysian during a period of manufactured racial tension and political corruption. In that way, they suggest a logical trajectory that evolved from the fateful arrest of Anwar Ibrahim under the Internal Security Act on September 20, 1998. I suggest that through various independent film projects, film-makers assert and re-imagine citizenship. What is crucial in formulating a different notion of Malaysianidentity in these films is that “such acts implicitly ask questions about a future responsibility towards others” (Isin & Nielsen 4). In the case of Malaysian Gods, Tamil Malaysians constitute “the Other” whose representations are usually relegated to culturally and linguistically segregated media channels. Yet here is a documentary produced and conceptualised by a Malay-Muslim Malaysian where the interviews are carried out completely in Tamil with a smattering of English and Malay. For once marginalised Tamil speaking-Malaysians are given a platform to voice their opinions about politics, to discuss their everyday lives, to recount memories of Reformasi and comment on more recent political action by the Indian community. After incidents involving imposed Islamisation, demolition of Hindu temples and neglect of Tamil needs by government authorities, a huge rally coordinated by the Hindu Rights Action Force, Hindraf, took place in November 2007. In the elections the following year Malaysian Indians boycotted the Malaysian Indian Congress whose top party leaders failed to win seats. In fact the film’s treatment of these issues is relatively mild. Out of the eighteen people who were interviewed, only six mentioned Reformasi or Hindraf or voiced dissatisfaction about the lack of equal opportunity. The film presents a small sample of Tamil-speaking Malaysians, urban-dwelling traders and others, as ordinary, rational, pragmatic and honest people, more concerned with day-to-day economic survival than with national politics. While these positive portrayals help refute negative ethnic stereotypes of Tamils, they do not represent the views of displaced plantation workers and others mobilised by experiences of discrimination and injustice for being ‘Indian’ in Malaysia who participated in the Hindraf demonstration. If Amir’s main intention is to draw links between the Reformasi and an Indian political awakening, it would have strengthened the film to include Tamils with more explicit political views and some who were on the ground in the Hindraf demonstration.


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The film does succeed, however, as an act of citizenship, an attempt to offer a space for alienated Malaysians to develop more empathy with each other. It speaks to the cosmopolitan longings of a younger urban generation of Malaysians for whom racial/ethnic difference is not an obstacle or threat but a strength to draw upon.1 Cosmopolitanism is more liberal than pluralism because it deconstructs and transgresses the boundaries that pluralist communities put up to preserve their uniqueness (Hollinger 1995: 85-86). Malaysian Gods challenges our racialised consciousness with repeated representations of cosmopolitan crossings – a popular Malay ballad being played on a traditional Chinese instrument by an Indian musician; two Chinese women interviewees speaking fluently in Tamil; the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall, which has long functioned as a hybrid cosmopolitan space, simultaneously hosting an indie music festival in one area and Buddhist Wesak prayers in another.2 The project 15Malaysia can be seen as another creative act of citizenship. Several recent political crises and events causing inter-racial and inter-religious conflict have affected film-makers as individual members of society and encouraged them to take up the camera. In 15Malaysia (2009) fifteen of these film-makers come together in a nonpartisan way to document contemporary social problems. Their films show that we live in country of social injustice and repression, where speaking up makes one liable for detention under the Internal Security Act (One Future), where our children are irrational racists or inherit our racism (The Son, Chocolate) where pluralism leads to humorous crosscultural misunderstanding (Halal, Potong Saga), inflation is high (Duit Kecil), there is social inequality (House) and corruption is rife (Slovak Sling, Rojak). Along with its diversity of issues and participants, the projects involves a wide range of participants, from members of the indie film-makers’ inner circle to newer film-makers, artists and animators. Although the project as a whole is naturally somewhat uneven, many issues are presented in a subtle and oblique way, using well-known public figures and locations with great strategic effectiveness. Most importantly the cosmopolitical motivation behind the project seems grounded in the cause of extending affiliation, compassion and empathy to ethnic Others 1

However Hollinger is careful to draw a distinction between universalism which many critics regard as too broad to be attentive to diversity, particularity and history, and cosmopolitanism which is more sensitive to the need for sustaining solidarities smaller than the species ( Hollinger 2006: xvii- xx). 2 Indeed the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall, under its Civil Rights Committee has hosted progressive events such a peace vigil for Aung San Suu Kyi in May 2009, seminars on human trafficking, anticorruption mechanisms, and public forums on the plight of the Indian Community in Malaysia. Films by


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within the nation.3 It is an anti-racist patriotic project that reclaims the idea of the nation on behalf of its diverse populace. This idea is symbolically expressed in Lumpur, a poetic film about national belonging which revolves around the Malay word ‘tanah air’ (meaning nation or homeland) as constituted by two words: tanah (land) and air (water). The title ‘lumpur’ (mud) comes from the - mixing some soil with water in a jar. He also interviews people from various ethnic backgrounds to find out what they think of the words tanah and air. Finally, he filters the muddy water and drinks the clean water. This final gesture suggests a symbiotic relationship between human beings and their natural environment (land and water) that surpasses the message about all ethnic groups being interdependent on each other to build a united and peaceful nation. To cite lawyer and activist Haris Ibrahim in an interview about the role of civil society in uniting Malaysians across ethnic boundaries, “Each one of us must have this love, love untuk [for] each other.”4 Love here can be defined as a combination of the Greek notions of storge/affection or care, philia/friendship, and agape/the love of God or its secular counterpart--charitable, altruistic love expressed as a love for Others (not kin but strangers). Based on compassion, respect for difference, and shared common goals, this love inscribes and enacts a re-imagined community through digital independent films and music videos. Indeed patriotic love is a central motif that runs through the MAFU music video “Here In My Home,” 15Malaysia and Malaysian Gods.5 At the conclusion of Malaysian Gods text appears on the screen stating that following the Malaysian political awakening of 2008 people should not stop dreaming ‘we have to keep moving.” The director of 15 Malaysia, Pete Teo , reminds us that 15 short films alone are not enough to solve the country’s problems and that Malaysia needs “more people to step into the breach and keep the flames of reform burning.” One means of encouraging broader participation in the project has been to invite other people to simply make a film about the country “we all love” using any format and keeping it under five minutes. To date, twenty films have been uploaded to the 15Malaysia website.6

independent Malaysian film-makers including Malaysian Gods (2009) have also been screened there. 3 For the idea of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, see (Mignolo 2000). For a more detailed application of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ to the work of independent Malaysian filmmakers, see (Khoo 2007). 4 http://popteevee.popfolio.net/default.aspx?e=1049 The Fairly Current Show, Episode #92, aired 8 April 2010. Host Fahmi Fadzil interviews Haris Ibrahim on a report on PM Najib’s first year in office. 5 Another musical example is the hip hop self-parody, “I Am a Macha,” composed by the PopTeeVee team for “That Effing Show,” aired 24 February, 2010. http://popteevee.popfolio.net/default.aspx?e=1037 6 http://15malaysia.com/mymalaysia/ International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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References Hollinger, David. Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Winsconsin P, 2006. Hollinger, David. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, New York: Basic Books, 1995. Isin, Engin F. and Greg M. Nielsen. Acts of Citizenship. London and New York: Zed Books, 2008. Khoo, Gaik Cheng. “Just Do-It-(Yourself): Independent Filmmaking in Malaysia.” InterAsia Cultural Studies 8.2 (2007): 227-247.


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Politik Reformasi: Sutradara Film Independen Reka Ulang Makna Kewarganegaraan dalam Malaysian Gods dan Project 15Malaysia Khoo Gaik Cheng Australian National University Tulisan ini akan membahas sutradara film independen Malaysia yang kebanyakan memiliki karakater kosmopolitan dalam karya-karya mereka yang lebih berfokus pada subyektivitas humanis daripada kritik terhadap situasi politik nasional. Meskipun sebagian dari mereka menegaskan sikap kosmopolit-nya dengan membuat film dokumenter bermuatan kritik terhadap paham developmentalisme negara, korupsi, pelanggaran HAM, atau perusakan lingkungan, kebanyakan pembuat film indie menghindari afiliasi etnis yang sempit dan bekerja untuk memenuhi hasrat mereka membuat film seni atau film yang berpeluang meraup sukses komersial. Namun, ketegangan politik saat ini yang berujung pada kemenangan partai oposisi Pakatan Rakyat di empat negara bagian pada pemilu Maret 2008, sampai Barisan Nasional, partai mayoritas, tidak menguasai 2/3 suara seperti biasannya, sementara ada elemen UMNO yang tetap berusaha melemahkan oposisi, mendorong para sutradara film independen untuk mengangkat isu politik dalam karya mereka. Tulisan saya akan menganalisa karya dokumenter terbaru Amir Muhammad yang berjudul Malaysian Gods (2009), kemudian saya juga akan membahas sedikit tentang beberapa film indie lain untuk memberikan gambaran yang lebih luas tentang gerakan film indie secara menyeluruh. Versi asli Malaysian Gods menampilkan narator tanpa nama yang berjalan sepanjang rute demonstrasi Reformasi yaitu dari Masjid Negara menuju PWTC pada tanggal 20 September 2008. Film ini direkam secara real-time dalam satu rekaman panjang tanpa terputus dan ditayangkan untuk memperingati 10 tahun Reformasi di tahun 2008. Sutradara film ini kemudian membuat film yang sama sekali baru di tempat yang sama dengan latar belakang gerakan Reformasi 1998. Namun kali ini ia mewawancarai warga Malaysia berbahasa Tamil yang bekerja atau bertempat tinggal di Kuala Lumpur, tempat terjadinya demonstrasi Reformasi anti pemerintah. Film ini menarik benang merah antara kebangkitan politik warga keturunan India di Malaysia saat ini dengan momen Reformasi yang menandai lahirnya kesadaran politik Malaysia 11 tahun yang lalu.


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Project 15 Malaysia—sebuah kompilasi 15 film pendek yang dibuat pada tahun 2009 oleh 15 sutradara—adalah sebuah kumpulan film yang bermula dari sebuah video musik indie produksi Malaysian Artists For Unity pada tahun 2008. Malaysian Artists For Unity beranggotakan seniman dari berbagai kalangan seperti musisi, pekerja teater rakyat, sukarelawan, dan termasuk di dalamnya sutradara film indie seperti Ho Yuhang dan Yasmin Ahmad. 15 Malaysia yang muncul sebagai tindak lanjut proyek seniman-seniman Malaysia ini mewakili keterlibatan dan kepedulian sipil mereka serta pandangan kosmopolit mereka terhadap wacana kontemporer di Malaysia tentang ras, agama, dan keadilan sosial. Film digital yang kaya dan kreatif ini membuka ruang dialog dan menyuguhkan ekspresi alternatif tentang makna menjadi orang Malaysia pada masa ketegangan rasial yang direkayasa dan korupsi politik seperti saat ini. Dengan cara demikian, mereka menunjukkan pola logis yang dapat dirujuk sejak penangkapan Anwar Ibrahim yang didakwa berdasarkan Internal Security Act pada tanggal 20 September 1998. Saya ingin menyampaikan bahwa melalui berbagai proyek film independen, para sutradara ini menyuarakan sekaligus me-reka ulang kewarganegaraan. Apa yang penting dalam merumuskan konsep-konsep yang berbeda tentang identitas orang Malaysia dalam film-film ini adalah bahwa, “tindakan ini secara tidak langsung mempertanyakan tanggung jawab masa depan terhadap orang lain” (Isin & Nielsen 4). Pada kasus Malaysian Gods, warga negara Malaysia keturunan Tamil ditampilkan sebagai “the other” yang representasinya sering dipinggirkan pada jaringan media yang bahasa dan kebudayaannya marginal . Tetapi hadirlah film dokumenter ini. Sebuah film yang dirancang dan diproduksi oleh warga Malaysia Melayu-Muslim dimana keseluruhan wawancara dilakukan dalam bahasa Tamil dengan sangat sedikit campuran bahasa Inggris dan Melayu. Untuk pertama kalinya warga negara Malaysia berbahasa Tamil yang senantiasa terpinggirkan diberi panggung untuk menyuarakan pendapat mereka tentang politik, membicarakan keseharian mereka, dan mengingat kembali masa-masa Reformasi serta memberikan pendapat tentang aksi politik komunitas India akhir-akhir ini. Setelah insiden yang melibatkan upaya Islamisasi yang dipaksakan, penghancuran kuil-kuil Hindu serta pengabaian hak-hak orang Tamil oleh pemerintah, kelompok Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) mengorganisir demonstrasi besar-besaran pada bulan November 2007. Pada pemilu tahun berikutnya, warga negara Malaysia keturunan India melakukan boikot


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terhadap Malaysian Indian Congress yang pemimpin puncaknya gagal untuk memenangkan kursi. Faktanya, eksplorasi film ini terhadap isu-isu di atas tidak terlalu tegas. Dari 18 orang yang diwawancarai, hanya 6 yang menyebutkan tentang Reformasi atau gerakan Hindraf atau menyuarakan ketidakpuasan atas kurangnya kesetaraan kesempatan. Film ini menampilkan sebagian kecil warga Malaysia berbahasa Tamil—para pedagang di daerah urban serta beberapa orang lain—sebagai orang kebanyakan yang rasional, pragmatis, dan jujur. Orang-orang yang lebih peduli pada kebutuhan ekonomi sehari-hari daripada situasi politik nasional. Meskipun penggambaran ini membantu mengikis stereotip negatif warga keturunan Tamil, ia tidak mewakili pandangan para pekerja ladang yang tergusur serta mereka yang berpartisipasi dalam demonstrasi Hindraf karena tergerak oleh pengalaman-pengalaman ketidak-adilan dan diskriminasi sebagai warga keturunan India di Malaysia. Jika tujuan Amir adalah untuk menarik benang merah antara Reformasi dan kebangkitan politik warga keturunan India, maka ia seharusnya memasukkan lebih banyak lagi warga keturunan dengan pandangan-pandangan politik yang lebih kuat serta mereka yang terlibat dalam demonstrasi Hindraf. Namun demikian, film ini sukses sebagai sebuah act of citizenship, sebagai sebuah usaha untuk menawarkan ruang bagi warga negara yang teralienasi untuk saling berempati satu sama lain. Film ini menyuarakan kerinduan kosmopolitan kaum muda Malaysia yang menganggap perbedaan ras dan etnis bukan sebagai penghalang melainkan sumber kekuatan.1 Kosmopolitanisme adalah sebuah konsep yang lebih liberal daripada pluralisme karena konsep ini mendekonstruksi sekaligus melampaui batas-batas yang dilestarikan oleh pluralis atas nama keunikan (Hollinger 1995: 85-86). Malaysian Gods mempertanyakan kesadaran kita yang bias ras dengan representasi lintas batas yang kosmopolit seperti penggambaran tentang sebuah lagu Melayu populer yang dimainkan dengan alat musik Cina oleh musisi Indian, 2 orang perempuan China yang fasih berbahasa Tamil, serta Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall, yang telah lama berfungsi sebagai ruang cosmopolitan hybrid dimana disana sering diselenggarakan festival musik indie di satu bagian gedung dan ibadah Wesak umat Buddha di bagian lainnya secara bersamaan.2 1

Namun, Hollinger sangat hati-hati untuk menarik garis pembeda antara universalisme—yang dianggap banyak kritikus sebagai konsep yang terlalu luas untuk mencakup keragaman, kekhususan dan sejarah—dan kosmopolitanisme yang lebih sensitif terhadap kebutuhan untuk solidaritas berkelanjutan yang lebih kecil dari spesies itu sendiri ( Hollinger 2006: xvii- xx). 2 Faktanya memang demikian, Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall dengan Civil Rights Committee-nya telah International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Proyek 15Malaysia juga dapat dilihat sebagai salah satu act of citizenship. Krisis politik dan berbagai kejadian yang memicu konflik antar agama dan antar ras yang merebak di Malaysia baru-baru ini mengusik para pembuat film sebagai individu sekaligus anggota masyarakat untuk segera memutar kameranya. Dalam film 15Malaysia (2009) para sutradara bersama-sama mendokumentasikan permasalahan sosial kontemporer. Film mereka menunjukkan bahwa kita hidup di negara yang penuh dengan ketidakadilan sosial dan represi; negara dimana jika seseorang angkat bicara maka ia dapat dengan mudah ditahan berdasarkan undang-undang Internal Security Act (One Future), negara yang memungkinkan anak-anaknya menjadi rasis atau mewarisi rasisme orang-orang dewasa (The Son, Chocolate), negara dimana pluralisme dapat berubah menjadi kesalahpahaman lintas budaya yang kadang lucu (Halal, Potong Saga), negara yang tingkat inflasinya tinggi (Duit Kecil), penuh dengan ketidaksetaraan sosial (House), dan korupsi yang dianggap lumrah (Slovak Sling, Rojak). Sejalan dengan keragaman tema dan isu yang diangkat, proyek ini juga melibatkan peserta yang beragam, mulai para sutradara film indie senior sampai sutradara-sutradara baru, seniman, dan animator. Meskipun secara umum mutu film proyek ini agak kurang berimbang, namun beberapa isu berhasil dikemas secara halus dan tak langsung, dengan menampilkan tokoh publik terkenal atau lokasi-lokasi yang strategis. Motivasi kosmopolit dibalik proyek ini adalah semangat untuk memperluas afiliasi, kasih sayang, dan empati terhadap etnik terpinggir dalam satu bangsa. Film ini adalah proyek patriotik anti rasis yang menyatakan ulang gagasan tentang sebuah bangsa atas nama rakyatnya yang beragam. Gagasan ini secara simbolis dilukiskan pada film Lumpur, sebuah film puitis tentang rasa memiliki terhadap sebuah bangsa yang berpusat pada kata Melayu ‘tanah air’ yang terdiri dari dua kata yaitu tanah dan air. Judul Lumpur ini muncul ketika sutradara mencampur sedikit tanah dengan air di dalam wadah. Ia juga mewawancarai beberapa orang dari berbagai latar belakang etnis untuk mengetahui pandangan mereka tentang kata tanah dan air. Di akhir film, ia menyaring air berlumpur itu dan meminum air bersih hasil saringan. Langkah di akhir film ini menunjukkan hubungan simbiosis antara manusia dengan lingkungannya (tanah dan air) yang banyak menyelenggarakan kegiatan-kegiatan progresif seperti protes damai untuk mendukung Aung San Suu Kyi pada bulan Mei 2009, seminar tentang perdagangan orang, mekanisme anti korupsi, dan forum publik untuk membahas masalah-masalah yang dihadapi komunitas India di Malaysia. Banyak film independen oleh sutradara Malaysia ditayangkan di gedung ini termasuk Malaysian Gods (2009). International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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menyampaikan pesan bahwa semua kelompok etnis sebenarnya saling bergantung satu sama lain untuk mewujudkan bangsa yang damai dan bersatu. Mengutip Haris Ibrahim, seorang advokat dan aktivis, pada sebuah wawancara tentang peran civil society dalam mempersatukan Malaysia lintas batasan etnis, “Setiap kita harus memiliki cinta, cinta terhadap sesama”3 Cinta disini dapat didefiniskan berdasarkan gabungan kata Yunani storge/kasih saying dan kepedulian, philia/persahabatan, dan agape/cinta kepada Tuhan atau sesembahan yang lain—sebuah cinta yang memberi dan tanpa pamrih yang diwujudkan dalam bentuk cinta kepada “yang lain” (bukan hanya kerabat tetapi juga orang asing sama sekali). Dengan semangat kasih saying, penghargaan terhadap perbedaan, dan tujuan yang sama, cinta ini merangkai kembali bayangan tentang masyarakat yang ideal melalui film independen dan video musik. Cinta yang patriotis adalah tema utama yang mengalir dalam nadi video musik “Here In My Home,” 15Malaysia dan Malaysian Gods.4 Pada akhir film Malaysian Gods muncul sebuah teks yang menyatakan bahwa pasca kebangkitan politik Malaysia tahun 2008, masyarakat tidak boleh berhenti bermimpi, “kita harus terus bergerak.” Sutradara 15Malaysia, Pete Teo, mengingatkan pada kita bahwa 15 film pendek tidak cukup untuk menyelesaikan persoalan negara dan Malaysia membutuhkan lebih banyak lagi orang yang “berani maju ke muka dan terus menyalakan api reformasi.” Salah satu cara mendorong partisipasi yang lebih luas lagi atas proyek ini adalah dengan mengundang masyarakat luas untuk membuat film tentang negara “yang kita cintai” menggunakan format apapun berdurasi kurang dari 5 menit. Sampai saat ini 20 film telah diunggah ke dalam situs 15Malaysia.5

http://popteevee.popfolio.net/default.aspx?e=1049 The Fairly Current Show, Episode #92, aired 8 April 2010. Host Fahmi Fadzil interviews Haris Ibrahim on a report on PM Najib’s first year in office. 4 Another musical example is the hip hop self-parody, “I Am a Macha,” composed by the PopTeeVee team for “That Effing Show,” aired 24 February, 2010. http://popteevee.popfolio.net/default.aspx?e=1037 5 http://15malaysia.com/mymalaysia/ 3


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META KNOL SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Beyond the Dutch’ – searching for the traces of colonialism in Indonesian contemporary art

Meta Knol, Central Museum, Utrecht In the autumn of 2009, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht presented the exhibition ‘Beyond the Dutch. Indonesia, The Netherlands and the Visual Arts since 1900’, which dealt with the intercultural relationship between The Netherlands and Indonesia, as seen from the specific perspective of visual arts. ‘Beyond the Dutch’ focused on three important phases from the shared cultural history of both Indonesia and The Netherlands. It offered an analysis of the cultural exchange that occurred in the subsequent periods of colonialism, of decolonisation and independence, and the current post-colonial era. Each phase was highlighted by a selection of exemplary works of more than 40 artists, like Raden Saleh, Abdullah Suriosubroto, Jan Toorop, Isaac Israels, Affandi, Hendra Gunawan, Sudjojono, Piet Ouborg, Charles Sayers, as well as the contemporary generation like Heri Dono, Agus Suwage, Mella Jaarsma, Tiong Ang and Fiona Tan. ‘Beyond the Dutch’ focused on the hybrids of these two cultures and how the notion of identity has taken on different forms in different periods and circumstances. We see, for example, how Indonesian artists around 1900 were educated by Dutch artists who were strongly influenced by an Orientalism that was inextricably bound up with the prevailing colonial viewpoint. Conversely, Indonesian visual art around 1950 was largely informed by independence and the subsequent development of a nationalist cultural policy. The emergence of fine arts in Indonesia is in origin strongly related to Western artistic traditions ánd colonial history. The discussion about the role of art and culture in the development and affirmation of national identities is a constant in both Indonesian and Dutch societies. In my paper, I will show how Indonesian artists have, in the course of the 20th century, emancipated themselves from colonialism en how they have developed their own intellectual directions and artistic expressions that are closely bound up with their own culture and history.


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RACHMAH IDA SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Fantasizing the Community in Contemporary Indonesia Rachmah Ida, Airlangga University

This paper investigates the construct of televisual community and ‘localness’ as shown in a TV program called Cangkru’an (gathering), broadcast once a week on the local private television station JTV Surabaya. It focuses on the formation of communal identity around the guardhouse, locally known as gardu , a gathering place where local men carry out guard duty as well as gambling and gossiping. I argue that the televisual construct of the ‘gardu community’ has played a crucial role in expressing political views, regulating public memory and defining collective identity. In addition, I also investigate the emergence of a new local (Surabaya) artist community that produces video arts. The group was established in 2007 by several young Surabaya artists, who declare themselves ‘AV nerds’ (penggila Audio Visual). This community, which is formally named ‘Surabaya New Media Art Centre,’ meets regularly ( also using the term ‘cangkrukan’ ) to share their new visual art productions, in a place that they call an ‘electronic party place’ where the artists share information about events and the VJ (visual jockey) artists show their new visual art experiments. The paper traces the historical development of the concept of ‘gardu’ and its use for state control during Suharto’s New Order and by Megawati’s PDI party and other political groups in the post-New Order period. It then examines the signifying functions of gardu in the television program Cangkrukan as a representation of contemporary community identity. The show is set on a street corner in an urban kampung area of Surabaya, and opens with chatting among several people gathered in the gardu. The subject of this talk in the gardu becomes the theme of the program. Topics such as regional development, elections and nationalism are discussed by local people and commented on by an invited expert, while audience members participate in the show by phoning the studio and voicing their opinions. The atmosphere is relaxed and intimate, but at the same time the gardu is depicted as a catalyst for social change and the development of a more democratic life.


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The AV nerds community is not a pre-existing social entity expressing itself through art and media, but a formation that comes into being through their use of shared cultural forms, in the form of new media art and new technology. Members gather regularly in arts spaces or someone’s home to show and discuss their new experimental work, and in 2009 introduced themselves to the Surabaya public in a video art exhibition in which almost all the productions addressed the themes of freedom, democracy, and independence. The group can also be termed an intellectual arts community in that they not only create art but also engage with concepts and terms from contemporary philosophy in discussing the ideas motivating their work. These two different communities occupy different spaces and places to express ‘democratization’ in the post-New Order era of Indonesia. The televisual community invokes the symbolic function of the gardu as a spatial expression of community identity. The Surabaya Video Art community, in a different way, has utilised its own ‘centre’ to form a new local art community and engage in the struggle for identity in urban Surabaya.


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REZA IDRIA SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite

14-6-2010

Performance while busy fighting Azhari Aiyub and Reza Idria

Because it was busy fighting the Dutch, Aceh’s encounter with contemporary performing arts was delayed. One has to work hard to find in the colonial archives in Aceh a report that mentions clearly that in a certain area there were performing groups influenced by contemporary arts practice. In the field of dance there are many traditional forms that exist up till now, in a similar way to the practice of cockfighting and kite-flying competitions, but with major changes in both practice and definition. In the past the dances were performed with a ‘profane’ understanding as part of the entertainment world of their society, but the advent of war made this art try to discover its religiosity. Saman and seudati, for example, two dances which are very well-known in Aceh, are always connected with the mystery of the Islamic saints, the wali, and are said to have been born from their sacred power. Perhaps this situation can be understood as the way in which this art form defended itself and survived. On the other hand, we find oral tales told by a story teller where the change of era has not affected their meaning or their mode of presentation, other than marginalising them from public life. Only after Japanese had taken control of Southeast Asia and driven out the Western colonial powers from this region does the touring theatre group Geulanggang receive mention. The need for propaganda to support Asia Raya, the concept of a Japanese-led United Asia, and hatred of Dutch colonialism apparently allowed this theatre to find a place for itself in Aceh. Existing for 30 years after Indonesian Independence but surviving only a very a short time after Suharto took power, this art form became simply a memory not long after the outbreak of the Aceh Merdeka War. The implementation of syariah law by the Indonesian central government constitutes another war for the world of the arts in Aceh. The Syariat Islam regime in Aceh actually does not hate art, but it deeply abhors busy public events. And we know that every arts event needs an audience and that creates a busy crowd.


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Note: This is an English-language summary of the abstract of Azhari Aiyub’s proposed workshop paper written in January. Unfortunately Azhari is now unable to attend the worskhop, but he and Reza Idria are working on a a joint paper which Reza will deliver in Azhari’s place. This may take a somewhat different form from the above outline.


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ALINE SCOTT-MAXWELL SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite

14-6-2010

Representing Indonesia in Australia through Cultural Performance: Communities, Collaborations, Identities Aline Scott-Maxwell, Monash University This paper uses case studies to illuminate some aspects of Indonesia-related performance activity in Australia and how it informs the Australia-Indonesia cultural ‘relationship’. Such activity is fragmented and diverse, including Indonesian migrant community renditions of regional dance and music, gamelan groups, intercultural performance experiments, world music bands, jazz, hiphop and reggae artists, and pop music produced by Indonesian international students. The examples reviewed here include gamelan performance, three Indonesian-flavoured intercultural projects led by Australians of Indonesian descent or Indonesians resident in Australia, and the Indonesian student pop music scene in Melbourne. Much of this diverse performance activity is strongly expressive of identity and of a sense of community grounded in shared group attributes or interests and with differing relations to Indonesia. Indonesian and non-Indonesian performers in Australia convey their Indonesianness (their cultural roots) or identify with Indonesia (as an adopted culture) through performance. Gamelan ensembles are found in most large cities in Australia and some provincial centres. Although part of a wide-spread international phenomenon, gamelan activity in Australia displays some distinctive features which link it to other local Indonesia-related performance. Most gamelan players in Australia are non-Indonesians but, in contrast to the United States, United Kingdom and Europe, many groups also include a few players who are Indonesian or partIndonesian.Thus gamelan activities become an arena for Australian-Indonesian social and cultural interaction within and beyond music-making. Many Australian players go on to develop an interest in Indonesia and its culture beyond gamelan music. For those of Indonesian background, on the other hand, playing gamelan music strongly reconnects them to Indonesia. To some extent, Australian gamelan groups see themselves as representing Indonesia to their audiences. Moreover many audience members have an expectation that they will experience something traditional— sounds that correspond with the visual impact of traditional musical instruments. This respect for tradition and authenticity in gamelan performance is not necessarily observed in the same consistent way in other countries, including Indonesia itself. Audiences for world music and intercultural theatre, by contrast, are not necessarily connected to the Indonesia-Australia ‘network’ or familiar with Indonesian performance traditions. They are open to and expect experimentation, while also wanting a flavour of International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Indonesia. The producers of this work take culturally-specific performance traditions in new directions or into new contexts by juxtaposing or blending them with Western forms and practices. The three examples discussed here include a contemporary randai (West Sumatran folk opera) created by West-Sumatran-Australian librettist/director/actor Indija Mahjoeddin, the hybrid, Javanese-influenced vocal style and song-writing of Javanese-Australian Ria Soemardjo, and the Indonesian-flavoured world-beat band, Genggong, led by Indonesian rock musician Sawung Jabo, who has lived part-time in Sydney with his Australian family since the 1980s. All three intercultural projects arise directly from Indonesian migration to Australia, express deep engagement with Indonesia and provide artists with cultural meaning and a vehicle for constructing identity. Indonesian students studying in Australia engage with a diverse array of pop culture forms, including film, multimedia, music, dance and fashion. Local, student-made independent films often have sound tracks employing the music of local Indonesian student bands. Musicmaking includes extensive band and song-writing activity, frequent band competitions, and CD production. This activity is strongly connected to Indonesia, with constant movement of students between the two countries; some Melbourne bands even re-form there. A 2004 compilation CD production project, titled Pengamen Melbourne comprises the work of 14 bands and spans a range of Indonesian pop and rock styles. While the music is not distinctively Indonesian, the CD represents Indonesian students’ relationship with Australia through references to landmarks of the musicians’ lives in Melbourne and cover photos of familiar Melbourne architectural icons. These case studies demonstrate that much Indonesia-related performance activity in Australia derives from and reinforces networks between Australia and Indonesia. Cultural performance constitutes a site for meaningful Australian/Indonesian creative encounters and interaction and a medium for cross-cultural engagement that leaves a strong social and artistic legacy.


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G. R. LONO LASTORO SIMATUPANG SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite 14-6-2010

Some Lessons From the Creative Community Initiative across the Regions G. R. Lono Lastoro Simatupang, Gadjah Mada University

This paper presents Inisiatif Komunitas Kreatif, IKK (Creative Community Inniatives), a pilot project on the application of cultural approach in developing rural communities in Indonesia. Organized by Kelola Foundation, a non profit organization working on the promotion of Indonesian arts, the pilot project was designed as a new complementary unit to the national program of Program Nasional Pemberdayaan Masyarakat (PNPM) Mandiri Perdesaan funded by the World Bank. Launched in May 2008, IKK was implemented in 30 districs in West Sumatra, Central Java, and East Nusa Tenggara provinces. The presentation, based on a project evaluation research conducted in 9 participating districts, will describe IKK as a form of quasigovernmental intervention in cultural performance in rural areas of Indonesia: its basic assumptions, how it works, and draw some lessons from it.


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WAWAN SOFWAN SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite

14-6-2010

Sundanese-language drama festivals, a cultural phenomenon Wawan Sofwan

This paper will review the development of theatre in Bandung. There are three main types of groups in Bandung – campus theatre, art theatre and general/ community theatre. The majority of these groups use the idiom of modern theatre with Indonesian language as the mediating language. But there are also groups that use Sundanese language, the language spoken by the majority of people of West Java. One group that stands out is Teater Sunda Kiwari, TSK. This group was formed in 1975 and has staged scores of plays, the majority of them written by Sundanese playwrights. In this paper I am not going to discuss the performances of TSK, but instead will focus on an activity carried out by the group which is quite phenomenal, the Festival of Sundanese language dama, FDSB, which takes place every two years, and has developed into a cultural event, The first time it was held in 1990 there were only 8 participants. In 2008 there were 74 participants and the festival was held for more than 20 days. The participants came not only from West Java but also from Yogyakarta and the province of Banten. FDSB is organised independently without funding from the government.

IN view of the above, the following questions arise:

1, How is it that Kiwari has been able to consistently hold the Sundanese language drama festival for 20 years, with no government assistance? 2. What is the system of selection for festival participants? 3. How does Kiwari theatre work collaboratively with other institutions in staging new scripts in Sundanese language? 4. How does Kiwari collborate directly with schools in approaching the public?


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FRIDUS STEIJLEN SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Indo-Rock: a Dutch Legend? Fridus Steijlen, Leiden University

In this paper I describe the development of Indorock from the 1950s until now. Indorock is rock and roll played by Indos. They have created a sound of their own by, among other things, letting steel guitar influence their way of playing. Most Indorock bands consisted of young Eurasians who were strongly oriented towards America. The supreme reign of Indorock occurred in the years between 1958 and 1963/4; from then on they were eclipsed by Mersey beat. Indorock bands in those years were more successful outside the Netherlands especially in Germany. For the Netherlands they certainly were ahead of their time. After Mersey beat took over, Indorock withdrew to the spheres of Indonesian evenings and parties. In the beginning of the 1980s Indorock underwent a revival. It was then when the term Indorock was born, making it possible to rewrite the history of Indo bands as a sub cultural movement. This revival was initiated by some fans and old Indorockers. It was backed up by a book and film on Indorock in 1989 and 1991. With the Indorock revival a quest started for recognition of its contribution to Dutch music history as well as the international music history scene. Many Dutch artists paid tribute to the old Indorock and expressed their admiration. There were new books, websites, records and even a play about Indorock. The undisputed emperor of Indorock Andy Tielman received a royal decoration from the queen. The international recognition of the influence of Indorock concentrates on its influence on the Beatles. Among many Indorockers and their fans it is a public secret that the Beatles were inspired by Indorock. The reasoning is based on the fact that Indorock was ruling in Hamburg when the Beatles were still on their way up: they must have seen Indorock bands. According to witnesses from the Indorock side, individual Beatles mentioned their admiration for Indorock, this can be found in books about the Beatles and in magazines like Rolling Stone. As is shown in this paper, these statements by the Beatles are hard to find, and some may be less than positive about Indorock, as indicated by a quote from ‘Shout’. Also the suggestion that early Beatle songs sound like Indorock is very hard to support, there are other plausible sources like Chuck Berry. If we look closely at the sources that talk about the Indorock-Beatle connection, it must be said that most are disputable. Many of them seem to repeat what others say, and in the case of Indorockers themselves, like Andy Tielman, most reports of the connection are formulated in an indirect way. Many Indorockers and fans do not support the claim, on the contrary they openly doubt whether it can be true. The writer of the most influential book on Indorock only mentions the claim and tries to reason out how and when, without a definite answer. International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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All this leaves us with a question: why this claim of having influenced the Beatles? What is behind it? What is its goal ? If we consider the moment at which the quest for recognition and the claim on the Indorock-Beatles influence emerged, we will see it coincided with a new stage in the multiculturalization process of the Netherlands. In the beginning of the 1980s it was realized the Netherlands had become an immigration country; that it was becoming multicultural. From the Indisch community voices were raised claiming a position in that multicultural spectrum; until then the Indisch community had been considered as an already assimilated group. In the process of repositioning in Dutch society, this quest for recognition emerged. For the moment the relationship between this multiculturalism project and the claims of Indorock are, of course, hypothetical. It will be an interesting topic for a new paper.


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BERNARD ARPS SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

The Lettuce Song and Its Vagaries: A Pop Song in Three Eras Bernard Arps, Leiden University Few song titles have provoked as much unease in Indonesia as ‘Genjer-Genjer’. This song from Banyuwangi in easternmost Java has lyrics in the local Osing language (closely related to Javanese) and a musical structure typical for Banyuwangi popular music. Composed in 1953 by music teacher Mohamad Arief and at first popular in Banyuwangi in the repertoire of the angklung genre (whereby angklung is a xylophone, not the shaken bamboo tubes called by this name elsewhere in Indonesia), it became a nationwide hit in the early 1960s. ‘Genjer-Genjer’ was strongly associated with Lekra and the Partai Komunis Indonesia, serving as a signature tune of sorts. The lyrics are innocuous by any standards, however; they describe yellow paddy-field lettuce (genjer) being harvested by a woman, sold in the market, bought by another woman, cooked, and eaten with rice and meat. After 1965, ‘Genjer-Genjer’ was banned. Throughout the Orde Baru period, it was no less than taboo, its political connotations boosted by its use as background music in certain gory scenes of Arifin C. Noer’s movie Penumpasan Pengkhianatan G 30 S PKI (1982). After Reformasi, ‘Genjer-Genjer’ enjoyed a rehabilitation of sorts, not least in its place of origin. Besides several renditions from the early 1960s which have been put up on YouTube and broadcast over the radio (sometimes sparking protests from Muslim action groups), also new renditions circulate, as well as songs clearly inspired by it and alluding to it. There are even versions around performed by non-Indonesian bands, including one sung in Khmer. In this paper I trace the vicissitudes of ‘Genjer-Genjer’ with a focus on its changing status, connotations, and forms in Banyuwangi over the years since the fall of Suharto.


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BART BARENDREGT SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite. 14-6-2010

Pop, politics and piety in the Digital Age Bart Barendregt, Leiden University

This paper focuses on young urban Muslims in their articulation of what has been called market Islam, or more derogatively ‘15 minutes Islam’. This newly styled Islamic popular culture is expressive of and connects with the rise of a Muslim middle class chic, many of its participants young and welleducated, but also to particular political and technological constellations. Decline of the authoritarian New Order regime in Indonesia, and to a lesser extent the upsurge of Malaysia’s civilizational Islam, has coincided with a world wide digital revolution. Combined with an almost chauvinist back to Islam sentiment after 9/11, this has in Southeast Asia resulted in publicly very visible expressions of a young, self conscious Muslim generation. Nasyid music is the auditory component of their newly styled Islamic popular culture, blending the politics of Middle Eastern hymns with the close harmony singing of Western boy band music. Muslim Malay modernities are sonically articulated through the clever use of new digital possibilities provided by small portable studio equipment and samplers. However, this contribution will focus on new means of distribution and especially the larger Southeast Asian market that is targeted in all of this. Nasyid aficionados have been at the forefront of using peer to peer digital platforms and social media in exchanging their music,but have also been among the first to release music as mobile ring and ring back tones, today an industry which is more lucrative than the conventional sales of cassettes and CDs. In sum, the nasyid industry not only caters to but has been very instrumental in shaping new needs for an ever growing audience of Modern Malay Muslim youths that do not shun away from commercial interests, as long as it is ‘funky but shariah’.


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Modern love: Pop Melayu in the new century Emma Baulch, ANU In recent times, the term Melayu crops up more and more in various genres of performance. In feature films, advertisements and the compositions of indie bands, images and sounds of Melayu from decades past are starting to appear. Sometimes Melayu is presented in fond light and nostalgic register, as in the films Laskar Pelangi and Sang Pemimpi. In Laskar Pelangi, (Rh)oma Irama makes an important appearance in the form of a poster. He serves, it is intimated, as a proxy political leader, and as a sartorial guide for Ikal’s first romantic foray. In Sang Pemimpi, an orkes Melayu vocalist in dazzling attire mentors one of the main teenage protagonists in matters of the heart. The tutelage is successful; in the end, the youth gets the girl, although she remains at a distance. These examples suggest an interpretation of Melayu that has much in common with the Rhoma Irama story of the 1970s - resistance, survival and success resulting from dogged determination. Another male dangdut star of that decade, A Rafiq, stresses in his compositions a different interpretation of Melayu: despair, hopelessness, longing, pining, a sense of things being beyond reach. But A Rafiq makes no appearance in the films. Apart from these nostalgic references, other appearances of Melayu in contemporary performances are very much in the here and now. See, for example, the recent clutch of pop Melayu boy bands, with Kangen Band, ST12 and Wali being the most successful. Whilst Laskar Pelangi appears to have enjoyed a broad appeal and critical success, some critics have met the rise of pop Melayu with great ambivalence. In a separate paper, I have discussed and analysed these derisive reactions to pop Melayu. Here, however, I want to start to try to get a sense of pop Melayu on its own terms. Eventually, I will consider broader questions around gendered and classed engagements with pop Melayu. In this paper I just want to share some of my general observations of pop Melayu based on available literature and some textual analysis.


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The paper begins by relating the story of the emergence of Kangen Band – their appearance in recordings and on television in 2006, and rise to national prominence in 2007 after signing a recording contract with Jakarta- based recording label Warner Music. I analyse the band’s embrace of the term ‘kampungan’, highlighting their humble beginnings and celebrating both lower classness and masculinity. I go on to compare pop Melayu with dangdut, bringing out their differences as well as similarities, while highlighting the key feature they share. Pop Melayu and dangdut both serve as sites, and sometimes as tools, for constructing a sense of lower class identity. The comparison is useful for pondering some significant changes in this construction process.


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Alternate arts collectives and the festival phenomenon Alexandra Crosby

In Indonesia, the intertwined histories of art and activism have generated a range of very particular cultural practices that emphasize collectivity and community engagement.1 These cultures of resistance in combination with the climate of greater political freedom over the last decade have prompted the formation of a number of art collectives that agitate for environmental change. Two such collectives are Tanam Untuk Kehidupan (TUK), based in Salatiga, and anakseribupulau, based in Randublatung. As part of the session ‘New Cultural Spaces and Forms’, this paper examines the festivals produced by TUK and anakseribupulau. These festivals generate fresh cultures of protest, open up new spaces of public engagement and provide viable alternatives to gallery-driven curatorial processes for the artists involved.

Placemaking: When is a kampung not just a kampung? This paper looks at some of the ways that the collectives described above organise their identities in order to generate and express imagined localities. The formation of the identities of events such as Festival Mata Air and the Forest Art Festival are site-specific, adapting rather than adopting general ideas such as ‘community’, ‘art’ and ‘nature’. In teasing out how this adaptation occurs, I consider the imagination of a shared locality as the prelude to its expression (Appadurai 1996). In the cases here, this expression occurs through festivals, which I regard as collections of associated cultural practices. The festival sites are defined by participants in the context of these imaginaries. Each festival is, in a sense, a temporary enactment of an imagined place. In this way, the

These histories have been traced by a number of others during this conference, which add context to this paper (Halim HD, Brett Hough, Nuraini Juliastuti). 1


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festivals produce and reproduce this context. This reproduction occurs through a global flow of local identities in hybrid networks of analogue and digital exchange. For example, digital videos and photographs are made during the festival that are then distributed off site: online as well as offline. Songs are written, referring to places, that are digitally recorded and distributed as well as sung and transformed in the more shared physical spaces. Global theorist Arjun Appadurai calls this the ‘context-generative dimension of neighbourhoods’ and points to its importance in providing ‘the beginnings of a theoretical angle on the relationship between local and global realities’ (Appadurai 1996). Appadurai argues that these continuous processes are necessary to the production and reproduction of ‘neighbourhoods’ as the way in which locality is imagined. In Java, while the physical boundaries of such neighbourhoods are defined through a kampung system, the actual identities within and between those kampung shift with dynamic cultural practices, in these cases, facilitated by activists. These festivals, as forms of collective struggle and creativity, reveal the possibilities of ‘what a neighbourhood is produced from, against, in spite of, and in relation to’ (Appadurai 1996).

Tapping the Springs of Salatiga Water is an undeniably important part of the identity of Salatiga. The city is dotted with hundreds of fresh water springs connected by canals, rivers and creeks that provide water for much of the lower altitude regions of Central Java. As an initiative formed out of a collective concern for decreasing water quality and quantity, Festival Mata Air has involved scientific research as well as artistic expression. Retrospectively, it can be viewed as a series of events that map the water sources and streams in Salatiga. Each incarnation of the festival has focused on a particular spring. However, the map is multi-dimensional, also telling the story of


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community relations driving the movement of the collective from one point to another around the city. Senjoyo, was the site of the first (2006) and fourth (2009) festivals. It is the main source for the municipal water supply and the two textile factories in the city. It is also used for irrigation downstream of Senjoyo river and has a public swimming pool. Although largely regular, the people that use Senjoyo do not for the most part reside there. Like the activists, they are transient, guests who share and activate a common locality. The second Festival Mata Air was staged at a kampung in Salatiga’s CBD called Kalitaman (river park in Javanese). Kalitaman is located below both a large shopping centre and the ‘main drag’ of Salatiga, where many residents work, and from which large quantities of waste makes its way through the kampung waterways. One of Kalitaman’s springs, traditionally used as a public bath for men only, has dried up completely. Two springs remain, one of which has been converted to a public swimming pool with an entrance fee, owned and run by the city council. Like at Senjoyo, the other spring is used by kampung residents (men, women and children) for bathing, laundry, washing dishes, and relaxation. Kalitaman was chosen by TUK not only because of the environmental problems it faced, but also because the kampung had already fought for its water rights in the 1990s, when an outside company had tried to take over all three springs (Crosby 2007). The 2008 festival was held at Kalimangkak, (which ironically translates as ‘dirty creek’). The waterway is managed (or mismanaged) by a co-operation between no less than four separate RT2. On one side of the creek are privately-owned rice fields, irrigated by the creek itself, and a TPSS (Tempat Pembuangan Sampah Sementara), council-run temporary rubbish tip that is used to sort and store rubbish that is then be transported to the main city tip.


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Community friction While the focus of Festival Mata Air has been water sources, TUK’s strategy has been to connect to the communities using them through cultural development. The journey of Festival Mata Air to three neighbourhoods, Senjoyo, Kalitaman and Kalimangkak, is a story of multiple tensions between activists and local communities. Despite the best intentions of public engagement, TUK’s activities have sometimes shown that kampung communities in fact view themselves as subjects rather than agents of social change. The most revealing of these relationships is between TUK and the kampung of Kalitaman. The internal politics of the kampung that hosted Festival Mata Air 2007 forced a redefinition of TUK’s collective identity, challenging the way they imagined themselves as a ‘local’ organisation. TUK’s mistake at Kalitaman was to assume a common imaginary. For TUK this imaginary (actually a counter-imaginary) was based partly on the activist history of the kampung, particularly the resistance to the sale of the spring in 1994. While this is publicly known, it obviously does not mean that the community’s resources were forever ‘safe’ from privatisation. The RWs imagined the location, and the festival, as a source of potential profit.

Performing place Part of the work done at festivals however is to develop representations of places that can then be transported and reformed. These places can then be recreated in different physical spaces. One way this is done is through the reproduction of language. The remarkable process of expressing place through music is described by geographer Sarah Cohen as: 2

'Rukun Tetangga. the smallest administrative unit of Indonesian society.


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… stimulating a sense of identity, in preserving and transmitting cultural memory, and in establishing the sensuous production of place. Individuals can use music as a cultural ‘map of meaning’, drawing upon it to locate themselves in different imaginary geographies … and to articulate both individual and collective identities (Cohen 1995, p. 286).

This process of creating locational identities through language is akin to the complicated processes of representation and replication described by Judith Butler as the ‘performativity’ of the subject. In an interaction between identification and disidentification (in this case with a particular city), identity is less about what a person is than it is a process of becoming, a flowing interaction between ‘self’ and place (Ross 2008, p. 5). These linguistic practices encouraged by the spaces and forms of the festivals can be read as a form of resistance on two levels. The first, and most obvious, the use of local languages and dialects rather than the Indonesian national language is an assertion of local identity that is independent of the state. Secondly, the layering and interaction of the languages demonstrates an awareness of any sense of ‘the local’ being generated by constantly shifting translations, forming identities based on cross-cultural exchanges and belonging, rather than static, externally-determined notions of ‘indigenous’ or even ‘exotic’. As activists are increasingly mobile, they identify less constantly with their singular place of origin (asal), than with the places they find themselves, the places they have been, and the places they are going or want to go, in short, with their movement between places. Sometimes these include both domestic and international destinations, evident in the way that words from other languages, such as English, French and German, also become part of the layering of their languages. They also include digital places which involve no physical movement but rapidly flowing language.

Hutan-Kota in Randublatung In making The Forest Art Festival, anakseribupulau enacted a shared imaginary of the place they lived. They knew it was a complicated process, but by collectively


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envisioning this place, the activists imagined themselves coexisting with wildlife and hundreds of varieties of teak living there until they are adult trees. This was not a pure vision of a wilderness, nor was it National Park-style rehabilitation. This was their forest, with all its contradictions, a ‘hutan-kota’. The Forest Art Festival, like Festival Mata Air, was also based on a counter-imaginary, a way to challenge the binary distinctions between wild and cultivated, hutan and kota. They also wanted to challenge images of their 'desa' being reliant on urban centres and less progressive than other parts of Java.

Loving Alam In the chapter of Friction titled ‘Nature Loving’, Anna Tsing describes the phenomenon of Indonesian pencinta alam (nature lovers) as ‘a training of internal agency, desire, and identity; it is a matter of crafting selves’ (Tsing 2005). The ways in which environmentalism is drawn into the identity of Randublatung activists is a good example of localization. The collective identity of anakseribupulau is patched together from many sources. Although they clearly identify as environmentalists, the romantic image of the heroic nature loving warrior, which is part of the national psyche of Indonesia, is neither clearly adopted nor rejected. In this case, the global idea of environmentalism, and the appreciation of nature as external to culture, becomes Indonesian, or Javanese, or even, in the example given by anakseribupulau, drawn into the local identity of being ‘asli Randublatung’ (from Randublatung). There is also a trajectory in the opposite direction. Commencing from a sense of place in the immediate sense, there is a movement to imagining and envisioning one’s sense of environmental responsibility globally. Environmentalism, however, like other seemingly global ideas, also has a specifically Indonesian history. The rise in popularity of nature lovers clubs at the end of the Sukarno regime usually appears historically as a calm antidote to the tension of national politics. Anna Tsing’s accounts for the way Gudang Garam and Phillip Morris, in the vein of America’s ‘Marlborough man’, adopted in the 1980s and 90s the virile risktaking image of nature loving adventurers in their advertising in Indonesia. But the International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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campaigns went further than putting manly models conquering mountaintops on their billboards. In 1997, Marlboro ‘organised a new confluence of nature loving concerns’ by sponsoring pencinta alam groups, setting up exhibitions displaying products and coordinating trips (Tsing 2000).

Split personality activism It was in this context that anakseribupulau and Rapala–Randublatung Pencinta Alam (Randublatung Nature Lovers) were simultaneously founded in 1998, by many of the same individuals, to express different local identities of the same environment movement. Rapala organized camps with local high school students in the forests surrounding Randublatung, bird watching, identifying tree varieties, and mountaineering, navigating its way through town bureaucracies for permission. This was a standard formula, as Tsing points out, a ‘cosmopolitan’ vision of human harmony with nature. But many Randublatung activists had just directly experienced the overthrow of Suharto. On the streets of Yogyakarta and Jakarta they learned the necessity of direct action in bringing about political change. They were serious about anarchism as well as about the mountains, rivers and forests. Anakseribupulau became the name of this side of their identity. Rejecting definitions, it was a punk band, an artist collective, a website, a gathering place, and performance troupe. More than the romanticism of the Pencinta Alam identity, anakseribupulau objected to its masculinity. They described (in English) the ‘sexism’ of nature lovers, referring to the way they boasted about mountains they had climbed, adventures they had completed and territory they had marked. And they were frustrated by the lack of women in most groups, including their own Rapala. They worked hard to make the activities they organised safe for women, to secure permission from families for overnight trips, to faciliate meetings inclusively. But the resistance was overwhelming. As Tsing explains, the


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masculinity evoked in imagery meant that ‘… women were expected to consume as admirers of virile men’. This was not the movement they had wanted to be part of. Was their emergence from the era of pencinta alam as environmental activists driven by a reaction to the popularization of the imagery in advertising and the mainstream acceptance of ‘loving nature’ as a legitimate hobby on a national and international level? Or was it a real response to the crisis in their local environment of Randublatung? Perhaps both are true, and one way of reading the Forest Art Festival is as a case of activists claiming the difference. Imagining the Hutan Kota was about making a place where all these identities could coexist.

Conclusion These stories, the mobility of TUK’s created locality around three Salatia kampungs, the interpretation and strategic adaption of environmentalism by anakseribupulau, and the expression of place through language practices, hopefully unravel some of the complexities of producing place in new cultural contexts. These activists are shaped by the geographical places in which they work, but their struggles also define the identities of those places. Understanding festivals as more than mixes of traditional and contemporary culture, or art and activism, but as cultural practices that actually do something, generating place every step of the way.


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REFERENCES Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Baulch, E. (2007). Making scenes : reggae, punk, and death metal in 1990s Bali. Durham, Duke University Press. Crosby, A. (2007). "Festival Mata Air: A community takes a fresh look at water." Inside Indonesia 90. Hatley, B. (1980). "Blora Revisited." Indonesia 30: 1-16. Kisawa, W. (2005). Dari Forest Art Festival di Blora, Tak Ubahnya Perkawinan Seni dan Lingkungan. Suara Merdeka. Jawa Tengah. Riza, R. (2005). Gie. Indonesia, Sinemart Pictures: 147. SuaraMerdeka (2007). Kompleks Pemandian Kalitaman Direlokasi. Suara Merdeka. S. Merdeka. Semarang. Toer, P. (1994). Cerita dari Blora: kumpulan cerita pendek, Hasta Mitra. Toer, P. A. and M. Lane (2007). Arok of Java : a novel of early Indonesia. Singapore, Horizon Books. Tsing, A. L. (2000). "The Global Situation." Cultural Anthropology 15(3): 33. Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction : an ethnography of global connection. Princeton, Princeton University Press.


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In this paper I describe the development of Indorock from the 1950s until now. Indorock is rock and roll played by Indos. They have created a sound of their own by, among other things, letting steel guitar influence their way of playing. Most Indorock bands consisted of young Eurasians who were strongly oriented towards America. The supreme reign of Indorock occurred in the years between 1958 and 1963/4; from then on they were eclipsed by Mersey beat. Indorock bands in those years were more successful outside the Netherlands especially in Germany. For the Netherlands they certainly were ahead of their time. After Mersey beat took over, Indorock withdrew to the spheres of Indonesian evenings and parties. In the beginning of the 1980s Indorock underwent a revival. It was then when the term Indorock was born, making it possible to rewrite the history of Indo bands as a sub cultural movement. This revival was initiated by some fans and old Indorockers. It was backed up by a book and film on Indorock in 1989 and 1991. With the Indorock revival a quest started for recognition of its contribution to Dutch music history as well as the international music history scene. Many Dutch artists paid tribute to the old Indorock and expressed their admiration. There were new books, websites, records and even a play about Indorock. The undisputed emperor of Indorock Andy Tielman received a royal decoration from the queen. The international recognition of the influence of Indorock concentrates on its influence on the Beatles. Among many Indorockers and their fans it is a public secret that the Beatles were inspired by Indorock. The reasoning is based on the fact that Indorock was ruling in Hamburg when the Beatles were still on their way up: they must have seen Indorock bands. According to witnesses from the Indorock side, individual Beatles mentioned their admiration for Indorock, this can be found in books about the Beatles and in magazines like Rolling Stone. As is shown in this paper, these statements by the Beatles are hard to find, and some may be less than positive about Indorock, as indicated by a quote from ‘Shout’. Also the suggestion that early Beatle songs sound like Indorock is very hard to support, there are other plausible sources like Chuck Berry. If we look closely at the sources that talk about the Indorock-Beatle connection, it must be said that most are disputable. Many of them seem to repeat what others say, and in the case of Indorockers themselves, like Andy Tielman, most reports of the connection are formulated in an indirect way. Many Indorockers and fans do not support the claim, on the contrary they openly doubt whether it can be true. The writer of the most influential book on Indorock only mentions the claim and tries to reason out how and when, without a definite answer. International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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‘Community’ in its various meanings Halim HD

As far as I can recall it was only in the middle of the 1980s that I heard the word ‘community’ being used frequently by many friends. I myself was attracted to this word, as I was by the word ‘forum’. For example, there was the expression ‘the Sasanamulya community’, ‘the Mesen community’. Meanwhile in Semarang , perhaps a few years earlier, the word ‘family’ emerged as a term for arts associations, like ‘the Semarang writers’ family’ ‘ the family of writers of Javanese literature’, ‘the Semarang theatre group family’. I don’t know why the word ‘family’ came to be used so often, likewise also ‘community’. Was it because of the influence of the bureaucracy or organisations in the government sphere which were growing more swollen and rigid, and the ‘familial’ quality which was often mentioned in relation to these organisations? Familial qualities also appeared in the names of regional/ local organisations such as KKSS , Kerabatan Keluarga Sulawesi Selatan, the South Sulawesi Family; all ethnicallybased local organisations used ‘family’ terminology. Maybe it was also because of the growing strength of paternalism embodied in bapakism in the 1980s, as in the term bapak pembangunan ‘father of development’ created for Suharto by Ali Murtopo, and continued by Harmoko in the expression menurut petunjuk bapak ‘according to Father’s orders.’ Meanwhile in arts circles the term ‘community’ apparently developed from the notion of meetings and interactions between people with the same ideas and similar working plans. But I’ve also met many groups which used the word as the name of their group. Apparently ‘community’ can be used for anything. For interactions, and also for a group where there is one figure who determines the direction of the group and controls its management and finances, like Komunitas Suket’ The Suket Community’ led by Slamet Gendono who established it in the mid-1990s. Recently in Solo, particularly in dance circles, the word ‘company’ has become popular. The ‘term ‘company’ need not have any connection with an


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organisation that involves ‘management’ of a large number of people. One person can come up with a name, then add the word ‘company’ after it, for example ‘Mugiyono Dance Company’ where only one person and his wife after he married look after everything. There are examples involving only one or two people, such as the ‘Independent Exploration Company’ of Bobby and Agus mBendol and many more. The word ‘company’ is apparently connected with the strengthening influence of ‘professionalism’ in the performance world, particularly dance. Interestingly, the word ‘company’ in the Solo area is identical with dance. There are no theatre or music groups who use the term. But, he, he, he, there is the group ‘Raditya Art Community’ from the Surakarta palace which apparently needs to declare and label itself a community, and seriously ( read ‘acting seriously’) enter the market for funding like arts groups and communities. Most recently they performed a new dance and gamelan work Tumadhah at the Central Java Arts Centre in Solo and at the Tembi House of Culture in Yogyakarta. ( Note: the terms rumah budaya ‘house of culture’ and rumah seni ‘art house’ are being used increasingly. ‘Art house’ was pioneered by Cemeti as a contemporary arts gallery beginning in late 1989 and the early 1990s. Recently, in January 2010, RSY, Rumah Seni Yaitu, ‘That Art House’ in Semarang closed its doors.) I don’t know how the politics of language influence a group and how this group chooses a name to strengthen its identity and how, too, they apply it in their practice. But what I see is that, however the name is instituted and used by them, this process can take place along with changes in social and economic conditions. Apparently arts groups or artists are moving ever more strongly in directions influenced by funding. Emphasis on aesthetics, in the sense of artistic quality, is strengthening, and political substance is declining. Artists and their work are apparently turning towards themselves, as issues and themes concerning the body are busily discussed, along with questions of lifestyle.


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Staging Identities, Constructing Communities in Contemporary Indonesian Theatre Barbara Hatley, University of Tasmania Theatre performances take place today in Indonesia in conditions seemingly very different from the Suharto years, when New Order state was the all- determining force in cultural production. Today there is no single, authoritarian body prescribing ideological values and constructing national identity through its arts policies and funding. Similarly there is no one all-powerful repressive force for critical theatre to demonise, nor a broad-based opposition movement to work with. Instead the regional autonomy system, replacing state centrism with increased government powers at the local level, focuses public attention on local social issues and promotes the celebration of local cultural identity. And the ideology of democratisation fosters the notion of active community participation. At the same time global cultures flourish and spread through the expanded, liberalised mass media and new technologies. In some areas, under these conditions the contemporary performance scene appears lively, dynamic and eclectic. In cities like Yogyakarta and Solo, constant festivals and parades promote a celebratory, carnivalesque mood. Rediscovery, reinvention and celebration of local identity has become a new creative focus. To expand access to the arts and communicate with wider audiences, performers work with community groups and stage events in sites other than theatre buildings – in house yards, on a neighbourhood badminton court – while spreading news about these activities through the global media of websites, email lists and facebook. Performances in Indonesian societies have long brought people together at the time of important community events, reinforcing shared values and celebrating cultural identity. Modern Indonesian language theatre has had a mission of contributing to the building of the emerging nation through social and political critique. Against this background, what can be said about the kind of social meanings being generated by performances today? What insights do they provide into the way people are experiencing and responding to the new social and political environment? How is ‘local identity’ understood and why is it seen to be important? What sense of belonging is expressed through the focus on ‘community’? Amidst the exuberant celebration of the local, what International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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place is there for the nation? Is there a still broader, international frame for contemporary Indonesian social experience and performance – the sense of dizzying change and fluidity created by 21st century modernity, against which local identity and community are asserted as reassuring markers of a stable, ongoing order? The following discussion documents and analyses recent developments in performance, and presents some preliminary observations. It looks briefly at festivals, as the major sites of contemporary performance, then at how theatre groups constituted in varying ways interpret local culture and create links with community. Finally the directors of three of these groups, key participants in the contemporary performance scene, talk about their work and give their views on the topics of identity, community and change. Festivals, Parades and Carnivals Festivals, parades and performance spectacles marking public events are by no means a new development in Indonesia. Today, however, they occur with greatly increased frequency, and there is a new diversity of sites and types of performance. Some festivals aim to actively involve local communities as performers and spectators. The 2008 Festival Kesenian Yogyakarta, for example, involved the staging by 9 kampung communities of performances about their history and experience; in the Festival Teater Jogja 2009 young local groups presented plays in kampung neighbourhoods rather than theatre buildings. At the other end of the scale are the grand spectacles, the street parades involving hundreds of performers and thousands of spectators which are now a familiar feature of Yogyakarta life. In the post-Suharto era, public space, once tightly controlled, becomes newly available for popular participation and display, and for promotion of visions of collective identity. The Jogja Java Karnaval which took place in October 2009 to mark the 253rd birthday celebrations of the founding of Yogykarta provides a telling example. A wildly eclectic mixture of participants – traditional Javanese dance groups, huge effigies of wayang shadow puppets, stilt-walkers, mime artists, transvestites, Chinese lion dancers – paraded along the main street, Malioboro. Dignitaries waiting at the end of the route were entertained by spectacular jathilan folk dance accompanied by hip-hop music and other blended acts. Official speeches at the Karnaval event enthusiastically endorsed its representation of Yogyakarta culture as a diverse, dynamic, fusion of images and traditions. International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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The Sultan and governor of the Special District of Yogyakarta praised the arts as a site of creative interaction between traditional, local and modern global cultures. In place of the resistance expressed by government officials in Suharto times to the threat to national identity posed by global culture, now the approach appears to more inclusive  adjustment and incorporation rather than rigid exclusion of the new. The picture of Yogyakarta as a tolerant, multicultural Javanese city, with deep cultural roots but also progressive and dynamic, is widely celebrated. It arguably dominates the local ‘social imaginary’, as defined by Chris Hudson in her paper for this workshop. And the perceived importance of the arts in constructing this imaginary provides performance groups with opportunities to display their skills, celebrate themselves. One risk for Yogyakarta performing groups in participating in festival events is arguably co-optation into a self-satisfied, self-referential representation of the city’s identity – an empty, a-political celebration of the local for its own sake. Yet the festival context can also be very productive. The kampung theatre program of the 2008 Yogyakarta arts festival, for example, stimulated much ongoing local activity. Overall the festival scene seems a dynamic site for contemporary performance, providing space for groups to display their skills, express their own styles and themes. So what are the themes and concerns of contemporary theatre and other performance genres? As mentioned earlier, reinventing and celebrating the local is a key focus of attention. In doing so contemporary performance groups often draw widely and eclectically on local genres and styles. Javanese classical poetry is presented in rap form, to accompanying hip hop music, stories from the Mahabharata epic are played out with contemporary reference in kampung settings, the refined, revered female court dance, srimpi, is rendered playfully and humorously by dancers dressed as grey-haired market sellers. Local genres are produced in a self-conscious, deliberate way. Arguably interaction with the global Other leads to enhanced awareness and appreciation of one’s own distinctiveness. Many plays focus on actual local events and experiences. Recent productions by Garasi theatre include a monologue about young Javanese women who became overseas migrant workers and Gunawan Maryanto’s exploration of the phenomenon of a boy in Jombang, East Java, who suddenly developed powers of healing. The play Mak, Ana Asu International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Mlebu Omah ( Ma, there are Dogs coming into the House!) concerning a long-term struggle over land in the Yogya kampung of Minggiran, was staged in the very neighbourhood where the events concerned had taken place. Staging performances in spaces of everyday social interaction fits within a focus on connecting with and building communities. For some this concept is fostered among performers themselves, for others it involves also community outreach. Some groups stage performances in villages and kampung, to bring local people together in shared enjoyment and solidarity. Others involve community members themselves in performance activities. Teater Gedag-Gedig in Solo started taking its simple, humorous, ketoprak-style shows into neighbourhoods around the city after the violent ethnic and class-based riots that swept Solo in 1998. At this time of heightened inter-group tension and suspicion, they felt that performances gathering neighbourhood residents together in shared entertainment could play a vital bonding role. Since then the group has performed each year at Independence Day at various locations in and around the city. Teater Ruang, also from Solo, has a more purposeful approach in taking its shows on the road. The leader, Joko Bibit Santoso, speaks of bringing theatre to people who normally would not have the chance to see it, as part of a mission of budaya gerilya ( guerrilla culture), challenging the dominance of television and other mass media in modern society. In another form of community theatre, neighbourhood residents join activities in the studio (sanggar) of a theatre group. At Teater Ruang’s base, local people rehearse and perform Javanese language plays, and to play the gamelan orchestra. The experimental dalang Slamet Gundono, leader of Komunitas Wayang Suket, likewise opens his sanggar to neighbours to practice gamelan and traditional Javanese dance. Once he took them to the glamorous, multi-storeyed Solo mall to stage a fragment of wayang dance drama, in order to overcome their intimidation by elite spaces and people, and to give middle people a taste of vital, humorous lower-class life. The largest and longest-established of community-based contemporary theatre groups is CCL, the Cultural Community of Ledeng, located in Bandung. The leader of the group, Imam Soleh, suggests that CCL members learn from their neighbours about the attitudes and concerns of ordinary people, and draw on them in performances. The production Air (Water), for example, combined movements from rain-making and water-divining rituals, huge, innovative puppets and


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filmic backdrops of waterfalls and oceans with simple statements about nature and the centrality of water taken from discussions with local residents. Shared themes, political perspectives. Imam Soleh nominates the environment as the most important of several key issues for CCL. Environmental themes feature prominently in contemporary performance, both in individual events and at festivals like those described in Ali Crosby’s workshop paper. Some commentators also see theatre engaging with ‘identity, gender, capitalism, religion’ and reinterpretation of recent history, in a more subtle and complex way than activist theatre in New Order times.1 But contemporary performance and art has also been described as lacking political content, preoccupied with celebrating the self and the body. For those involved in oppositionist theatre during the New Order, the practice of contemporary performance, as groups display and promote their work in festivals and new arts spaces and on facebook and the internet, is perhaps unfamiliar and jarring. But what this implies about the political role of today’s performances, and about the consciousness of theatre groups, is too big and complex a question to be addressed here. Instead, in the full paper I report the views of several key participants in this process, three actor/ directors of differing backgrounds and contrasting performing styles – Slamet Gundono, Yudi Tajuddin leader of the Garasi theatre company, and Andy SW, writer and director of the play about a kampung land dispute mentioned above. Here I will just make some very broad comparisons. Both Slamet Gundono, steeped in Javanese cultural forms and ways of thought, and Yudi, intellectual and cosmopolitan, describing himself as culturally ‘rootless’, endorse the dynamic syncretism of Javanese culture, condemn essentialism and ‘fanaticism’ and see artists as responsible for addressing major social issues. Slamet calls on performers to reinterpret ‘our culture’ in ways which will assist communities swamped by global influences; Yudi speaks of the need for a new, pluralist form of nationalism. Andy S.W identifies with the contemporary kampung in all its discontinuities and disruptions, yet also its warmth, freedom and cheery, stoic sense of survival. He describes himself as telling local stories, staged in local settings, rather than addressing big social and political issues in a confrontational way. Yet the performances he 1

See Andy SW and Muhammad Abe ‘Theatre of Life’ Inside Indonesia ( forthcoming – August 2010)


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is involved in picture a world also affected by the ‘big issues’ which other theatre groups tackle more directly. Concluding thoughts In many contemporary performances Indonesian life is depicted as fast-moving, fastchanging, threatened by social fragmentation, domination by the mass media or destruction of the environment. But these issues are addressed through a diverse range of theatrical idioms, sometimes relatively seriously, often farcically. For no longer are social problems attributed, as in New Order times, to faults in one big, evil System, to be exposed, combated and resisted. Now they are portrayed as aspects of local life, highlighted for attention and action, or wryly satirised in their everyday familiarity. Some performers feel a sense of mission to go beyond the local, to engage explicitly with national themes. Many groups focussing on local expression do so in a highly-constructed way, very conscious of the surrounding context of global media and international cultural influence. Yet rather than being asserted reactively, in resistance to a threatening Other, local identity is portrayed as something dynamic and flexible, taking in and making use of the new. How far this position can be maintained and developed will depend on what happens in Indonesian society more broadly. For performance remains very closely integrated into its social and political context, albeit in different ways from previous decades.


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Balinese cultural communities and scenes Brett Hough, Monash University

This paper argues that as a result of Bali’s unique social structure and religio-cultural characteristics, the end of the New Order has not led to substantial changes in the production or performance contexts of the arts. Balinese continue to maintain a range of cross-cutting groups that provide a focus for social and cultural activities, hence no need is felt to create new communities amidst the fluidity and uncertainty of modern life. There has been no discernible emergence of groups that see themselves as ‘communities’ (komunitas) in a qualitatively different sense to those which have long been a part of the performing arts landscape. After 1998 the performing arts in Bali continued to be generally directed towards the needs of local adat and the tourism industry. Regional autonomy and associated democratisation has brought greater scope for asserting local identity and publicly discussing local issues, and allowed local and regional

politicians and

officials to enhance their reputations through support of the arts. But there has been no significant mobilisation of the performing arts for political purposes. Instead many groups and individuals work in varying ways to preserve and revitalise traditional genres, some address the perceived rigidity of male and female roles, while all express an intense pride and belief in the performing arts as intrinsic to Balinese cultural identity and social transformation. This paper discusses the contributions to contemporary performance of a number of groups and individuals, then looks briefly at key arts institutions and at the roles of arts festivals. Some of the groups reviewed are located in specific communities, others come together on an ad hoc basis, while one, the Arti Foundation (Yayasan Arti), is avowedly supra-Balinese. Theatre director and composer Kadek Suardana and three colleagues established Arti in 1998 as an organisation for the conservation and development of Balinese performing arts through creating contemporary works and incorporating

traditional forms into new pieces. As a

foundation (yayasan) rather than a traditional studio (sanggar), Arti is not limited to training and performances but also organises festivals and workshops and produces


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publications. The group Sanggar Çudamani, by contrast, is a professional company with a firm community base, explicitly committed to community outreach, which holds classes for local children and teenagers and contributes to local social and religious activities. Topeng Shakti and Luh Luwih consist of all-female members, who are committed to pushing the boundaries of accepted performance practice by venturing into hitherto male terrain. The Bali Arts Festival (Pesta Kesenian Bali), long the centrepiece of the provincial government’s involvement in the arts, remains an immensely popular annual event. With much of the program devoted to traditional genres and a focus on providing locally-based performance opportunities and entertainment, it can be said, however, to to give little space or creative leadership for more experimental performance. A new development in the regional autonomy context is the appearance of more regionally-based festivals that aim to celebrate local diversity. To appeal to tourists and ex-patriot residents, many of these festivals consist of sporting events and competitions, food and fashion shows, plus a ‘cultural parade’ for local colour. An exception is the Denpasar City Festival which began in 2008 to promote Denpasar as a Kota Kreatif Berbasis Budaya Unggulan (creative city based on superior culture). Here traditional and modern performances and displays highlight the artistic heritage of the city, while the active inclusion of non-ethnic Balinese groups acknowledges the multicultural makeup of its population. Although the performing arts scene in Bali has not changed in any noticeable ways since 1998, creativity abounds: there is no sense that the arts are struggling to survive. The more interesting activities are those which seek to rework, reinvigorate or reinterpret traditional forms. The groups and individuals whose work is reviewed here do this to varying degrees depending on their artistic visions, their community and institutional embeddedness and their responsiveness to audience demands. All remain firmly anchored in place and artistic space, even those who actively engage with the wider world beyond Bali.


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CHRIS HUDSON SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Understanding the Symbolic Power of Arts Festivals in Asia: Some methodological considerations Chris Hudson, RMIT University, All nations have undergone transformations in the ways they are imagined in response to historical developments and constraints, and all nations must now be represented and imagined in a global environment. The global and the national are neither mutually exclusive, nor formed in opposition to each other; rather, they are engaged in an ongoing process of cultural negotiation and accommodation. International arts festivals are now one of the preeminent means for the nation to position itself in the global political and cultural economy. They are also the sites for the emergence of a new social imaginary through which the nation is re-imagined in its engagement with the regional and the global. The arts festival in Asia is a site for the production of culturally specific social imaginaries conflating the global, the regional and the national. The political and cultural practices associated with arts festivals in Asia can offer insights into the ways in which the global and the national are synthesized to engender locationspecific social imaginaries. Arts festivals can be imagined as a new kind of metatopical space—a common space, both local and non-local, and imagined as somewhere in the fluid movement between the global, the national and the regional. The new social space of the arts festival is neither extrapolitical, nor outside power; on the contrary, it is a space of the condensed power of the global market—in particular the post-industrial cultural economy—in its engagement with the political power of the nation. Since arts festivals are almost always in major cities, they are also the nodes in a network of cities that are anchored in the nation, while at the same time bypassing the nation to connect with and global culture. Major events such as festivals construct a city’s image or brand. Image making and branding creates an emotional map through which the experience of the city or country is shaped by a script that prescribes forms of knowledge and emotional response. The lived spaces of the city become spaces of the global, national and regional through a narrative that encourages emotional attachment to the national, while at the same time orienting the individual to the global. If there is no global institution in which people actually live, no common name, no collective traditions through which it can be constituted, how can individual existence be projected on to a collective global narrative? One approach is to investigate the process by which the common name, traditions and past of the national and the local can flow into and merge with the global to produce a new social imaginary. The arts festival is one space where all spatial scales are constructed in mutual accommodation and negotiation with each other.


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NURAINI JULIASTUTI SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Some explanations about the birth of an autodidactic culture Nuraini Juliastuti, KUNCI This essay tries to give a plausible explanation of the persisting alternative culture in Indonesia, which manifests itself in particular forms of thinking about educational institutions, and in disordered ways of accessing knowledge. My paper will draw on various illustrations, scattered pieces of stories that I documented in order to draw some lessons from vernacular experiences of art and culture practitioners. These passages document my attempts to study the birth of an artist, to study the culture involved in studying art and living in an art context in a broader, historical sense. It is this fundamental, illegal and chaotic way of learning and acting that reveals the particular need for knowledge that has to be satisfied, the discrepancy that needs to be resolved, and the particular, progressive goal that needs to be achieved. It reveals an endeavor to fix, for example, the deficiencies of the art infrastructure, by seeking acces to knowledge in seemingly wrong, disorderly, and odd ways. Perhaps that is precisely the local understanding of progress, and modernity; it can only be obtained by undermining existing rules and by constantly adapting yourself to the purposes and needs one encounters. In Indonesia, development grows spontaneously, in unplanned steps and strategies.


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EDWIN JURRIËNS SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Indonesian video art: Discourse, display and development Edwin Jurriëns , UNSW@ADFA.

Video currently enjoys broad acceptance as a tool of creative expression in Indonesia. Video applications on cameras, iPods and mobile phones have become widely available, especially among the Indonesian middle-class youth. Youth in the main cities of Java and Bali have organized themselves in their own art spaces and video communities. Video art is not just a medium of visual expression, it also makes youth talk, by directing their thoughts to topics that are inspired by the techno-cultural features of the medium. A vital aspect of contemporary Indonesian video art is the discourse it generates. In this paper, I will discuss three forms of discourse concerning Indonesian video art: 1. discourse about the concept, history and development of video art, 2. discourse about the creation, institutionalization and display of video and other art, 3. discourse on broader sociopolitical issues, including television, consumer culture and community development. After reviewing analyses of different types of video art – video as installation art, as an alternative type of film, as consumer culture etc – I look at the activities of several video arts collectives, including Ruang Rupa, Ruang Mes 56 and the Bandung-based Video Lab, and video art festivals, particularly the bi-annual OK video arts festival in Jakarta. Some art critics draw an unfavourable contrast between the video arts pioneers of the 1980s and 1990s and today’s generation, whom they picture as self-absorbed and a-political. I would argue instead that many of the younger artists are concerned with politics not in an overtly ideological sense, but in more subtle and varied ways, by critically addressing such themes as the body, gender, historiography and mediation. Some Indonesian alternative media initiatives focus on the production of short video documentaries in collaboration with local communities. They use video to represent issues such as local governance, health and the environment, and to reflect on the politics of today’s information society and enhance people’s media literacy. Video art has arguably brought about a greater diversity of actors and themes than any other medium in Indonesia’s art history. It is not restricted to specialized artists and art critics, but also involves students, workers and other ordinary community members. The discourses it has generated range from the history of art and the impact of consumer culture to issues of identity and social development. It has renewed important debates on the institutionalization and function of art, which had reached stalemate under the New Order regime. Considering its short but impressive history, Indonesian video art seems to have the potential to bring people together and make them talk about socially and artistically relevant topics for many more years to come. International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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The Politics of Reformasi: independent film-makers re-imagine citizenship in Malaysian Gods and Project 15Malaysia Khoo Gaik Cheng Australian National University This paper focuses on independent film-makers in Malaysia who, for the most part, can be characterised as cosmopolitan in their focus on humanist subjectivity rather than on challenging or commenting on the state of national politics. While some display a ‘cosmopolitical’ stance in making documentaries which critique state developmentalism, corruption, human rights violation and environmental devastation, most indie film makers avoid narrow ethnic affiliations, while fulfilling their own desire to make either art films or commercially viable works. However, recent political upheavals that led to the Opposition Pakatan Rakyat winning over four states and denying the Barisan Nasional its traditional two thirds majority in the March 2008 elections, while elements within UMNO continued to attempt to weaken the Opposition, seem to have prompted independent film-makers to take up explicit political issues in their work. My paper analyses Amir Muhammad’s recent documentary Malaysian Gods (2009), then I include brief glimpses of other indie films to give a broader view of the indie filmmaking movement as a whole. The original Malaysian Gods has an unnamed narrator walking along the same path that the Reformasi demonstration took, from Masjid Negara to PWTC on September 20, 1998. Shot in real time in one long take, it was screened to commemorate the tenth year anniversary of Reformasi in 2008. The film-maker then made a completely new film still set against the backdrop of the 1998 Reformasi movement and interviewing Tamil-speaking Malaysians who work in or occupy areas in Kuala Lumpur, where anti-government Reformasi demonstrations took place. The film draws links between the current political awakening of Indian Malaysians with Reformasi, which had heralded the birth of political consciousness in Malaysia eleven years ago. Project 15Malaysia, a set of 15 short films that were made in 2009 by fifteen filmmakers, emerges out of a 2008 anti-racist independent music video called “Here In My Home” produced by a group called Malaysian Artists For Unity. Among the group of musicians, theatre folk, volunteers, etc. were indie film-makers like Ho Yuhang and Yasmin Ahmad. 15 Malaysia, the follow up, reflects indie film-makers’ cosmopolitical and civic engagement with current discourses in the nation about race, religion and social International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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justice. Diverse and creative, these digital films open up space for dialogue and provide an alternative expression about what it means to be Malaysian during a period of manufactured racial tension and political corruption. In that way, they suggest a logical trajectory that evolved from the fateful arrest of Anwar Ibrahim under the Internal Security Act on September 20, 1998. I suggest that through various independent film projects, film-makers assert and re-imagine citizenship. What is crucial in formulating a different notion of Malaysianidentity in these films is that “such acts implicitly ask questions about a future responsibility towards others” (Isin & Nielsen 4). In the case of Malaysian Gods, Tamil Malaysians constitute “the Other” whose representations are usually relegated to culturally and linguistically segregated media channels. Yet here is a documentary produced and conceptualised by a Malay-Muslim Malaysian where the interviews are carried out completely in Tamil with a smattering of English and Malay. For once marginalised Tamil speaking-Malaysians are given a platform to voice their opinions about politics, to discuss their everyday lives, to recount memories of Reformasi and comment on more recent political action by the Indian community. After incidents involving imposed Islamisation, demolition of Hindu temples and neglect of Tamil needs by government authorities, a huge rally coordinated by the Hindu Rights Action Force, Hindraf, took place in November 2007. In the elections the following year Malaysian Indians boycotted the Malaysian Indian Congress whose top party leaders failed to win seats. In fact the film’s treatment of these issues is relatively mild. Out of the eighteen people who were interviewed, only six mentioned Reformasi or Hindraf or voiced dissatisfaction about the lack of equal opportunity. The film presents a small sample of Tamil-speaking Malaysians, urban-dwelling traders and others, as ordinary, rational, pragmatic and honest people, more concerned with day-to-day economic survival than with national politics. While these positive portrayals help refute negative ethnic stereotypes of Tamils, they do not represent the views of displaced plantation workers and others mobilised by experiences of discrimination and injustice for being ‘Indian’ in Malaysia who participated in the Hindraf demonstration. If Amir’s main intention is to draw links between the Reformasi and an Indian political awakening, it would have strengthened the film to include Tamils with more explicit political views and some who were on the ground in the Hindraf demonstration.


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The film does succeed, however, as an act of citizenship, an attempt to offer a space for alienated Malaysians to develop more empathy with each other. It speaks to the cosmopolitan longings of a younger urban generation of Malaysians for whom racial/ethnic difference is not an obstacle or threat but a strength to draw upon.1 Cosmopolitanism is more liberal than pluralism because it deconstructs and transgresses the boundaries that pluralist communities put up to preserve their uniqueness (Hollinger 1995: 85-86). Malaysian Gods challenges our racialised consciousness with repeated representations of cosmopolitan crossings – a popular Malay ballad being played on a traditional Chinese instrument by an Indian musician; two Chinese women interviewees speaking fluently in Tamil; the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall, which has long functioned as a hybrid cosmopolitan space, simultaneously hosting an indie music festival in one area and Buddhist Wesak prayers in another.2 The project 15Malaysia can be seen as another creative act of citizenship. Several recent political crises and events causing inter-racial and inter-religious conflict have affected film-makers as individual members of society and encouraged them to take up the camera. In 15Malaysia (2009) fifteen of these film-makers come together in a nonpartisan way to document contemporary social problems. Their films show that we live in country of social injustice and repression, where speaking up makes one liable for detention under the Internal Security Act (One Future), where our children are irrational racists or inherit our racism (The Son, Chocolate) where pluralism leads to humorous crosscultural misunderstanding (Halal, Potong Saga), inflation is high (Duit Kecil), there is social inequality (House) and corruption is rife (Slovak Sling, Rojak). Along with its diversity of issues and participants, the projects involves a wide range of participants, from members of the indie film-makers’ inner circle to newer film-makers, artists and animators. Although the project as a whole is naturally somewhat uneven, many issues are presented in a subtle and oblique way, using well-known public figures and locations with great strategic effectiveness. Most importantly the cosmopolitical motivation behind the project seems grounded in the cause of extending affiliation, compassion and empathy to ethnic Others 1

However Hollinger is careful to draw a distinction between universalism which many critics regard as too broad to be attentive to diversity, particularity and history, and cosmopolitanism which is more sensitive to the need for sustaining solidarities smaller than the species ( Hollinger 2006: xvii- xx). 2 Indeed the Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall, under its Civil Rights Committee has hosted progressive events such a peace vigil for Aung San Suu Kyi in May 2009, seminars on human trafficking, anticorruption mechanisms, and public forums on the plight of the Indian Community in Malaysia. Films by


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within the nation.3 It is an anti-racist patriotic project that reclaims the idea of the nation on behalf of its diverse populace. This idea is symbolically expressed in Lumpur, a poetic film about national belonging which revolves around the Malay word ‘tanah air’ (meaning nation or homeland) as constituted by two words: tanah (land) and air (water). The title ‘lumpur’ (mud) comes from the - mixing some soil with water in a jar. He also interviews people from various ethnic backgrounds to find out what they think of the words tanah and air. Finally, he filters the muddy water and drinks the clean water. This final gesture suggests a symbiotic relationship between human beings and their natural environment (land and water) that surpasses the message about all ethnic groups being interdependent on each other to build a united and peaceful nation. To cite lawyer and activist Haris Ibrahim in an interview about the role of civil society in uniting Malaysians across ethnic boundaries, “Each one of us must have this love, love untuk [for] each other.”4 Love here can be defined as a combination of the Greek notions of storge/affection or care, philia/friendship, and agape/the love of God or its secular counterpart--charitable, altruistic love expressed as a love for Others (not kin but strangers). Based on compassion, respect for difference, and shared common goals, this love inscribes and enacts a re-imagined community through digital independent films and music videos. Indeed patriotic love is a central motif that runs through the MAFU music video “Here In My Home,” 15Malaysia and Malaysian Gods.5 At the conclusion of Malaysian Gods text appears on the screen stating that following the Malaysian political awakening of 2008 people should not stop dreaming ‘we have to keep moving.” The director of 15 Malaysia, Pete Teo , reminds us that 15 short films alone are not enough to solve the country’s problems and that Malaysia needs “more people to step into the breach and keep the flames of reform burning.” One means of encouraging broader participation in the project has been to invite other people to simply make a film about the country “we all love” using any format and keeping it under five minutes. To date, twenty films have been uploaded to the 15Malaysia website.6

independent Malaysian film-makers including Malaysian Gods (2009) have also been screened there. 3 For the idea of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’, see (Mignolo 2000). For a more detailed application of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ to the work of independent Malaysian filmmakers, see (Khoo 2007). 4 http://popteevee.popfolio.net/default.aspx?e=1049 The Fairly Current Show, Episode #92, aired 8 April 2010. Host Fahmi Fadzil interviews Haris Ibrahim on a report on PM Najib’s first year in office. 5 Another musical example is the hip hop self-parody, “I Am a Macha,” composed by the PopTeeVee team for “That Effing Show,” aired 24 February, 2010. http://popteevee.popfolio.net/default.aspx?e=1037 6 http://15malaysia.com/mymalaysia/ International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Politik Reformasi: Sutradara Film Independen Reka Ulang Makna Kewarganegaraan dalam Malaysian Gods dan Project 15Malaysia Khoo Gaik Cheng Australian National University Tulisan ini akan membahas sutradara film independen Malaysia yang kebanyakan memiliki karakater kosmopolitan dalam karya-karya mereka yang lebih berfokus pada subyektivitas humanis daripada kritik terhadap situasi politik nasional. Meskipun sebagian dari mereka menegaskan sikap kosmopolit-nya dengan membuat film dokumenter bermuatan kritik terhadap paham developmentalisme negara, korupsi, pelanggaran HAM, atau perusakan lingkungan, kebanyakan pembuat film indie menghindari afiliasi etnis yang sempit dan bekerja untuk memenuhi hasrat mereka membuat film seni atau film yang berpeluang meraup sukses komersial. Namun, ketegangan politik saat ini yang berujung pada kemenangan partai oposisi Pakatan Rakyat di empat negara bagian pada pemilu Maret 2008, sampai Barisan Nasional, partai mayoritas, tidak menguasai 2/3 suara seperti biasannya, sementara ada elemen UMNO yang tetap berusaha melemahkan oposisi, mendorong para sutradara film independen untuk mengangkat isu politik dalam karya mereka. Tulisan saya akan menganalisa karya dokumenter terbaru Amir Muhammad yang berjudul Malaysian Gods (2009), kemudian saya juga akan membahas sedikit tentang beberapa film indie lain untuk memberikan gambaran yang lebih luas tentang gerakan film indie secara menyeluruh. Versi asli Malaysian Gods menampilkan narator tanpa nama yang berjalan sepanjang rute demonstrasi Reformasi yaitu dari Masjid Negara menuju PWTC pada tanggal 20 September 2008. Film ini direkam secara real-time dalam satu rekaman panjang tanpa terputus dan ditayangkan untuk memperingati 10 tahun Reformasi di tahun 2008. Sutradara film ini kemudian membuat film yang sama sekali baru di tempat yang sama dengan latar belakang gerakan Reformasi 1998. Namun kali ini ia mewawancarai warga Malaysia berbahasa Tamil yang bekerja atau bertempat tinggal di Kuala Lumpur, tempat terjadinya demonstrasi Reformasi anti pemerintah. Film ini menarik benang merah antara kebangkitan politik warga keturunan India di Malaysia saat ini dengan momen Reformasi yang menandai lahirnya kesadaran politik Malaysia 11 tahun yang lalu.


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Project 15 Malaysia—sebuah kompilasi 15 film pendek yang dibuat pada tahun 2009 oleh 15 sutradara—adalah sebuah kumpulan film yang bermula dari sebuah video musik indie produksi Malaysian Artists For Unity pada tahun 2008. Malaysian Artists For Unity beranggotakan seniman dari berbagai kalangan seperti musisi, pekerja teater rakyat, sukarelawan, dan termasuk di dalamnya sutradara film indie seperti Ho Yuhang dan Yasmin Ahmad. 15 Malaysia yang muncul sebagai tindak lanjut proyek seniman-seniman Malaysia ini mewakili keterlibatan dan kepedulian sipil mereka serta pandangan kosmopolit mereka terhadap wacana kontemporer di Malaysia tentang ras, agama, dan keadilan sosial. Film digital yang kaya dan kreatif ini membuka ruang dialog dan menyuguhkan ekspresi alternatif tentang makna menjadi orang Malaysia pada masa ketegangan rasial yang direkayasa dan korupsi politik seperti saat ini. Dengan cara demikian, mereka menunjukkan pola logis yang dapat dirujuk sejak penangkapan Anwar Ibrahim yang didakwa berdasarkan Internal Security Act pada tanggal 20 September 1998. Saya ingin menyampaikan bahwa melalui berbagai proyek film independen, para sutradara ini menyuarakan sekaligus me-reka ulang kewarganegaraan. Apa yang penting dalam merumuskan konsep-konsep yang berbeda tentang identitas orang Malaysia dalam film-film ini adalah bahwa, “tindakan ini secara tidak langsung mempertanyakan tanggung jawab masa depan terhadap orang lain” (Isin & Nielsen 4). Pada kasus Malaysian Gods, warga negara Malaysia keturunan Tamil ditampilkan sebagai “the other” yang representasinya sering dipinggirkan pada jaringan media yang bahasa dan kebudayaannya marginal . Tetapi hadirlah film dokumenter ini. Sebuah film yang dirancang dan diproduksi oleh warga Malaysia Melayu-Muslim dimana keseluruhan wawancara dilakukan dalam bahasa Tamil dengan sangat sedikit campuran bahasa Inggris dan Melayu. Untuk pertama kalinya warga negara Malaysia berbahasa Tamil yang senantiasa terpinggirkan diberi panggung untuk menyuarakan pendapat mereka tentang politik, membicarakan keseharian mereka, dan mengingat kembali masa-masa Reformasi serta memberikan pendapat tentang aksi politik komunitas India akhir-akhir ini. Setelah insiden yang melibatkan upaya Islamisasi yang dipaksakan, penghancuran kuil-kuil Hindu serta pengabaian hak-hak orang Tamil oleh pemerintah, kelompok Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf) mengorganisir demonstrasi besar-besaran pada bulan November 2007. Pada pemilu tahun berikutnya, warga negara Malaysia keturunan India melakukan boikot


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terhadap Malaysian Indian Congress yang pemimpin puncaknya gagal untuk memenangkan kursi. Faktanya, eksplorasi film ini terhadap isu-isu di atas tidak terlalu tegas. Dari 18 orang yang diwawancarai, hanya 6 yang menyebutkan tentang Reformasi atau gerakan Hindraf atau menyuarakan ketidakpuasan atas kurangnya kesetaraan kesempatan. Film ini menampilkan sebagian kecil warga Malaysia berbahasa Tamil—para pedagang di daerah urban serta beberapa orang lain—sebagai orang kebanyakan yang rasional, pragmatis, dan jujur. Orang-orang yang lebih peduli pada kebutuhan ekonomi sehari-hari daripada situasi politik nasional. Meskipun penggambaran ini membantu mengikis stereotip negatif warga keturunan Tamil, ia tidak mewakili pandangan para pekerja ladang yang tergusur serta mereka yang berpartisipasi dalam demonstrasi Hindraf karena tergerak oleh pengalaman-pengalaman ketidak-adilan dan diskriminasi sebagai warga keturunan India di Malaysia. Jika tujuan Amir adalah untuk menarik benang merah antara Reformasi dan kebangkitan politik warga keturunan India, maka ia seharusnya memasukkan lebih banyak lagi warga keturunan dengan pandangan-pandangan politik yang lebih kuat serta mereka yang terlibat dalam demonstrasi Hindraf. Namun demikian, film ini sukses sebagai sebuah act of citizenship, sebagai sebuah usaha untuk menawarkan ruang bagi warga negara yang teralienasi untuk saling berempati satu sama lain. Film ini menyuarakan kerinduan kosmopolitan kaum muda Malaysia yang menganggap perbedaan ras dan etnis bukan sebagai penghalang melainkan sumber kekuatan.1 Kosmopolitanisme adalah sebuah konsep yang lebih liberal daripada pluralisme karena konsep ini mendekonstruksi sekaligus melampaui batas-batas yang dilestarikan oleh pluralis atas nama keunikan (Hollinger 1995: 85-86). Malaysian Gods mempertanyakan kesadaran kita yang bias ras dengan representasi lintas batas yang kosmopolit seperti penggambaran tentang sebuah lagu Melayu populer yang dimainkan dengan alat musik Cina oleh musisi Indian, 2 orang perempuan China yang fasih berbahasa Tamil, serta Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall, yang telah lama berfungsi sebagai ruang cosmopolitan hybrid dimana disana sering diselenggarakan festival musik indie di satu bagian gedung dan ibadah Wesak umat Buddha di bagian lainnya secara bersamaan.2 1

Namun, Hollinger sangat hati-hati untuk menarik garis pembeda antara universalisme—yang dianggap banyak kritikus sebagai konsep yang terlalu luas untuk mencakup keragaman, kekhususan dan sejarah—dan kosmopolitanisme yang lebih sensitif terhadap kebutuhan untuk solidaritas berkelanjutan yang lebih kecil dari spesies itu sendiri ( Hollinger 2006: xvii- xx). 2 Faktanya memang demikian, Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall dengan Civil Rights Committee-nya telah International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Proyek 15Malaysia juga dapat dilihat sebagai salah satu act of citizenship. Krisis politik dan berbagai kejadian yang memicu konflik antar agama dan antar ras yang merebak di Malaysia baru-baru ini mengusik para pembuat film sebagai individu sekaligus anggota masyarakat untuk segera memutar kameranya. Dalam film 15Malaysia (2009) para sutradara bersama-sama mendokumentasikan permasalahan sosial kontemporer. Film mereka menunjukkan bahwa kita hidup di negara yang penuh dengan ketidakadilan sosial dan represi; negara dimana jika seseorang angkat bicara maka ia dapat dengan mudah ditahan berdasarkan undang-undang Internal Security Act (One Future), negara yang memungkinkan anak-anaknya menjadi rasis atau mewarisi rasisme orang-orang dewasa (The Son, Chocolate), negara dimana pluralisme dapat berubah menjadi kesalahpahaman lintas budaya yang kadang lucu (Halal, Potong Saga), negara yang tingkat inflasinya tinggi (Duit Kecil), penuh dengan ketidaksetaraan sosial (House), dan korupsi yang dianggap lumrah (Slovak Sling, Rojak). Sejalan dengan keragaman tema dan isu yang diangkat, proyek ini juga melibatkan peserta yang beragam, mulai para sutradara film indie senior sampai sutradara-sutradara baru, seniman, dan animator. Meskipun secara umum mutu film proyek ini agak kurang berimbang, namun beberapa isu berhasil dikemas secara halus dan tak langsung, dengan menampilkan tokoh publik terkenal atau lokasi-lokasi yang strategis. Motivasi kosmopolit dibalik proyek ini adalah semangat untuk memperluas afiliasi, kasih sayang, dan empati terhadap etnik terpinggir dalam satu bangsa. Film ini adalah proyek patriotik anti rasis yang menyatakan ulang gagasan tentang sebuah bangsa atas nama rakyatnya yang beragam. Gagasan ini secara simbolis dilukiskan pada film Lumpur, sebuah film puitis tentang rasa memiliki terhadap sebuah bangsa yang berpusat pada kata Melayu ‘tanah air’ yang terdiri dari dua kata yaitu tanah dan air. Judul Lumpur ini muncul ketika sutradara mencampur sedikit tanah dengan air di dalam wadah. Ia juga mewawancarai beberapa orang dari berbagai latar belakang etnis untuk mengetahui pandangan mereka tentang kata tanah dan air. Di akhir film, ia menyaring air berlumpur itu dan meminum air bersih hasil saringan. Langkah di akhir film ini menunjukkan hubungan simbiosis antara manusia dengan lingkungannya (tanah dan air) yang banyak menyelenggarakan kegiatan-kegiatan progresif seperti protes damai untuk mendukung Aung San Suu Kyi pada bulan Mei 2009, seminar tentang perdagangan orang, mekanisme anti korupsi, dan forum publik untuk membahas masalah-masalah yang dihadapi komunitas India di Malaysia. Banyak film independen oleh sutradara Malaysia ditayangkan di gedung ini termasuk Malaysian Gods (2009). International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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menyampaikan pesan bahwa semua kelompok etnis sebenarnya saling bergantung satu sama lain untuk mewujudkan bangsa yang damai dan bersatu. Mengutip Haris Ibrahim, seorang advokat dan aktivis, pada sebuah wawancara tentang peran civil society dalam mempersatukan Malaysia lintas batasan etnis, “Setiap kita harus memiliki cinta, cinta terhadap sesama”3 Cinta disini dapat didefiniskan berdasarkan gabungan kata Yunani storge/kasih saying dan kepedulian, philia/persahabatan, dan agape/cinta kepada Tuhan atau sesembahan yang lain—sebuah cinta yang memberi dan tanpa pamrih yang diwujudkan dalam bentuk cinta kepada “yang lain” (bukan hanya kerabat tetapi juga orang asing sama sekali). Dengan semangat kasih saying, penghargaan terhadap perbedaan, dan tujuan yang sama, cinta ini merangkai kembali bayangan tentang masyarakat yang ideal melalui film independen dan video musik. Cinta yang patriotis adalah tema utama yang mengalir dalam nadi video musik “Here In My Home,” 15Malaysia dan Malaysian Gods.4 Pada akhir film Malaysian Gods muncul sebuah teks yang menyatakan bahwa pasca kebangkitan politik Malaysia tahun 2008, masyarakat tidak boleh berhenti bermimpi, “kita harus terus bergerak.” Sutradara 15Malaysia, Pete Teo, mengingatkan pada kita bahwa 15 film pendek tidak cukup untuk menyelesaikan persoalan negara dan Malaysia membutuhkan lebih banyak lagi orang yang “berani maju ke muka dan terus menyalakan api reformasi.” Salah satu cara mendorong partisipasi yang lebih luas lagi atas proyek ini adalah dengan mengundang masyarakat luas untuk membuat film tentang negara “yang kita cintai” menggunakan format apapun berdurasi kurang dari 5 menit. Sampai saat ini 20 film telah diunggah ke dalam situs 15Malaysia.5

http://popteevee.popfolio.net/default.aspx?e=1049 The Fairly Current Show, Episode #92, aired 8 April 2010. Host Fahmi Fadzil interviews Haris Ibrahim on a report on PM Najib’s first year in office. 4 Another musical example is the hip hop self-parody, “I Am a Macha,” composed by the PopTeeVee team for “That Effing Show,” aired 24 February, 2010. http://popteevee.popfolio.net/default.aspx?e=1037 5 http://15malaysia.com/mymalaysia/ 3


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META KNOL SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite.

14-6-2010

Beyond the Dutch’ – searching for the traces of colonialism in Indonesian contemporary art

Meta Knol, Central Museum, Utrecht In the autumn of 2009, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht presented the exhibition ‘Beyond the Dutch. Indonesia, The Netherlands and the Visual Arts since 1900’, which dealt with the intercultural relationship between The Netherlands and Indonesia, as seen from the specific perspective of visual arts. ‘Beyond the Dutch’ focused on three important phases from the shared cultural history of both Indonesia and The Netherlands. It offered an analysis of the cultural exchange that occurred in the subsequent periods of colonialism, of decolonisation and independence, and the current post-colonial era. Each phase was highlighted by a selection of exemplary works of more than 40 artists, like Raden Saleh, Abdullah Suriosubroto, Jan Toorop, Isaac Israels, Affandi, Hendra Gunawan, Sudjojono, Piet Ouborg, Charles Sayers, as well as the contemporary generation like Heri Dono, Agus Suwage, Mella Jaarsma, Tiong Ang and Fiona Tan. ‘Beyond the Dutch’ focused on the hybrids of these two cultures and how the notion of identity has taken on different forms in different periods and circumstances. We see, for example, how Indonesian artists around 1900 were educated by Dutch artists who were strongly influenced by an Orientalism that was inextricably bound up with the prevailing colonial viewpoint. Conversely, Indonesian visual art around 1950 was largely informed by independence and the subsequent development of a nationalist cultural policy. The emergence of fine arts in Indonesia is in origin strongly related to Western artistic traditions ánd colonial history. The discussion about the role of art and culture in the development and affirmation of national identities is a constant in both Indonesian and Dutch societies. In my paper, I will show how Indonesian artists have, in the course of the 20th century, emancipated themselves from colonialism en how they have developed their own intellectual directions and artistic expressions that are closely bound up with their own culture and history.


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14-6-2010

Fantasizing the Community in Contemporary Indonesia Rachmah Ida, Airlangga University

This paper investigates the construct of televisual community and ‘localness’ as shown in a TV program called Cangkru’an (gathering), broadcast once a week on the local private television station JTV Surabaya. It focuses on the formation of communal identity around the guardhouse, locally known as gardu , a gathering place where local men carry out guard duty as well as gambling and gossiping. I argue that the televisual construct of the ‘gardu community’ has played a crucial role in expressing political views, regulating public memory and defining collective identity. In addition, I also investigate the emergence of a new local (Surabaya) artist community that produces video arts. The group was established in 2007 by several young Surabaya artists, who declare themselves ‘AV nerds’ (penggila Audio Visual). This community, which is formally named ‘Surabaya New Media Art Centre,’ meets regularly ( also using the term ‘cangkrukan’ ) to share their new visual art productions, in a place that they call an ‘electronic party place’ where the artists share information about events and the VJ (visual jockey) artists show their new visual art experiments. The paper traces the historical development of the concept of ‘gardu’ and its use for state control during Suharto’s New Order and by Megawati’s PDI party and other political groups in the post-New Order period. It then examines the signifying functions of gardu in the television program Cangkrukan as a representation of contemporary community identity. The show is set on a street corner in an urban kampung area of Surabaya, and opens with chatting among several people gathered in the gardu. The subject of this talk in the gardu becomes the theme of the program. Topics such as regional development, elections and nationalism are discussed by local people and commented on by an invited expert, while audience members participate in the show by phoning the studio and voicing their opinions. The atmosphere is relaxed and intimate, but at the same time the gardu is depicted as a catalyst for social change and the development of a more democratic life.


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The AV nerds community is not a pre-existing social entity expressing itself through art and media, but a formation that comes into being through their use of shared cultural forms, in the form of new media art and new technology. Members gather regularly in arts spaces or someone’s home to show and discuss their new experimental work, and in 2009 introduced themselves to the Surabaya public in a video art exhibition in which almost all the productions addressed the themes of freedom, democracy, and independence. The group can also be termed an intellectual arts community in that they not only create art but also engage with concepts and terms from contemporary philosophy in discussing the ideas motivating their work. These two different communities occupy different spaces and places to express ‘democratization’ in the post-New Order era of Indonesia. The televisual community invokes the symbolic function of the gardu as a spatial expression of community identity. The Surabaya Video Art community, in a different way, has utilised its own ‘centre’ to form a new local art community and engage in the struggle for identity in urban Surabaya.


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14-6-2010

Performance while busy fighting Azhari Aiyub and Reza Idria

Because it was busy fighting the Dutch, Aceh’s encounter with contemporary performing arts was delayed. One has to work hard to find in the colonial archives in Aceh a report that mentions clearly that in a certain area there were performing groups influenced by contemporary arts practice. In the field of dance there are many traditional forms that exist up till now, in a similar way to the practice of cockfighting and kite-flying competitions, but with major changes in both practice and definition. In the past the dances were performed with a ‘profane’ understanding as part of the entertainment world of their society, but the advent of war made this art try to discover its religiosity. Saman and seudati, for example, two dances which are very well-known in Aceh, are always connected with the mystery of the Islamic saints, the wali, and are said to have been born from their sacred power. Perhaps this situation can be understood as the way in which this art form defended itself and survived. On the other hand, we find oral tales told by a story teller where the change of era has not affected their meaning or their mode of presentation, other than marginalising them from public life. Only after Japanese had taken control of Southeast Asia and driven out the Western colonial powers from this region does the touring theatre group Geulanggang receive mention. The need for propaganda to support Asia Raya, the concept of a Japanese-led United Asia, and hatred of Dutch colonialism apparently allowed this theatre to find a place for itself in Aceh. Existing for 30 years after Indonesian Independence but surviving only a very a short time after Suharto took power, this art form became simply a memory not long after the outbreak of the Aceh Merdeka War. The implementation of syariah law by the Indonesian central government constitutes another war for the world of the arts in Aceh. The Syariat Islam regime in Aceh actually does not hate art, but it deeply abhors busy public events. And we know that every arts event needs an audience and that creates a busy crowd.


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Note: This is an English-language summary of the abstract of Azhari Aiyub’s proposed workshop paper written in January. Unfortunately Azhari is now unable to attend the worskhop, but he and Reza Idria are working on a a joint paper which Reza will deliver in Azhari’s place. This may take a somewhat different form from the above outline.


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14-6-2010

Representing Indonesia in Australia through Cultural Performance: Communities, Collaborations, Identities Aline Scott-Maxwell, Monash University This paper uses case studies to illuminate some aspects of Indonesia-related performance activity in Australia and how it informs the Australia-Indonesia cultural ‘relationship’. Such activity is fragmented and diverse, including Indonesian migrant community renditions of regional dance and music, gamelan groups, intercultural performance experiments, world music bands, jazz, hiphop and reggae artists, and pop music produced by Indonesian international students. The examples reviewed here include gamelan performance, three Indonesian-flavoured intercultural projects led by Australians of Indonesian descent or Indonesians resident in Australia, and the Indonesian student pop music scene in Melbourne. Much of this diverse performance activity is strongly expressive of identity and of a sense of community grounded in shared group attributes or interests and with differing relations to Indonesia. Indonesian and non-Indonesian performers in Australia convey their Indonesianness (their cultural roots) or identify with Indonesia (as an adopted culture) through performance. Gamelan ensembles are found in most large cities in Australia and some provincial centres. Although part of a wide-spread international phenomenon, gamelan activity in Australia displays some distinctive features which link it to other local Indonesia-related performance. Most gamelan players in Australia are non-Indonesians but, in contrast to the United States, United Kingdom and Europe, many groups also include a few players who are Indonesian or partIndonesian.Thus gamelan activities become an arena for Australian-Indonesian social and cultural interaction within and beyond music-making. Many Australian players go on to develop an interest in Indonesia and its culture beyond gamelan music. For those of Indonesian background, on the other hand, playing gamelan music strongly reconnects them to Indonesia. To some extent, Australian gamelan groups see themselves as representing Indonesia to their audiences. Moreover many audience members have an expectation that they will experience something traditional— sounds that correspond with the visual impact of traditional musical instruments. This respect for tradition and authenticity in gamelan performance is not necessarily observed in the same consistent way in other countries, including Indonesia itself. Audiences for world music and intercultural theatre, by contrast, are not necessarily connected to the Indonesia-Australia ‘network’ or familiar with Indonesian performance traditions. They are open to and expect experimentation, while also wanting a flavour of International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Indonesia. The producers of this work take culturally-specific performance traditions in new directions or into new contexts by juxtaposing or blending them with Western forms and practices. The three examples discussed here include a contemporary randai (West Sumatran folk opera) created by West-Sumatran-Australian librettist/director/actor Indija Mahjoeddin, the hybrid, Javanese-influenced vocal style and song-writing of Javanese-Australian Ria Soemardjo, and the Indonesian-flavoured world-beat band, Genggong, led by Indonesian rock musician Sawung Jabo, who has lived part-time in Sydney with his Australian family since the 1980s. All three intercultural projects arise directly from Indonesian migration to Australia, express deep engagement with Indonesia and provide artists with cultural meaning and a vehicle for constructing identity. Indonesian students studying in Australia engage with a diverse array of pop culture forms, including film, multimedia, music, dance and fashion. Local, student-made independent films often have sound tracks employing the music of local Indonesian student bands. Musicmaking includes extensive band and song-writing activity, frequent band competitions, and CD production. This activity is strongly connected to Indonesia, with constant movement of students between the two countries; some Melbourne bands even re-form there. A 2004 compilation CD production project, titled Pengamen Melbourne comprises the work of 14 bands and spans a range of Indonesian pop and rock styles. While the music is not distinctively Indonesian, the CD represents Indonesian students’ relationship with Australia through references to landmarks of the musicians’ lives in Melbourne and cover photos of familiar Melbourne architectural icons. These case studies demonstrate that much Indonesia-related performance activity in Australia derives from and reinforces networks between Australia and Indonesia. Cultural performance constitutes a site for meaningful Australian/Indonesian creative encounters and interaction and a medium for cross-cultural engagement that leaves a strong social and artistic legacy.


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G. R. LONO LASTORO SIMATUPANG SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite 14-6-2010

Some Lessons From the Creative Community Initiative across the Regions G. R. Lono Lastoro Simatupang, Gadjah Mada University

This paper presents Inisiatif Komunitas Kreatif, IKK (Creative Community Inniatives), a pilot project on the application of cultural approach in developing rural communities in Indonesia. Organized by Kelola Foundation, a non profit organization working on the promotion of Indonesian arts, the pilot project was designed as a new complementary unit to the national program of Program Nasional Pemberdayaan Masyarakat (PNPM) Mandiri Perdesaan funded by the World Bank. Launched in May 2008, IKK was implemented in 30 districs in West Sumatra, Central Java, and East Nusa Tenggara provinces. The presentation, based on a project evaluation research conducted in 9 participating districts, will describe IKK as a form of quasigovernmental intervention in cultural performance in rural areas of Indonesia: its basic assumptions, how it works, and draw some lessons from it.


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WAWAN SOFWAN SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite

14-6-2010

Sundanese-language drama festivals, a cultural phenomenon Wawan Sofwan

This paper will review the development of theatre in Bandung. There are three main types of groups in Bandung – campus theatre, art theatre and general/ community theatre. The majority of these groups use the idiom of modern theatre with Indonesian language as the mediating language. But there are also groups that use Sundanese language, the language spoken by the majority of people of West Java. One group that stands out is Teater Sunda Kiwari, TSK. This group was formed in 1975 and has staged scores of plays, the majority of them written by Sundanese playwrights. In this paper I am not going to discuss the performances of TSK, but instead will focus on an activity carried out by the group which is quite phenomenal, the Festival of Sundanese language dama, FDSB, which takes place every two years, and has developed into a cultural event, The first time it was held in 1990 there were only 8 participants. In 2008 there were 74 participants and the festival was held for more than 20 days. The participants came not only from West Java but also from Yogyakarta and the province of Banten. FDSB is organised independently without funding from the government.

IN view of the above, the following questions arise:

1, How is it that Kiwari has been able to consistently hold the Sundanese language drama festival for 20 years, with no government assistance? 2. What is the system of selection for festival participants? 3. How does Kiwari theatre work collaboratively with other institutions in staging new scripts in Sundanese language? 4. How does Kiwari collborate directly with schools in approaching the public?


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FRIDUS STEIJLEN SUMMARY

14-6-2010


In this paper I describe the development of Indorock from the 1950s until now. Indorock is rock and roll played by Indos. They have created a sound of their own by, among other things, letting steel guitar influence their way of playing. Most Indorock bands consisted of young Eurasians who were strongly oriented towards America. The supreme reign of Indorock occurred in the years between 1958 and 1963/4; from then on they were eclipsed by Mersey beat. Indorock bands in those years were more successful outside the Netherlands especially in Germany. For the Netherlands they certainly were ahead of their time. After Mersey beat took over, Indorock withdrew to the spheres of Indonesian evenings and parties. In the beginning of the 1980s Indorock underwent a revival. It was then when the term Indorock was born, making it possible to rewrite the history of Indo bands as a sub cultural movement. This revival was initiated by some fans and old Indorockers. It was backed up by a book and film on Indorock in 1989 and 1991. With the Indorock revival a quest started for recognition of its contribution to Dutch music history as well as the international music history scene. Many Dutch artists paid tribute to the old Indorock and expressed their admiration. There were new books, websites, records and even a play about Indorock. The undisputed emperor of Indorock Andy Tielman received a royal decoration from the queen. The international recognition of the influence of Indorock concentrates on its influence on the Beatles. Among many Indorockers and their fans it is a public secret that the Beatles were inspired by Indorock. The reasoning is based on the fact that Indorock was ruling in Hamburg when the Beatles were still on their way up: they must have seen Indorock bands. According to witnesses from the Indorock side, individual Beatles mentioned their admiration for Indorock, this can be found in books about the Beatles and in magazines like Rolling Stone. As is shown in this paper, these statements by the Beatles are hard to find, and some may be less than positive about Indorock, as indicated by a quote from ‘Shout’. Also the suggestion that early Beatle songs sound like Indorock is very hard to support, there are other plausible sources like Chuck Berry. If we look closely at the sources that talk about the Indorock-Beatle connection, it must be said that most are disputable. Many of them seem to repeat what others say, and in the case of Indorockers themselves, like Andy Tielman, most reports of the connection are formulated in an indirect way. Many Indorockers and fans do not support the claim, on the contrary they openly doubt whether it can be true. The writer of the most influential book on Indorock only mentions the claim and tries to reason out how and when, without a definite answer.

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FRIDUS STEIJLEN SUMMARY

14-6-2010


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SURYADI SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite

14-6-2010

Minangkabau Traditional Verbal Arts in the Electronic Communication Era: New Media, New Venues

Suryadi, Leiden University

Over the last two decades Indonesian regional recording industries have developed significantly. Almost every ethnic group in Indonesia has its own pop music which is now available on commercial recordings in cassette and Video Compact Disc (VCD) format. The rapid development of Indonesian regional recording industries has also influenced ethnic oral literature, including Minangkabau traditional verbal art. West Sumatra is one of Indonesia’s biggest music industry centres after Jakarta. Though the predominant product of the West Sumatran recording companies is pop Minang, Minangkabau traditional verbal art genres are also strongly represented. As competition among the recording companies increases, there has been extensive mediation of Minangkabau culture, including oral literature, which impacts structurally and sociologically on traditional art forms. This paper reviews processes of mediation of Minangkabau traditional verbal art genres, and assesses the way this mediation has impacted on the form and reception of Minangkabau oral literature, and how it engages with issues of modernity and cultural identity.

Minangkabau Oral Literature and its Recording The Minangkabau region maintains a rich variety of oral literature forms, with important roles in traditional ritual and social life. Some genres exist in many parts of West Sumatra while others are specific to the particular regions with texts strongly influenced by a particular dialect of the Minangkabau language. Some genres recite kaba, folktales containing ethical and moral lessons, and other genres comprise sung traditional verses such as pantun and syair. The major genres which have been recorded on commercial International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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cassettes and VCDs include rabab Pariaman, indang, rabab Pesisir Selatan (or rabab Pasisia), dendang Pauah, sijobang, saluang (or bagurau), salawat dulang, randai and pidato adat dan pasambahan. These forms are traditionally presented on public occasions of celebration, such as marriages, celebrations of Prophet Muhammad’s birthday in surau (religious shrines), nagari festivals, and the festivities celebrating the installation of a new penghulu (male village leader; head of matrilineal unit). They are also often performed to gather money for building public facilities like school and village halls (balai desa). The first recordings of Minangkabau verbal art appeared on gramophone disks in the 1930s. It was the emergence of the cassette recording industry in the early 1970s, however, which brought about large scale production and consumption of recordings. This new industry developed first in Java and Bali, later extending to other outer islands. In West Sumatra Tanama Records and Sinar Padang Records were established in the early 1970s. Since the late 1980s new competitors such as Pelangi Records, Minang Records, and Talao Records, have also produced Minangkabau oral literature on commercial cassettes and VCDs. Rabab Pesisir Selatan is the most popular genre of Minangkabau oral literature produced by West Sumatran recording companies. Its singers are engaged by cassette producers more often than their comrades from any other genre. This genre employs lyrical prose using modern Minangkabau language and adds color to humour. The singer Syamsudin seems to have been the first performer to have released rabab Pesisir Selatan commercial recordings, beginning in 1971 and continuing with such works as ‘Kaba Merantau ke Jambi,’ produced in 5 cassettes by Tanama Records in 1975 (Phillips 1991: 81-82). The success of Tanama Records in marketing commercial recordings of rabab Pesisir Selatan seems to have inspired other companies also. Sinar Padang is notable for releasing the largest number of rabab Pesisir Selatan titles in VCD, which it has been producing since the early 2000s. Saluang or bagurau, which have been recorded ever since the gramophone era, have also been released both in cassette and VCD format. Nowadays, due to the influence of the West Sumatran regional recording industry, saluang is adopting new texts and International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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musical styles that incorporate elements of pop Minang. This transformation is reflected on the covers of saluang cassettes and VCDs in the new style, which is described as saluang maso kini (‘contemporary saluang’), saluang dangdut (‘dangdut saluang’) and dendang saluang mode AseRege (‘chanting saluang Asereje-style’).The latter was inspired by the song melody of “Asereje” by three Spanish sisters known as “Las Ketchup” that became a hit worldwide in 2002. Randai recordings have also appeared on cassette and since the 2000s also in VCD format. Randai VCDs enable the audience to enjoy not only the audio aspect of this Minangkabau folk theatre, but also its visual aspect. Pidato adat dan pasambahan recordings have been produced since the 1980s, pioneered by Yus Dt. Parpatiah, a panghulu (lineage head) from Maninjau, West Sumatra, who became the leader of the Rumah Gadang ’83 theatre troupe in Jakarta (Suryadi 2003a: 61). Commercial recordings of this genre have appeared only in cassette format. Among Yus Dt. Parpatiah’s cassettes in this genre are “Kepribadian Minang” (‘Minangkabau Personality’), “Nasehat Perkawinan Versi Adat” (‘Adat Version of Marriage Advice’), “Baringin Bonsai: Krisis Kepemimpinan Ninik-Mamak Di Gerbang Era Globalisasi” (‘The Bonsai Banyan: A Crisis of Village Leadership in the Transition to Globalization’), “Konsultasi Adat Minangkabau” (‘Consultation on Minangkabau Custom’), and “Pitaruah Ayah untuk Calon Panghulu” (Father’s Advice for a Candidate Lineage Head’).

New, Media-Bound Genres The advent of recording has also given rise to some genres which have no original counterparts in public performances, that exist only in media such as cassette, VCD, radio, and television. One such genre is drama Minang moderen (modern Minangkabau drama) which was created in the 1980s by two Minangkabau theatrical-troupes established by emigrants (perantau) in Jakarta. Cassettes were produced of such dramas are “Diseso Bayang” (‘Tormented by the [Beloved] Shadow’), “Kamari Bedo” (“All Wrong’), “Di Simpang Duo” (‘In a Dilemma’), “Kasiah Tak Sampai” (‘Unrequited International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Love’), “Rajo Angek Bacakak jo Turih” (‘Rajo Angek Clashes with Tourists), and “Puber Kaduo” (‘Second Puberty’). Some of these titles have been re-issued recently but only in cassette format, not VCD. These modern Minangkabau dramas are performed by a group of five to ten male and female actors in a radio format. The actors deliver their dialogue as if they were acting a play, while making asides to the audience about the imagined scene of the action and using many sound effects. Humour and jokes add flavor to the stories, which combine music and sung and spoken dialogue, partly in Indonesian and mostly in Minangkabau language (colloquial and formal literary dialect). The cassette covers are made from engravings or photographic plates showing a carefully posed scene of drama troupe actors in traditional and modern costumes . Reflecting the perceptions of Minangkabau emigrants toward the social changes occurring in their homeland and among the Minangkabau generations born in rantau, the themes of the dramas focus on modern Minangkabau family affairs – choice of marriage partners, inheritance disputes, the problems of living in rantau, the dilemmas and attractions of marrying non-Minangkabau women, mamak (mother’s brother)-kemenakan (nephew) ties, loyalty to custom and cultural decay in the home village (kampung halaman). Some other stories are inspired by local legends or Minangkabau history in the colonial era. These modern Minangkabau cassette dramas are just one example of how ethnic cultures are represented and revitalized making use of modern media technology. Such revitalization involves the creation of new genres, predominantly by mixing pre-existing genres from both inside and outside the culture. Effect of Recording on Oral Texts Circumstances necessarily influence the form of oral literature. Every performance is in some respects a new creation for the singer, producing a new text. Oral literary texts recorded on cassette or VCD tend to be condensed; sometimes storytellers indicate they are shortening their accounts, showing their awareness of the limited space available on


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media like cassette and VCD. Sometimes performers use formulaic expressions indicating they are shifting between cassettes, such as the following by the singer Amir Hosen in “Kaba Nan Gombang Patuanan & Sutan Pangaduan” :

Ujuang tali pangabek paga

The end of the string for binding the fence

Putuih bajelo masuak balai

Broken, it trails into the market

Sakarang kini kito mulai

Now we are beginning it 1

Disambuang [di] kaset nan kalapan

It is continued on cassette number eight

In sum, the engagement of oral literature genres with new media like cassettes and VCDs affects their texts. The texts of studio performances tend to be condensed, with less parallelism, fewer pairs of synonyms, or fewer long vocative phrases, though genrespecific formulaic elements are retained.

Authenticity and Modernity ‘Authenciticy’ and ‘modernity’ are two contrasting characteristics used to identify and sell recorded verbal forms. On indang cassette and VCD covers the words “Pariaman asli” (‘genuine Pariaman’) always appear. They indicate that the genre recorded in the cassettes and VCDs is the traditional version of Pariaman indang, performed by male performers only, and not the new modified modern version (indang moderen), performed by male and female performers which is often staged as a cultural attraction for tourism, Conversely rabab Pesisir Selatan commercial cassettes are labelled ‘gaya baru’ (new style) (Phillips 1991: 81), indicating the changes of its intrinsic structure and suggesting the storytellers’ attitude to modernity. Cassette and VCD cover images reinforce these concepts of modernity and authenticity. The rabab Pesisir Selatan singers Pirin Asmara and Hasan Basri, for example, appear fashionably dressed. On one cover Pirin is in a Western style working suit with necktie and jacket, an image which arguably distances rabab Pesisir Selatan from Minangkabau verbal art tradition. By contrast, the performers of other genres such as rabab Pariaman, salawat dulang, and sijobang, appear in


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traditional garb on their commercial cassettes covers. The images of modernity on the one hand, and of authenticity on the other hand, also emerge in the VCD clips accompanying the performances of Minangkabau oral literature.

New Opportunities of Reception The engagement of Minangkabau oral literature with electronic communication has opened up new ways of reception beside the traditional pattern of public performance at traditional festivities in Minangkabau villages. The competition to make commercial recordings in cassette and VCD format has provided Minangkabau people with a new way to appreciate these genres. The perantau, that half of the total of 6 million Minangkabau people who now live outside West Sumatra, are able to enjoy these forms far from their homeland. Cassette retailers in Padang, Pariaman and Bukittinggi report that commercial cassettes and VCDs of Minangkabau oral literature are often bought by Minangkabau emigrants. And the leading producers of recordings, Tanama Records and Sinar Padang Records, have established their own supplier shops in Glodok Plaza, Jakarta, in order to service the expanding market of potential consumers. Nevertheless, it seems that Minangkabau emigrants are not fully satisfied simply with recordings of Minangkabau oral genres. Recently Minangkabau emigrants have invited Minangkabau oral literature storytellers to conduct performances in the rantau. Saluang and rabab Pesisir Selatan singers have often been invited by the Minangkabau emigrants living in Denpasar, Jakarta, Bogor, Bandung, Medan, Palembang and Batam. As they come together to enjoy such performances in the rantau, the Minangkabau emigrants’ yearning for their home land may be tempered. This development suggests that the mediation of oral literature genres does not threaten its live performance. Though cassettes and VCDs have created a new public for Minangkabau verbal forms, especially in urban areas of the rantau, apparently such consumers still appreciate performances in public settings.

1

“Nan Gombang Patuanan & Sutan Pangaduan” (Tanama Records 1996, 20 cassettes): cassette no.8.


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Concluding Remarks Through commercial cassettes and VCDs, the auditory and visual dimensions of Minangkabau oral literature can now be enjoyed far from their point of origin. They facilitate an emotional bridge between emigrants and their homeland. Though transmitted through new electronic media to dispersed virtual audiences and connecting with regional cultural flows, such genres still emphasize local, grassroots identity and community, both in the homeland and in the rantau. Media versions of Minangkabau oral literature engage with the dialogue on modernity and authenticity in Minangkabau society. In this respect cassettes and VCDs contribute to the revitalization and redefining of regional cultural identity in contemporary Indonesia. In the regional context, they reaffirm local sensitivity, which goes with the euphoria of regional autonomy in the contemporary Indonesian political sphere. The wider political consequences of this development remain to be seen. No doubt the mediation of local culture is contributing to a sense of difference from others, a potential divisiveness. And it is expected to affect, politically and socially, the nation-state project of Indonesia as a multi-ethnic country.

References

Phillips, Nigel. 1991. “Two variant forms of Minangkabau kaba”, in : J.J. Ras and S.O. Robson (eds.), Variation, transformation and meaning; Studies on Indonesian literatures in honour of A. Teeuw, pp. 73-86. Leiden: KITLV Press

Suryadi. 2003a. “Minangkabau commercial cassettes and the cultural impact of recording industry in West Sumatra”, Asian Music 32.2: 51-89.


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SENI VERBAL TRADISIONAL MINANGKABAU DI ERA KOMUNIKASI ELEKTRONIK: MEDIA BARU, TEMPAT BARU SURYADI (Leiden University, The Netherlands) Selama dua dekade lalu industri rekaman daerah di Indonesia berkembang dengan pesat. Hampir setiap kelompok etnis di Indonesia memiliki musik pop sendiri yang sekarang tersedia dalam rekaman-rekaman komersial berupa kaset dan VCD. Perkembangan pesat industri rekaman daerah di Indonesia ini juga mempengaruhi sastra lisan etnik, termasuk seni verbal tradisional di Minangkabau. Sumatra Barat merupakan salah satu pusat industri musik terbesar di Indonesia setelah Jakarta. Meskipun produk utama dari perusahaan-perusahaan rekaman di Sumatra Barat adalah Pop Minang, genre seni verbal tradisional Minangkabau juga tercermin sangat kuat. Ketika persaingan di antara perusahaan rekaman meningkat, ada mediasi budaya Minangkabau yang ekstensif, termasuk sastra lisan, yang mempengaruhi secara struktural dan sosiologis bentuk-bentuk seni tradisional. Makalah ini mengulas proses-proses mediasi genre seni verbal tradisional di Minangkabau, dan menilai cara mediasi ini mempengaruhi bentuk dan resepsi sastra lisan Minangkabau, dan bagaimana ia bergelut dengan soal-soal modernitas dan identitas budaya. Sastra Lisan Minangkabu dan Rekamannya Daerah Minangkabau menjaga keragaman bentuk sastra lisan yang kaya, serta peran penting dalam ritual tradisional dan kehidupan sosial. Sebagian genre ditemukan di banyak daerah di Sumatra Barat, sedang genre-genre lainnya menjadi ciri khas bagi daerah-daerah tertentu dengan teks-teks yang sangat dipengaruhi oleh dialek khas bahasa Minangkabau. Sebagian genre mendaraskan kaba, dongeng-dongeng yang berisi pelajaran etika dan moral, dan genre lainnya berisi bait-bait tradisional yang dinyanyikan seperti pantun dan syair. Genre-genre utama yang direkam dalam kaset-kaset komersial dan VCD di antaranya: rabab Pariaman, indang, rabab Pesisir Selatan (or rabab Pasisia), dendang Pauah, sijobang, saluang (atau bagurau), salawat dulang, randai and pidato adat dan pasambahan. Bentuk-bentuk ini secara International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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tradisional disuguhkan pada kesempatan-kesempatan perayaan, semisal perkawinan, peringatan Maulid Nabi di surau, perayaan nagari, dan pesta-pesta merayakan pengangkatan penghulu baru. Bentuk-bentuk kesenian itu juga sering dipertunjukkan untuk mengumpulkan dana untuk membangun fasilitas publik semisal sekolah dan balai desa. Rekaman-rekaman pertama dari seni verbal Minangkabau muncul dalam bentuk piringan hitam (gramaphone discs) pada tahun 1930an. Namun munculnya industri rekaman kaset pada awal 1970an lah yang menghasilkan produksi dan konsumsi rekaman berskala besar. Industri baru ini berkembang pertama kali di Jawa dan Bali, kemudian merambah ke pulau-pulau luar Jawa lainnya. Di Sumatra Barat Tanama records dan Sinar Pandang Records didirikan pada awal 1970an. Sejak akhir 1980an, pesaing-pesaing baru semisal Pelangi Records, Minang Records, dan Talao Records, juga memproduksi sastra lisan Minangkabau dalam bentuk kaset-kased komersial dan VCD. Rabab Pesisir Selatan adalah genre paling populer dari sastra lisan Minangkabau yang dibuat oleh perusahaan-perusahaan rekaman Sumatra Barat. Para penyanyinya dilibatkan oleh para produser kaset lebih sering ketimbang rekan-rekan mereka dari genre lainnya. Genre ini menerapkan prosa lirik dengan menggunakan bahasa modern Minangkabau dan menambahkan humor. Penyanyi Syamsuddin tampaknya adalah pemain pertama yang merilis rekaman komersial Rabab Pesisir Selatan, mulai pada 1971 dan terus dengan karya-karya semisal ‘Kaba Merantau ke Jambi,’ yang dibuat dalam 5 kaset oleh Tanama Records pada 1975 (Phillips 1991: 81-82). Keberhasilan Tanama Records dalam memasarkan rekaman komersial rabab Pesisir Selatan tampaknya mengilhami pula perusahaan-perusahaan lainnya. Sinar Padang terkenal karena merilis jumlah terbanyak judul rabab Pesisir Selatan dalam VCD, yang ia produksi sejak awa 2000an. Saluang or bagurau, yang sudah direkam sejak era piringan hitam, juga dirilis baik dalam bentuk kaset maupun VCD. Sekarang, karena pengaruh industri rekaman daerah Sumatra Barat, saluang mengadopsi teks-teks dan gaya-gaya musikal baru yang memadukan unsur-unsur pop Minang. Perubahan ini tecermin pada sampul kaset dan VCD saluang dalam gaya baru, yang digambarkan sebagai saluang maso kini, saluang dangdut dan dendang saluang mode AseRege. Yang terakhir diilhami oleh melodi lagi

“Asereje” oleh tiga


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bersaudari dari Spanyol yang dikenal sebagai “Las Ketchup” yang menjadi hit dunia pada 2002. Rekaman Randai juga muncul dalam bentuk kaset dan sejak 2000-an juga dalam bentuk VCD. VCD Randai VCD memungkinkan khalayak menikmati tidak hanya aspek audio dari teater rakyat Minangkabau ini, tetapi juga aspek visualnya. Rekaman-rekaman Pidato adat dan pasambahan telah dibuat sejak tahun 1980an, yang diprakarsai oleh Yus Dt. Parpatiah, seorang panghulu dari Maninjau, Sumatra Barat, yang menjadi pimpinan kelompok teater Rumah Gadang ’83 di Jakarta (Suryadi 2003a: 61). Rekaman-rekaman komersial dari genre ini muncul hanya dalam bentuk kaset. Di antara kaset Yus Dt. Parpatiah dalam genre ini adalah “Kepribadian Minang”, “Nasehat Perkawinan Versi Adat”, “Baringin Bonsai: Krisis Kepemimpinan Niniak-Mamak Di Gerbang Era Globalisasi”, “Konsultasi Adat Minangkabau”, dan “Pitaruah Ayah untuak Calon Panghulu”.

Baru, Genre yang Gayut dengan Media (Media-Bound Genres) Hadirnya rekaman juga memunculkan beberapa genre yang tidak memiliki padanan asli dalam pertunjukan-pertunjukan publik, yang hanya ada dalam media semisal kaset, VCD, radio, dan televisi. Contohnya adalah drama Minang moderen yang dibuat pada 1980an oleh dua kelompok teater Minangkabau yang didirikan oleh para perantau di Jakarta. Kaset-kaset yang diproduksi dari drama ini antar alain adalah “Diseso Bayang” (‘Disiksa Bayang(an)’), “Kamari Bedo” (‘Serba Salah’), “Di Simpang Duo” (‘Di Simpang Dua’; maksudnya: dalam dilema), “Kasiah Tak Sampai” (‘Kasih Tak Sampai’), “Rajo Angek Bacakak jo Turih” (Rajo Angek Ribut dengan Turis’), dan “Puber Kaduo” (‘Puber Kedua’). Sebagian judul ini dikeluarkan lagi baru-baru ini tetapi hanya dalam bentuk kaset, bukan VCD. Drama-drama Minangkabau modern ini dipertunjukkan oleh sekelompok yang terdiri dari lima sampai sepuluh pemain laki-laki dan perempuan dalam bentuk drama radio. Para pelaku menyampaikan dialog mereka seolah sedang memerankan sebuah permainan, menyisakan khalayak tentang skenario bayangan dari aksi dan menggunakan banyak efek suara. Humor dan candatawa membumbui kisah-kisahnya, yang menggabungkan musik dan dialog yang dinyanyikan dan diucapkan, sebagian dalam bahasa Indonesia dan sebagian besar dalam bahasa Minangkabau (dialek sastra formal dan keseharian). Sampul kaset dibuat dari International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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guratan-guratan lukisan atau gambar-gambar fotografik yang menunjukkan skenario yang ditampakkan secara cermat dari para pemain kelompok drama dalam kostum tradisional dan modern. Dengan mencerminkan persepsi para perantau Minangkabau terhadap perubahan sosial yang terjadi di tanah kelahiran mereka dan di antara generasi Minangkabau yang lahir di rantau, tema-tema dari drama itu berpusat pada persoalan-persoalan keluarga Minangkabau modern—pilihan pasangan hidup, perselisihan warisan, masalah hidup di rantau, dilema dan ketertarikan menikahi gadis non-Minangkabau, pertalian mamak (saudara laki-laki ibu)kemenakan (anak saudara perempuan), kesetiaan pada adat dan lunturnya budaya di kampung halaman. Cerita-cerita lainnya diilhami oleh legenda-legenda setempat atau sejarah Minangkabau di masa penjajahan. Drama-drama kaset Minangkabau modern ini hanyalah satu contoh dari bagaimana budaya etnis digambarkan dan dihidupkan kembali dengan menggunakan teknologi media modern. Menghidupkan kembali semacam ini melibatkan penciptaan genre-genre baru, yang sebagian besar melalui pencampuran genre-genre yang ada sebelumnya baik dari dalam maupun dari luar budaya. Pengaruh Rekaman pada Teks-Teks Lisan Keadaan sekitar tentu saja mempengaruhi bentu sastra lisan. Setiap pertunjukan dalam beberapa hal adalah penciptaan baru bagi sang penyanyi, yakni membuat teks baru. Teks-teks sastra lisan yang direkam dalam kaset atau VCD cenderung dipadatkan; kadang para para tukang cerita menyatakan bahwa mereka sedang memendekkan ceritanya, yang menunjukkan kesadaran mereka akan ruang yang terbatas yang tersedia pada media semisal kaset dan VCD. Kadang-kadang

para

pemain

menggunakan

ekspresi-ekspresi

formulaik

(formulaic

expressions) yang menujukkan mereka bergeser di antara kaset-kaset itu. Contohnya adalah yang berikut ini oleh penyayi Amir Hosen dalam “Kaba Nan Gombang Patuanan & Sutan Pangaduan” :


Ujung tali pengikat pagar


Putus berjela masuk pasar


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Jelo-bajelo ka kadaian

Jela-berjela ke perkedaian

Ujuang nyanyi jatuah ka kaba

Ujung nyanyi jatuh ke kaba


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Sekarang kini kita mulai 1


Disambung di kasen nomor delapan

Pendeknya, pergulatan genre sastra lisan dengan media baru seperti kaset dan VCD mempengaruhi teks-teksnya. Teks dari pertunjukan studio cenderung dipadatkan, dengan sedikit paralelisme, pasangan sinonim yang sedikit, atau sedikit frase-frase vokatif yang panjang, meskipun unsur-unsur formula genre khusus dipertahankan.

Otentisitas dan Modernitas

‘Otentisitas’ dan ‘modernitas’ adalah dua ciri khas yang berlawanan yang digunakan untuk mengenali dan menjual bentuk-bentuk verbal rekaman. Pada sampul kaset dan VCD indang kata “Pariaman asli” selalu muncul. Kata-kata ini menunjukkan bahwa genre yang direkam dalam kaset dan VCD adalah versi tradisional indang Pariaman, dimainkan oleh para pemain laki-laki saja, dan bukan versi modern baru yang dimodifikasi (indang moderen), dimainkan oleh pemain laku-laki dan perempuan yang sering dipentaskan sebagai atraksi budaya untuk pariwisata. Sebaliknya, kaset-kaset komersial rabab Pesisir Selatan dilabeli ‘gaya baru’ (Phillips 1991: 81), yang menunjukkan perubahan-perubahan struktur intrinsiknya dan menegaskan sikap para tukang ceritanya (tukang rabab)

terhadap modernitas. Gambar-

gambar sampul kaset dan VCD memperkuat konsep modernitas dan otentisitas ini. Penyanyi rabab Pesisir Selatan Pirin Asmara dan Hasan Basri, misalnya, tampil dengan pakaian modern. Pada satu sampul Pirin memakai pakaian ala Barat dengan dasi dan jaket, suatu kesan yang tentunya menjauhkan rabab Pesisir Selatan dari tradisi seni verbal Minangkabau. Sebaliknya, para peman dari genre-genre lainya seperti rabab Pariaman, salawat dulang, dan sijobang, tampil dalam pakaian tradisional pada sampul-sampul kaset komersial mereka. Gambaran-gambaran modernitas di satu sisi dan otentisitas di sisi lain juga muncul dalam klip-klip VCD yang menyertai pertunjukan-pertunjukan sastra lisan Minangkabau.


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Kesempatan Baru Resepsi Pergulatan sastra lisan Minangkabau dengan komunikasi elekronik telah membuka cara-cara baru resepsi di samping pola tradisional pertunjukan publik dalam festival-festival tradisional di kampung-kampung di Minangkabau. Persaingan untuk membuat rekaman-rekaman komersial dalam bentuk kaset dan VCD telah memberi masyarakat Minangkabau cara baru untuk memahami genre-genre ini. Perantau, separuh dari 6 juta total penduduk Minangkabau yang sekarang tinggal di luar Sumatra Barat, bisa menikmati bentuk-bentuk ini jauh dari tanah asal mereka. Para pengecer kaset di Padang, Pariaman dan Bukittinggi melaporkan bahwa kaset-kaset dan VCD komersial sastra oral Minangkabau sering dibeli oleh para perantau Minangkabau. Dan produsen rekaman terkenal, Tanama Records dan Sinar Padang Records, telah mendirikan toko-toko suplier sendiri di Glodok Plaza, Jakarta, untuk melayani pasar calon pembeli yang semakin meluas. Namun demikian, tampaknya para perantau Minangkabau tidak sepenuhnya puas hanya dengan rekaman-rekaman genre oral Minangkabau. Baru-baru ini para perantau Minangkabau mengundang para tukang cerita sastra lisan Minangkabau untuk melakukan pementasan di rantau. Para penyanyi Saluang dan rabab Pesisir Selatan seringkali diundang oleh para perantau Minangkabau yang tingkal di Denpasar, Jakarta, Bogor, Bandung, Medan, Palembang dan Batam. Ketika mereka datang bersama untuk menikmati pertunjukanpertunjukan itu di rantau, kerinduan para perantau Minangkabau akan kampung halaman mereka bisa terobati. Perkembangan ini menegaskan bahwa mediasi genre-genre sastra lisan tidak mengancam pertunjukan langsungnya. Meski kaset dan VCD telah menciptakan publik baru bagi bentuk-bentuk verbal Minangkabau, khususnya di daerah-daerah perkotaan rantau, jelas para konsumen masih mengapresiasi pertunjukan dalam latar publik.

Catatan Penutup Melalui kaset dan VCD komersial, dimensi dengar dan lihat dari sastra lisan Minangkabau 1

“Nan Gombang Patuanan & Sutan Pangaduan” (Tanama Records 1996, 20 cassettes): cassette no.8. Kursif


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sekarang bisa dinikmati jauh dari tempat asalnya. Kaset dan VCD itu memudahkan jembatan emosional antara para perantau dan kampung halaman mereka. Meski dibawa melalui media elektronik baru ke audiens virtual yang tersebar dan berhubungan dengan aliran budaya setempat, genre-genre itu masih menekankan identitas dan komunitas lokal dan akar rumput, baik di kampung halaman maupun rantau.

Versi-versi media sastra lisan Minangkabau bergelut dengan dialog tentang modernitas dan otentisitas dalam masyarakat Minangkabau. Dalam hal ini kaset dan VCD turut menghidupkan kembali dan menakrifkan kembali identitas budaya daerah dalam Indonesia kontemporer. Dalam konteks regional, kaset dan VCD mempertegas sensitivitas lokal, yang berjalan seturut euforia otonomi daerah dalam ruang politik Indonesia kontemporer. Akibatakibat politik yang lebih luas dari perkembangan ini masih harus dilihat. Tak syak mediasi budaya lokal turut menyumbang makna perbedaan dari yang lain, suatu potensi perpecahan. Dan diperkirakan hal itu mempengaruhi, secara politik dan sosial, proyek negara-bangsa Indonesia sebagai negeri multi-etnis.

Kepustakaan Phillips, Nigel. 1991. “Two variant forms of Minangkabau kaba”, in : J.J. Ras and S.O. Robson (eds.), Variation, transformation and meaning; Studies on Indonesian literatures in honour of A. Teeuw, pp. 73-86. Leiden: KITLV Press



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ALIA SWASTIKA SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite

14-6-2010

Audiences as a Part of the History of the Performing Arts. A Study of Arts Spaces in Jakarta after 1998 Alia Swastika

Many commentaries on performances in Indonesia make reference to the presence and opinions of audience members, but few engage with them as subjects, and the role of audiences in shaping the development of the performing arts is not addressed. It was this situation which prompted me a few years ago to undertake research on audience members at performances of Waktu Batu by Teater Garasi in Yogyakarta, to compare representations of audience members in the mass media with the reactions of viewers themselves. Here I look more broadly at audiences of performances staged after 1998, in the post-New Order period. The change of political climate has not only had a major effect on freedom of expression for artists as creators, but has also influenced the response of audiences to works in this period. Along with radical political changes, the economic situation and the strengthening of global culture are other factors which have impacted directly on relations between audiences and arts spaces and with artists themselves. This paper consists of a simple mapping of audiences or visitors to arts events in the city of Jakarta from 2000 to 2010. It attempts to address the way the three factors mentioned above have influenced changes in audience composition and arts spaces for an urban population. A number of new arts ‘centres’ have appeared in Jakarta during this time. I concentrate especially on spaces which offer a crossdisciplinary mix – performing arts, fine arts, film, literature, architecture, intellectual discussions. I ask what aesthetic trends characterise these spaces, particularly from the viewpoint of audience members, and how audience perceptions interact with the concepts of organisers of the spaces. The three sites discussed

are the Taman Ismail Marzuki Arts Centre,

established as the centre of national arts/ culture activity early in the New Order period, Salihara, a large arts complex which opened in 2009 in South Jakarta, and the arts spaces maintained by foreign embassies such as the Goethe Institut (German) the Erasmus Haus (Netherlands) and French, Japanese and Italian cultural centres. International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Taman Ismail Marzuki – TIM As a true centre of the arts, from the 1970s onwards TIM presented all forms of arts – theatre, dance, music, film, literature, painting – and brought together all kinds of arts practitioners and supporters – artists, curators, cultural workers and audience members. Experimental works were staged by figures such as Rendra and his Bengkel theatre, Sardono Kusumo and many others; there were international festivals and performances by foreign groups, and TIM was a hub of activity for young artists. After 2000, however, with the spread of other arts spaces, TIM is no longer the only centre of arts activities for young people. Experimental works are staged in alternate sites rather than its large, formal theatres, and practitioners of contemporary performance come there only for special events rather than routinely. The majority of audience members at TIM performances are people who have long been involved in theatre activities, journalists and NGO activists. They feel a nostalgic connection with TIM, as a place for meeting with like-minded people, with political as well as artistic interests. Another group are fans of the popular theatre groups Teater Koma and Gandrik from Yogya, while a third are people who came to TIM as children to paint or learn dance or perform children’s theatre and now return regularly to maintain the link.

Salihara

Extending the activities of the alternate arts space Komunitas Hutan Kayu, which had operated since the mid-1990s, to a much grander scale, Komunitas Salihara offers an eclectic mix of arts disciplines and of contemporary and traditional work. Its audiences consist predominantly of young people, many of whom are arts practitioners, while others come seeking new forms of entertainment. As part of the urban middle class they are very familiar with new technology and with international popular culture. They come not out of nostalgia like the audiences at TIM, but to be part of arts events and to gain new aesthetic experiences. Performances by international groups are one of the biggest attractions at Salihara and cultural discussions are very popular. Through the variety of its performances and events International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Salihara has the potential to become a new melting pot, bringing together artists, intellectuals and the general public.

Foreign cultural institutes Activities at the arts spaces maintained by foreign cultural institutes allow arts practitioners to keep up with international trends and maintain networks, while also providing opportunities for young people to expand their cultural experience. Many of the young audience members at exhibitions and performances are students of the language classes held by these institutes. Others come along out of curiosity, become interested and may go on to attend arts events at other locations such at TIM and Salihara.

Attracting audiences

Given the lack of infrastructure for arts education in society, the enormous growth and power of the entertainment industry and Jakarta’s segmented social structure, strategies for attracting audiences are crucial in the management of arts spaces. Conventional means of publicising arts events, through posters and banners, are ineffective due Jakarta’s huge size and the absence of a culture of walking in the city. Far more effective for publicity is the use of the internet. For the last few years arts groups and arts spaces have actively used email lists and email blasts to publicise events. More recently facebook has become a most important force for communicating with potential audience members, both through the announcement of events as well as previews, reviews etc.

Concluding thoughts In the repressive New Order era, particularly the last decade, art became a channel for political ideas; audiences at performances saw themselves as part of a movement expressing criticism of the government. After 1998 the motivations and expectations of audience members changed markedly. Today’s audiences come from a generation International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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with wide access to information networks growing out of an excess of freedom of expression. This new generation is often described as a-political. Rather than socialpolitical issues they are more interested in projects of construction of identity. A common sensibility characterises audience members of this younger generation, and helps define the concept of contemporary performance in Indonesia. Given the rich information sources they enjoy and their unlimited interaction with popular culture, the performances they prefer emphasise popular, often spectacular visual imagery, are accompanied by pop or independent music and address themes close to the experience of young people, such as identity, consumerism, myths and legends and interpretations of some actual political issues. Relations between audiences and arts practitioners are closer and more constructive than a few years ago. Audience members become part of the ‘creation’ of an arts event, in that their tastes are taken into account and form a reference point. This group of audience members can be said to have built quite a strong bargaining position in relation to the growth of performing arts in Indonesia.


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KATINKA VAN HEEREN SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite 14-6-2010

Hot Dogs and Spring Rolls or Ten years of post-Soeharto filmmaking: What is at stake? Katinka van Heeren, Leiden University In Indonesia, films addressing socio-political issues have been produced ever since 1998 when President Soeharto resigned. Over the years independent filmmakers have produced films that touch on the officially still forbidden subjects of SARA – Suku (ethnic groups), Agama (religion), Ras (race), and Antar-golongan (social groups or class). Some have produced documentaries exposing atrocities committed by the Indonesian military. Other films depict the effects of the demonization of supposed Communists by the Soeharto regime. NGOs and film-maker collectives promote appreciation and production of films by young people through workshops in schools and villages where participants are encouraged to make films about contemporary sociopolitical issues that affect them personally. Within this wide range of projects and activities some themes repeatedly recur. These include: Sex (gender inequality, patriarchy, and homosexuality), Religion (religious minorities and intolerance of fundamentalist religious thinking), Race (racial prejudice against Indonesian Chinese), and Social Groups (misuse of power of officials and the position of ‘common people’ in day to day life). This paper explores representations of these themes in post-Soeharto films and asks why critical films are made, who funds and promotes them and where they are screened. Like Khoo Gaik Cheng’s paper it focuses on two films that were released precisely a decade after Reformasi. The first Babi Buta Yang Ingin Terbang (Blind Pig Wants to Fly) by the Indonesian independent film-maker Edwin is about a racial minority: the IndonesianChinese. The second film, 9808, made by ten different film-makers, can be compared to the compilation film of fifteen independent Malaysian film-makers 15 Malaysia. Working with several Indonesian-Chinese friends, Edwin created the film Babi Buta in order to explore how it feels to be Chinese, and find out about his identity . The shots and characters present a kaleidoscope of issues and emotions Indonesian-Chinese International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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are confronted with.. The themes of the film are confronting – homosexual sex, racial discrimination, religious hypocrisy. Funding the film was very difficult; rich ChineseIndonesian investors, whom the production team had expected to rely on, believed that it was too dangerous to discuss racial problems. Nevertheless the film went ahead and has been shown at independent film forums and several international festivals. Its creators describe the filmmaking process and their experiences with sponsors as a healing therapy. It gave them the chance to explore and confront all aspects of their identity. After completion they could move on. IN the 9808 film project, fifteen young visual artists, musicians, and other creative workers who were also short film-makers were asked to produce a short film inspired by the May 1998 events. Screenings were held in Jakarta from 13 to 20 May 2008 ; thereafter the film was shown in several other cities and distributed to education institutions all over the country. Like Babi Buta, 9808 addresses several SARA themes, sex, religion, race and social divisions. Five out of the ten films present concern the disowned histories and identities of Chinese-Indonesians. A vital aspect of the film screenings was the following discussion, where directors and viewers often commented on how the films affected them personally. In this way 9808 succeeded in its aim to present alternative histories and restart a discussion on post-Soeharto social constructions and identities. The post-Soeharto generation of independent film-makers clearly believes it is important to address topics of ethnicity, gender, homosexuality, and religion. Issues that may seem rather clichéd in a transnational context in Indonesia are still troubling and controversial. In Babi Buta and 9808 the different film-makers came up with the ideas for the films themselves, and demonstrated a strong personal attachment to the topics. They are attempting to, if not change society, at least change their own lives through filmmaking. Hopefully others who watch and discuss the films will help raise awareness of the ongoing struggles of contemporary life.


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AMRIH WIDODO SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite

14-6-2010

Grassroots hip hop and political activism in local world music in Java. Amrih Widodo, ANU

This paper will depict how globalisation is at work in a given locality and how local hybrid creativity has taken advantage of globalized media and technology to participate in the production and circulation of fusion music while raising local and national issues on good governance, corruption, social justice, environment and pluralism. Using the case of Sampak GusUran, a rurally based musical group of hybrid music which mixes western diatonic tune and Indonesian ethnic musics, particularly the pentatonic Javanese gamelan orchestra, this paper will demonstrate how the local artistic and cultural communities adjust themselves to the global trends and take benefits from the new formatted technologies to produce and disseminate Indonesian fusion music. Through their artistic expressions and production strategies, local artists attempt to demonstrate the viability of their local cultural practices, reassert their identity in the national arena, and compete with other genres of popular and hybrid music in the commercial music industry. The are three characteristics which make this group particularly curious. Unlike the more established and urban based fusion groups such as Krakatau, Balawan Batuan and Kua Etnik, Sampak GusUran is rurally based and inevitably has to cater for local middle class and peasant communities as their first consumers of their musics. Initially totally unknown by national music community, Sampak GusUran gained its recognition from global albeit specified indie music community through the internet. And finally, even though at a first glance their music is heavily coloured with Islamic nuances, they refuse to be categorized as Islamic musical group. In this paper, I am looking at identity politics in the context of globalisation/localisation, and consumption where interborrowing of genres to create new hybrid or fusions have been one of the common features, in the context of political, social and cultural discourse in Indonesia.


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YOSHI FAJAR KRESNO MURTI SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite 14-6-2010

Stage and Myth in The Transformation of the Practice of Community Life Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti This paper takes the form of a reflection on the practice of community life, on the process of living and working together of the residents of several kampung areas of Yogyakarta. It is acknowledged that the entities known as ‘city kampung’ in Yogyakarta have a particular history, and the term is understood differently from other cities of Indonesia. City kampung in Yogya will be discussed in their connection with the transformation of community life which has continued from the time of the formation of the unitary state of Indonesia until today. The city kampung dynamic in this discussion is a representation of the process of civilising the city, not only in a physical spatial but also in a global cultural sense, which has produced an extraordinary transformation of a number of areas of community life. IN working together in the kampung we often use words such as ‘performance’, ‘art’, ‘artist’ and so on, as a language of interaction and communication. Actually a number of kinds of cultural media that we usually refer to with these terms in practice cannot be separated from community. Kethoprak, wayang, jathilan, reyog, srandul, coke’an, kerawitan, or other performances of this current era like dangdut, campursari etc together with their variants, represent different kinds of cultural media ( not just entertainment) that grow and develop in Javanese communities. The diversity of form and practice of these ‘media’ is closely connected with the transformation of community life. Performance, art and so on have become part of the performativity of society, a mass product and at the same time a medium for many ordinary people seen to overcome the allure and threat of modernity, through daily life and by building up audiences which are complex, unique and specific. It is a celebration of a coming together of people, communities. Building identity, building language. Through several projects of performance as a cultural medium carried out together by city kampung, this paper will describe processes of contestation, negotiation and contemporary kampung dynamics in the context of post -1998 reform. Several forms and media of ‘performance’ create a space and a moment, not just International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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providing a mechanism for self-expression and the release of tension, but more than that, presenting actual reality. They don’t force people to regard thought, word and social action as three different things. We have to acknowledge that what lives in the brain and the gestures of the whole body need to be re-examined, not only to understand their traces but to be amazed that there are thoughts and movements which escape the increasing pressures and restrictions of contemporary life.


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Minangkabau Traditional Verbal Arts in the Electronic Communication Era: New Media, New Venues

Suryadi, Leiden University

Over the last two decades Indonesian regional recording industries have developed significantly. Almost every ethnic group in Indonesia has its own pop music which is now available on commercial recordings in cassette and Video Compact Disc (VCD) format. The rapid development of Indonesian regional recording industries has also influenced ethnic oral literature, including Minangkabau traditional verbal art. West Sumatra is one of Indonesia’s biggest music industry centres after Jakarta. Though the predominant product of the West Sumatran recording companies is pop Minang, Minangkabau traditional verbal art genres are also strongly represented. As competition among the recording companies increases, there has been extensive mediation of Minangkabau culture, including oral literature, which impacts structurally and sociologically on traditional art forms. This paper reviews processes of mediation of Minangkabau traditional verbal art genres, and assesses the way this mediation has impacted on the form and reception of Minangkabau oral literature, and how it engages with issues of modernity and cultural identity.

Minangkabau Oral Literature and its Recording The Minangkabau region maintains a rich variety of oral literature forms, with important roles in traditional ritual and social life. Some genres exist in many parts of West Sumatra while others are specific to the particular regions with texts strongly influenced by a particular dialect of the Minangkabau language. Some genres recite kaba, folktales containing ethical and moral lessons, and other genres comprise sung traditional verses such as pantun and syair. The major genres which have been recorded on commercial International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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cassettes and VCDs include rabab Pariaman, indang, rabab Pesisir Selatan (or rabab Pasisia), dendang Pauah, sijobang, saluang (or bagurau), salawat dulang, randai and pidato adat dan pasambahan. These forms are traditionally presented on public occasions of celebration, such as marriages, celebrations of Prophet Muhammad’s birthday in surau (religious shrines), nagari festivals, and the festivities celebrating the installation of a new penghulu (male village leader; head of matrilineal unit). They are also often performed to gather money for building public facilities like school and village halls (balai desa). The first recordings of Minangkabau verbal art appeared on gramophone disks in the 1930s. It was the emergence of the cassette recording industry in the early 1970s, however, which brought about large scale production and consumption of recordings. This new industry developed first in Java and Bali, later extending to other outer islands. In West Sumatra Tanama Records and Sinar Padang Records were established in the early 1970s. Since the late 1980s new competitors such as Pelangi Records, Minang Records, and Talao Records, have also produced Minangkabau oral literature on commercial cassettes and VCDs. Rabab Pesisir Selatan is the most popular genre of Minangkabau oral literature produced by West Sumatran recording companies. Its singers are engaged by cassette producers more often than their comrades from any other genre. This genre employs lyrical prose using modern Minangkabau language and adds color to humour. The singer Syamsudin seems to have been the first performer to have released rabab Pesisir Selatan commercial recordings, beginning in 1971 and continuing with such works as ‘Kaba Merantau ke Jambi,’ produced in 5 cassettes by Tanama Records in 1975 (Phillips 1991: 81-82). The success of Tanama Records in marketing commercial recordings of rabab Pesisir Selatan seems to have inspired other companies also. Sinar Padang is notable for releasing the largest number of rabab Pesisir Selatan titles in VCD, which it has been producing since the early 2000s. Saluang or bagurau, which have been recorded ever since the gramophone era, have also been released both in cassette and VCD format. Nowadays, due to the influence of the West Sumatran regional recording industry, saluang is adopting new texts and International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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musical styles that incorporate elements of pop Minang. This transformation is reflected on the covers of saluang cassettes and VCDs in the new style, which is described as saluang maso kini (‘contemporary saluang’), saluang dangdut (‘dangdut saluang’) and dendang saluang mode AseRege (‘chanting saluang Asereje-style’).The latter was inspired by the song melody of “Asereje” by three Spanish sisters known as “Las Ketchup” that became a hit worldwide in 2002. Randai recordings have also appeared on cassette and since the 2000s also in VCD format. Randai VCDs enable the audience to enjoy not only the audio aspect of this Minangkabau folk theatre, but also its visual aspect. Pidato adat dan pasambahan recordings have been produced since the 1980s, pioneered by Yus Dt. Parpatiah, a panghulu (lineage head) from Maninjau, West Sumatra, who became the leader of the Rumah Gadang ’83 theatre troupe in Jakarta (Suryadi 2003a: 61). Commercial recordings of this genre have appeared only in cassette format. Among Yus Dt. Parpatiah’s cassettes in this genre are “Kepribadian Minang” (‘Minangkabau Personality’), “Nasehat Perkawinan Versi Adat” (‘Adat Version of Marriage Advice’), “Baringin Bonsai: Krisis Kepemimpinan Ninik-Mamak Di Gerbang Era Globalisasi” (‘The Bonsai Banyan: A Crisis of Village Leadership in the Transition to Globalization’), “Konsultasi Adat Minangkabau” (‘Consultation on Minangkabau Custom’), and “Pitaruah Ayah untuk Calon Panghulu” (Father’s Advice for a Candidate Lineage Head’).

New, Media-Bound Genres The advent of recording has also given rise to some genres which have no original counterparts in public performances, that exist only in media such as cassette, VCD, radio, and television. One such genre is drama Minang moderen (modern Minangkabau drama) which was created in the 1980s by two Minangkabau theatrical-troupes established by emigrants (perantau) in Jakarta. Cassettes were produced of such dramas are “Diseso Bayang” (‘Tormented by the [Beloved] Shadow’), “Kamari Bedo” (“All Wrong’), “Di Simpang Duo” (‘In a Dilemma’), “Kasiah Tak Sampai” (‘Unrequited International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Love’), “Rajo Angek Bacakak jo Turih” (‘Rajo Angek Clashes with Tourists), and “Puber Kaduo” (‘Second Puberty’). Some of these titles have been re-issued recently but only in cassette format, not VCD. These modern Minangkabau dramas are performed by a group of five to ten male and female actors in a radio format. The actors deliver their dialogue as if they were acting a play, while making asides to the audience about the imagined scene of the action and using many sound effects. Humour and jokes add flavor to the stories, which combine music and sung and spoken dialogue, partly in Indonesian and mostly in Minangkabau language (colloquial and formal literary dialect). The cassette covers are made from engravings or photographic plates showing a carefully posed scene of drama troupe actors in traditional and modern costumes . Reflecting the perceptions of Minangkabau emigrants toward the social changes occurring in their homeland and among the Minangkabau generations born in rantau, the themes of the dramas focus on modern Minangkabau family affairs – choice of marriage partners, inheritance disputes, the problems of living in rantau, the dilemmas and attractions of marrying non-Minangkabau women, mamak (mother’s brother)-kemenakan (nephew) ties, loyalty to custom and cultural decay in the home village (kampung halaman). Some other stories are inspired by local legends or Minangkabau history in the colonial era. These modern Minangkabau cassette dramas are just one example of how ethnic cultures are represented and revitalized making use of modern media technology. Such revitalization involves the creation of new genres, predominantly by mixing pre-existing genres from both inside and outside the culture. Effect of Recording on Oral Texts Circumstances necessarily influence the form of oral literature. Every performance is in some respects a new creation for the singer, producing a new text. Oral literary texts recorded on cassette or VCD tend to be condensed; sometimes storytellers indicate they are shortening their accounts, showing their awareness of the limited space available on


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media like cassette and VCD. Sometimes performers use formulaic expressions indicating they are shifting between cassettes, such as the following by the singer Amir Hosen in “Kaba Nan Gombang Patuanan & Sutan Pangaduan” :


The end of the string for binding the fence


Broken, it trails into the market


Now we are beginning it 1


It is continued on cassette number eight

In sum, the engagement of oral literature genres with new media like cassettes and VCDs affects their texts. The texts of studio performances tend to be condensed, with less parallelism, fewer pairs of synonyms, or fewer long vocative phrases, though genrespecific formulaic elements are retained.

Authenticity and Modernity ‘Authenciticy’ and ‘modernity’ are two contrasting characteristics used to identify and sell recorded verbal forms. On indang cassette and VCD covers the words “Pariaman asli” (‘genuine Pariaman’) always appear. They indicate that the genre recorded in the cassettes and VCDs is the traditional version of Pariaman indang, performed by male performers only, and not the new modified modern version (indang moderen), performed by male and female performers which is often staged as a cultural attraction for tourism, Conversely rabab Pesisir Selatan commercial cassettes are labelled ‘gaya baru’ (new style) (Phillips 1991: 81), indicating the changes of its intrinsic structure and suggesting the storytellers’ attitude to modernity. Cassette and VCD cover images reinforce these concepts of modernity and authenticity. The rabab Pesisir Selatan singers Pirin Asmara and Hasan Basri, for example, appear fashionably dressed. On one cover Pirin is in a Western style working suit with necktie and jacket, an image which arguably distances rabab Pesisir Selatan from Minangkabau verbal art tradition. By contrast, the performers of other genres such as rabab Pariaman, salawat dulang, and sijobang, appear in


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traditional garb on their commercial cassettes covers. The images of modernity on the one hand, and of authenticity on the other hand, also emerge in the VCD clips accompanying the performances of Minangkabau oral literature.

New Opportunities of Reception The engagement of Minangkabau oral literature with electronic communication has opened up new ways of reception beside the traditional pattern of public performance at traditional festivities in Minangkabau villages. The competition to make commercial recordings in cassette and VCD format has provided Minangkabau people with a new way to appreciate these genres. The perantau, that half of the total of 6 million Minangkabau people who now live outside West Sumatra, are able to enjoy these forms far from their homeland. Cassette retailers in Padang, Pariaman and Bukittinggi report that commercial cassettes and VCDs of Minangkabau oral literature are often bought by Minangkabau emigrants. And the leading producers of recordings, Tanama Records and Sinar Padang Records, have established their own supplier shops in Glodok Plaza, Jakarta, in order to service the expanding market of potential consumers. Nevertheless, it seems that Minangkabau emigrants are not fully satisfied simply with recordings of Minangkabau oral genres. Recently Minangkabau emigrants have invited Minangkabau oral literature storytellers to conduct performances in the rantau. Saluang and rabab Pesisir Selatan singers have often been invited by the Minangkabau emigrants living in Denpasar, Jakarta, Bogor, Bandung, Medan, Palembang and Batam. As they come together to enjoy such performances in the rantau, the Minangkabau emigrants’ yearning for their home land may be tempered. This development suggests that the mediation of oral literature genres does not threaten its live performance. Though cassettes and VCDs have created a new public for Minangkabau verbal forms, especially in urban areas of the rantau, apparently such consumers still appreciate performances in public settings.

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“Nan Gombang Patuanan & Sutan Pangaduan” (Tanama Records 1996, 20 cassettes): cassette no.8.


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Concluding Remarks Through commercial cassettes and VCDs, the auditory and visual dimensions of Minangkabau oral literature can now be enjoyed far from their point of origin. They facilitate an emotional bridge between emigrants and their homeland. Though transmitted through new electronic media to dispersed virtual audiences and connecting with regional cultural flows, such genres still emphasize local, grassroots identity and community, both in the homeland and in the rantau. Media versions of Minangkabau oral literature engage with the dialogue on modernity and authenticity in Minangkabau society. In this respect cassettes and VCDs contribute to the revitalization and redefining of regional cultural identity in contemporary Indonesia. In the regional context, they reaffirm local sensitivity, which goes with the euphoria of regional autonomy in the contemporary Indonesian political sphere. The wider political consequences of this development remain to be seen. No doubt the mediation of local culture is contributing to a sense of difference from others, a potential divisiveness. And it is expected to affect, politically and socially, the nation-state project of Indonesia as a multi-ethnic country.

References

Phillips, Nigel. 1991. “Two variant forms of Minangkabau kaba”, in : J.J. Ras and S.O. Robson (eds.), Variation, transformation and meaning; Studies on Indonesian literatures in honour of A. Teeuw, pp. 73-86. Leiden: KITLV Press



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SENI VERBAL TRADISIONAL MINANGKABAU DI ERA KOMUNIKASI ELEKTRONIK: MEDIA BARU, TEMPAT BARU SURYADI (Leiden University, The Netherlands) Selama dua dekade lalu industri rekaman daerah di Indonesia berkembang dengan pesat. Hampir setiap kelompok etnis di Indonesia memiliki musik pop sendiri yang sekarang tersedia dalam rekaman-rekaman komersial berupa kaset dan VCD. Perkembangan pesat industri rekaman daerah di Indonesia ini juga mempengaruhi sastra lisan etnik, termasuk seni verbal tradisional di Minangkabau. Sumatra Barat merupakan salah satu pusat industri musik terbesar di Indonesia setelah Jakarta. Meskipun produk utama dari perusahaan-perusahaan rekaman di Sumatra Barat adalah Pop Minang, genre seni verbal tradisional Minangkabau juga tercermin sangat kuat. Ketika persaingan di antara perusahaan rekaman meningkat, ada mediasi budaya Minangkabau yang ekstensif, termasuk sastra lisan, yang mempengaruhi secara struktural dan sosiologis bentuk-bentuk seni tradisional. Makalah ini mengulas proses-proses mediasi genre seni verbal tradisional di Minangkabau, dan menilai cara mediasi ini mempengaruhi bentuk dan resepsi sastra lisan Minangkabau, dan bagaimana ia bergelut dengan soal-soal modernitas dan identitas budaya. Sastra Lisan Minangkabu dan Rekamannya Daerah Minangkabau menjaga keragaman bentuk sastra lisan yang kaya, serta peran penting dalam ritual tradisional dan kehidupan sosial. Sebagian genre ditemukan di banyak daerah di Sumatra Barat, sedang genre-genre lainnya menjadi ciri khas bagi daerah-daerah tertentu dengan teks-teks yang sangat dipengaruhi oleh dialek khas bahasa Minangkabau. Sebagian genre mendaraskan kaba, dongeng-dongeng yang berisi pelajaran etika dan moral, dan genre lainnya berisi bait-bait tradisional yang dinyanyikan seperti pantun dan syair. Genre-genre utama yang direkam dalam kaset-kaset komersial dan VCD di antaranya: rabab Pariaman, indang, rabab Pesisir Selatan (or rabab Pasisia), dendang Pauah, sijobang, saluang (atau bagurau), salawat dulang, randai and pidato adat dan pasambahan. Bentuk-bentuk ini secara International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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tradisional disuguhkan pada kesempatan-kesempatan perayaan, semisal perkawinan, peringatan Maulid Nabi di surau, perayaan nagari, dan pesta-pesta merayakan pengangkatan penghulu baru. Bentuk-bentuk kesenian itu juga sering dipertunjukkan untuk mengumpulkan dana untuk membangun fasilitas publik semisal sekolah dan balai desa. Rekaman-rekaman pertama dari seni verbal Minangkabau muncul dalam bentuk piringan hitam (gramaphone discs) pada tahun 1930an. Namun munculnya industri rekaman kaset pada awal 1970an lah yang menghasilkan produksi dan konsumsi rekaman berskala besar. Industri baru ini berkembang pertama kali di Jawa dan Bali, kemudian merambah ke pulau-pulau luar Jawa lainnya. Di Sumatra Barat Tanama records dan Sinar Pandang Records didirikan pada awal 1970an. Sejak akhir 1980an, pesaing-pesaing baru semisal Pelangi Records, Minang Records, dan Talao Records, juga memproduksi sastra lisan Minangkabau dalam bentuk kaset-kased komersial dan VCD. Rabab Pesisir Selatan adalah genre paling populer dari sastra lisan Minangkabau yang dibuat oleh perusahaan-perusahaan rekaman Sumatra Barat. Para penyanyinya dilibatkan oleh para produser kaset lebih sering ketimbang rekan-rekan mereka dari genre lainnya. Genre ini menerapkan prosa lirik dengan menggunakan bahasa modern Minangkabau dan menambahkan humor. Penyanyi Syamsuddin tampaknya adalah pemain pertama yang merilis rekaman komersial Rabab Pesisir Selatan, mulai pada 1971 dan terus dengan karya-karya semisal ‘Kaba Merantau ke Jambi,’ yang dibuat dalam 5 kaset oleh Tanama Records pada 1975 (Phillips 1991: 81-82). Keberhasilan Tanama Records dalam memasarkan rekaman komersial rabab Pesisir Selatan tampaknya mengilhami pula perusahaan-perusahaan lainnya. Sinar Padang terkenal karena merilis jumlah terbanyak judul rabab Pesisir Selatan dalam VCD, yang ia produksi sejak awa 2000an. Saluang or bagurau, yang sudah direkam sejak era piringan hitam, juga dirilis baik dalam bentuk kaset maupun VCD. Sekarang, karena pengaruh industri rekaman daerah Sumatra Barat, saluang mengadopsi teks-teks dan gaya-gaya musikal baru yang memadukan unsur-unsur pop Minang. Perubahan ini tecermin pada sampul kaset dan VCD saluang dalam gaya baru, yang digambarkan sebagai saluang maso kini, saluang dangdut dan dendang saluang mode AseRege. Yang terakhir diilhami oleh melodi lagi

“Asereje” oleh tiga


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bersaudari dari Spanyol yang dikenal sebagai “Las Ketchup” yang menjadi hit dunia pada 2002. Rekaman Randai juga muncul dalam bentuk kaset dan sejak 2000-an juga dalam bentuk VCD. VCD Randai VCD memungkinkan khalayak menikmati tidak hanya aspek audio dari teater rakyat Minangkabau ini, tetapi juga aspek visualnya. Rekaman-rekaman Pidato adat dan pasambahan telah dibuat sejak tahun 1980an, yang diprakarsai oleh Yus Dt. Parpatiah, seorang panghulu dari Maninjau, Sumatra Barat, yang menjadi pimpinan kelompok teater Rumah Gadang ’83 di Jakarta (Suryadi 2003a: 61). Rekaman-rekaman komersial dari genre ini muncul hanya dalam bentuk kaset. Di antara kaset Yus Dt. Parpatiah dalam genre ini adalah “Kepribadian Minang”, “Nasehat Perkawinan Versi Adat”, “Baringin Bonsai: Krisis Kepemimpinan Niniak-Mamak Di Gerbang Era Globalisasi”, “Konsultasi Adat Minangkabau”, dan “Pitaruah Ayah untuak Calon Panghulu”.

Baru, Genre yang Gayut dengan Media (Media-Bound Genres) Hadirnya rekaman juga memunculkan beberapa genre yang tidak memiliki padanan asli dalam pertunjukan-pertunjukan publik, yang hanya ada dalam media semisal kaset, VCD, radio, dan televisi. Contohnya adalah drama Minang moderen yang dibuat pada 1980an oleh dua kelompok teater Minangkabau yang didirikan oleh para perantau di Jakarta. Kaset-kaset yang diproduksi dari drama ini antar alain adalah “Diseso Bayang” (‘Disiksa Bayang(an)’), “Kamari Bedo” (‘Serba Salah’), “Di Simpang Duo” (‘Di Simpang Dua’; maksudnya: dalam dilema), “Kasiah Tak Sampai” (‘Kasih Tak Sampai’), “Rajo Angek Bacakak jo Turih” (Rajo Angek Ribut dengan Turis’), dan “Puber Kaduo” (‘Puber Kedua’). Sebagian judul ini dikeluarkan lagi baru-baru ini tetapi hanya dalam bentuk kaset, bukan VCD. Drama-drama Minangkabau modern ini dipertunjukkan oleh sekelompok yang terdiri dari lima sampai sepuluh pemain laki-laki dan perempuan dalam bentuk drama radio. Para pelaku menyampaikan dialog mereka seolah sedang memerankan sebuah permainan, menyisakan khalayak tentang skenario bayangan dari aksi dan menggunakan banyak efek suara. Humor dan candatawa membumbui kisah-kisahnya, yang menggabungkan musik dan dialog yang dinyanyikan dan diucapkan, sebagian dalam bahasa Indonesia dan sebagian besar dalam bahasa Minangkabau (dialek sastra formal dan keseharian). Sampul kaset dibuat dari International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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guratan-guratan lukisan atau gambar-gambar fotografik yang menunjukkan skenario yang ditampakkan secara cermat dari para pemain kelompok drama dalam kostum tradisional dan modern. Dengan mencerminkan persepsi para perantau Minangkabau terhadap perubahan sosial yang terjadi di tanah kelahiran mereka dan di antara generasi Minangkabau yang lahir di rantau, tema-tema dari drama itu berpusat pada persoalan-persoalan keluarga Minangkabau modern—pilihan pasangan hidup, perselisihan warisan, masalah hidup di rantau, dilema dan ketertarikan menikahi gadis non-Minangkabau, pertalian mamak (saudara laki-laki ibu)kemenakan (anak saudara perempuan), kesetiaan pada adat dan lunturnya budaya di kampung halaman. Cerita-cerita lainnya diilhami oleh legenda-legenda setempat atau sejarah Minangkabau di masa penjajahan. Drama-drama kaset Minangkabau modern ini hanyalah satu contoh dari bagaimana budaya etnis digambarkan dan dihidupkan kembali dengan menggunakan teknologi media modern. Menghidupkan kembali semacam ini melibatkan penciptaan genre-genre baru, yang sebagian besar melalui pencampuran genre-genre yang ada sebelumnya baik dari dalam maupun dari luar budaya. Pengaruh Rekaman pada Teks-Teks Lisan Keadaan sekitar tentu saja mempengaruhi bentu sastra lisan. Setiap pertunjukan dalam beberapa hal adalah penciptaan baru bagi sang penyanyi, yakni membuat teks baru. Teks-teks sastra lisan yang direkam dalam kaset atau VCD cenderung dipadatkan; kadang para para tukang cerita menyatakan bahwa mereka sedang memendekkan ceritanya, yang menunjukkan kesadaran mereka akan ruang yang terbatas yang tersedia pada media semisal kaset dan VCD. Kadang-kadang

para

pemain

menggunakan

ekspresi-ekspresi

formulaik

(formulaic

expressions) yang menujukkan mereka bergeser di antara kaset-kaset itu. Contohnya adalah yang berikut ini oleh penyayi Amir Hosen dalam “Kaba Nan Gombang Patuanan & Sutan Pangaduan” :


Ujung tali pengikat pagar


Putus berjela masuk pasar


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Jelo-bajelo ka kadaian

Jela-berjela ke perkedaian

Ujuang nyanyi jatuah ka kaba

Ujung nyanyi jatuh ke kaba


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Sekarang kini kita mulai 1


Disambung di kasen nomor delapan

Pendeknya, pergulatan genre sastra lisan dengan media baru seperti kaset dan VCD mempengaruhi teks-teksnya. Teks dari pertunjukan studio cenderung dipadatkan, dengan sedikit paralelisme, pasangan sinonim yang sedikit, atau sedikit frase-frase vokatif yang panjang, meskipun unsur-unsur formula genre khusus dipertahankan.

Otentisitas dan Modernitas

‘Otentisitas’ dan ‘modernitas’ adalah dua ciri khas yang berlawanan yang digunakan untuk mengenali dan menjual bentuk-bentuk verbal rekaman. Pada sampul kaset dan VCD indang kata “Pariaman asli” selalu muncul. Kata-kata ini menunjukkan bahwa genre yang direkam dalam kaset dan VCD adalah versi tradisional indang Pariaman, dimainkan oleh para pemain laki-laki saja, dan bukan versi modern baru yang dimodifikasi (indang moderen), dimainkan oleh pemain laku-laki dan perempuan yang sering dipentaskan sebagai atraksi budaya untuk pariwisata. Sebaliknya, kaset-kaset komersial rabab Pesisir Selatan dilabeli ‘gaya baru’ (Phillips 1991: 81), yang menunjukkan perubahan-perubahan struktur intrinsiknya dan menegaskan sikap para tukang ceritanya (tukang rabab)

terhadap modernitas. Gambar-

gambar sampul kaset dan VCD memperkuat konsep modernitas dan otentisitas ini. Penyanyi rabab Pesisir Selatan Pirin Asmara dan Hasan Basri, misalnya, tampil dengan pakaian modern. Pada satu sampul Pirin memakai pakaian ala Barat dengan dasi dan jaket, suatu kesan yang tentunya menjauhkan rabab Pesisir Selatan dari tradisi seni verbal Minangkabau. Sebaliknya, para peman dari genre-genre lainya seperti rabab Pariaman, salawat dulang, dan sijobang, tampil dalam pakaian tradisional pada sampul-sampul kaset komersial mereka. Gambaran-gambaran modernitas di satu sisi dan otentisitas di sisi lain juga muncul dalam klip-klip VCD yang menyertai pertunjukan-pertunjukan sastra lisan Minangkabau.


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Kesempatan Baru Resepsi Pergulatan sastra lisan Minangkabau dengan komunikasi elekronik telah membuka cara-cara baru resepsi di samping pola tradisional pertunjukan publik dalam festival-festival tradisional di kampung-kampung di Minangkabau. Persaingan untuk membuat rekaman-rekaman komersial dalam bentuk kaset dan VCD telah memberi masyarakat Minangkabau cara baru untuk memahami genre-genre ini. Perantau, separuh dari 6 juta total penduduk Minangkabau yang sekarang tinggal di luar Sumatra Barat, bisa menikmati bentuk-bentuk ini jauh dari tanah asal mereka. Para pengecer kaset di Padang, Pariaman dan Bukittinggi melaporkan bahwa kaset-kaset dan VCD komersial sastra oral Minangkabau sering dibeli oleh para perantau Minangkabau. Dan produsen rekaman terkenal, Tanama Records dan Sinar Padang Records, telah mendirikan toko-toko suplier sendiri di Glodok Plaza, Jakarta, untuk melayani pasar calon pembeli yang semakin meluas. Namun demikian, tampaknya para perantau Minangkabau tidak sepenuhnya puas hanya dengan rekaman-rekaman genre oral Minangkabau. Baru-baru ini para perantau Minangkabau mengundang para tukang cerita sastra lisan Minangkabau untuk melakukan pementasan di rantau. Para penyanyi Saluang dan rabab Pesisir Selatan seringkali diundang oleh para perantau Minangkabau yang tingkal di Denpasar, Jakarta, Bogor, Bandung, Medan, Palembang dan Batam. Ketika mereka datang bersama untuk menikmati pertunjukanpertunjukan itu di rantau, kerinduan para perantau Minangkabau akan kampung halaman mereka bisa terobati. Perkembangan ini menegaskan bahwa mediasi genre-genre sastra lisan tidak mengancam pertunjukan langsungnya. Meski kaset dan VCD telah menciptakan publik baru bagi bentuk-bentuk verbal Minangkabau, khususnya di daerah-daerah perkotaan rantau, jelas para konsumen masih mengapresiasi pertunjukan dalam latar publik.

Catatan Penutup Melalui kaset dan VCD komersial, dimensi dengar dan lihat dari sastra lisan Minangkabau 1

“Nan Gombang Patuanan & Sutan Pangaduan” (Tanama Records 1996, 20 cassettes): cassette no.8. Kursif


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sekarang bisa dinikmati jauh dari tempat asalnya. Kaset dan VCD itu memudahkan jembatan emosional antara para perantau dan kampung halaman mereka. Meski dibawa melalui media elektronik baru ke audiens virtual yang tersebar dan berhubungan dengan aliran budaya setempat, genre-genre itu masih menekankan identitas dan komunitas lokal dan akar rumput, baik di kampung halaman maupun rantau.

Versi-versi media sastra lisan Minangkabau bergelut dengan dialog tentang modernitas dan otentisitas dalam masyarakat Minangkabau. Dalam hal ini kaset dan VCD turut menghidupkan kembali dan menakrifkan kembali identitas budaya daerah dalam Indonesia kontemporer. Dalam konteks regional, kaset dan VCD mempertegas sensitivitas lokal, yang berjalan seturut euforia otonomi daerah dalam ruang politik Indonesia kontemporer. Akibatakibat politik yang lebih luas dari perkembangan ini masih harus dilihat. Tak syak mediasi budaya lokal turut menyumbang makna perbedaan dari yang lain, suatu potensi perpecahan. Dan diperkirakan hal itu mempengaruhi, secara politik dan sosial, proyek negara-bangsa Indonesia sebagai negeri multi-etnis.

Kepustakaan Phillips, Nigel. 1991. “Two variant forms of Minangkabau kaba”, in : J.J. Ras and S.O. Robson (eds.), Variation, transformation and meaning; Studies on Indonesian literatures in honour of A. Teeuw, pp. 73-86. Leiden: KITLV Press



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Audiences as a Part of the History of the Performing Arts. A Study of Arts Spaces in Jakarta after 1998 Alia Swastika

Many commentaries on performances in Indonesia make reference to the presence and opinions of audience members, but few engage with them as subjects, and the role of audiences in shaping the development of the performing arts is not addressed. It was this situation which prompted me a few years ago to undertake research on audience members at performances of Waktu Batu by Teater Garasi in Yogyakarta, to compare representations of audience members in the mass media with the reactions of viewers themselves. Here I look more broadly at audiences of performances staged after 1998, in the post-New Order period. The change of political climate has not only had a major effect on freedom of expression for artists as creators, but has also influenced the response of audiences to works in this period. Along with radical political changes, the economic situation and the strengthening of global culture are other factors which have impacted directly on relations between audiences and arts spaces and with artists themselves. This paper consists of a simple mapping of audiences or visitors to arts events in the city of Jakarta from 2000 to 2010. It attempts to address the way the three factors mentioned above have influenced changes in audience composition and arts spaces for an urban population. A number of new arts ‘centres’ have appeared in Jakarta during this time. I concentrate especially on spaces which offer a crossdisciplinary mix – performing arts, fine arts, film, literature, architecture, intellectual discussions. I ask what aesthetic trends characterise these spaces, particularly from the viewpoint of audience members, and how audience perceptions interact with the concepts of organisers of the spaces. The three sites discussed

are the Taman Ismail Marzuki Arts Centre,

established as the centre of national arts/ culture activity early in the New Order period, Salihara, a large arts complex which opened in 2009 in South Jakarta, and the arts spaces maintained by foreign embassies such as the Goethe Institut (German) the Erasmus Haus (Netherlands) and French, Japanese and Italian cultural centres. International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Taman Ismail Marzuki – TIM As a true centre of the arts, from the 1970s onwards TIM presented all forms of arts – theatre, dance, music, film, literature, painting – and brought together all kinds of arts practitioners and supporters – artists, curators, cultural workers and audience members. Experimental works were staged by figures such as Rendra and his Bengkel theatre, Sardono Kusumo and many others; there were international festivals and performances by foreign groups, and TIM was a hub of activity for young artists. After 2000, however, with the spread of other arts spaces, TIM is no longer the only centre of arts activities for young people. Experimental works are staged in alternate sites rather than its large, formal theatres, and practitioners of contemporary performance come there only for special events rather than routinely. The majority of audience members at TIM performances are people who have long been involved in theatre activities, journalists and NGO activists. They feel a nostalgic connection with TIM, as a place for meeting with like-minded people, with political as well as artistic interests. Another group are fans of the popular theatre groups Teater Koma and Gandrik from Yogya, while a third are people who came to TIM as children to paint or learn dance or perform children’s theatre and now return regularly to maintain the link.

Salihara

Extending the activities of the alternate arts space Komunitas Hutan Kayu, which had operated since the mid-1990s, to a much grander scale, Komunitas Salihara offers an eclectic mix of arts disciplines and of contemporary and traditional work. Its audiences consist predominantly of young people, many of whom are arts practitioners, while others come seeking new forms of entertainment. As part of the urban middle class they are very familiar with new technology and with international popular culture. They come not out of nostalgia like the audiences at TIM, but to be part of arts events and to gain new aesthetic experiences. Performances by international groups are one of the biggest attractions at Salihara and cultural discussions are very popular. Through the variety of its performances and events International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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Salihara has the potential to become a new melting pot, bringing together artists, intellectuals and the general public.

Foreign cultural institutes Activities at the arts spaces maintained by foreign cultural institutes allow arts practitioners to keep up with international trends and maintain networks, while also providing opportunities for young people to expand their cultural experience. Many of the young audience members at exhibitions and performances are students of the language classes held by these institutes. Others come along out of curiosity, become interested and may go on to attend arts events at other locations such at TIM and Salihara.

Attracting audiences

Given the lack of infrastructure for arts education in society, the enormous growth and power of the entertainment industry and Jakarta’s segmented social structure, strategies for attracting audiences are crucial in the management of arts spaces. Conventional means of publicising arts events, through posters and banners, are ineffective due Jakarta’s huge size and the absence of a culture of walking in the city. Far more effective for publicity is the use of the internet. For the last few years arts groups and arts spaces have actively used email lists and email blasts to publicise events. More recently facebook has become a most important force for communicating with potential audience members, both through the announcement of events as well as previews, reviews etc.

Concluding thoughts In the repressive New Order era, particularly the last decade, art became a channel for political ideas; audiences at performances saw themselves as part of a movement expressing criticism of the government. After 1998 the motivations and expectations of audience members changed markedly. Today’s audiences come from a generation International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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with wide access to information networks growing out of an excess of freedom of expression. This new generation is often described as a-political. Rather than socialpolitical issues they are more interested in projects of construction of identity. A common sensibility characterises audience members of this younger generation, and helps define the concept of contemporary performance in Indonesia. Given the rich information sources they enjoy and their unlimited interaction with popular culture, the performances they prefer emphasise popular, often spectacular visual imagery, are accompanied by pop or independent music and address themes close to the experience of young people, such as identity, consumerism, myths and legends and interpretations of some actual political issues. Relations between audiences and arts practitioners are closer and more constructive than a few years ago. Audience members become part of the ‘creation’ of an arts event, in that their tastes are taken into account and form a reference point. This group of audience members can be said to have built quite a strong bargaining position in relation to the growth of performing arts in Indonesia.


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Hot Dogs and Spring Rolls or Ten years of post-Soeharto filmmaking: What is at stake? Katinka van Heeren, Leiden University In Indonesia, films addressing socio-political issues have been produced ever since 1998 when President Soeharto resigned. Over the years independent filmmakers have produced films that touch on the officially still forbidden subjects of SARA – Suku (ethnic groups), Agama (religion), Ras (race), and Antar-golongan (social groups or class). Some have produced documentaries exposing atrocities committed by the Indonesian military. Other films depict the effects of the demonization of supposed Communists by the Soeharto regime. NGOs and film-maker collectives promote appreciation and production of films by young people through workshops in schools and villages where participants are encouraged to make films about contemporary sociopolitical issues that affect them personally. Within this wide range of projects and activities some themes repeatedly recur. These include: Sex (gender inequality, patriarchy, and homosexuality), Religion (religious minorities and intolerance of fundamentalist religious thinking), Race (racial prejudice against Indonesian Chinese), and Social Groups (misuse of power of officials and the position of ‘common people’ in day to day life). This paper explores representations of these themes in post-Soeharto films and asks why critical films are made, who funds and promotes them and where they are screened. Like Khoo Gaik Cheng’s paper it focuses on two films that were released precisely a decade after Reformasi. The first Babi Buta Yang Ingin Terbang (Blind Pig Wants to Fly) by the Indonesian independent film-maker Edwin is about a racial minority: the IndonesianChinese. The second film, 9808, made by ten different film-makers, can be compared to the compilation film of fifteen independent Malaysian film-makers 15 Malaysia. Working with several Indonesian-Chinese friends, Edwin created the film Babi Buta in order to explore how it feels to be Chinese, and find out about his identity . The shots and characters present a kaleidoscope of issues and emotions Indonesian-Chinese International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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are confronted with.. The themes of the film are confronting – homosexual sex, racial discrimination, religious hypocrisy. Funding the film was very difficult; rich ChineseIndonesian investors, whom the production team had expected to rely on, believed that it was too dangerous to discuss racial problems. Nevertheless the film went ahead and has been shown at independent film forums and several international festivals. Its creators describe the filmmaking process and their experiences with sponsors as a healing therapy. It gave them the chance to explore and confront all aspects of their identity. After completion they could move on. IN the 9808 film project, fifteen young visual artists, musicians, and other creative workers who were also short film-makers were asked to produce a short film inspired by the May 1998 events. Screenings were held in Jakarta from 13 to 20 May 2008 ; thereafter the film was shown in several other cities and distributed to education institutions all over the country. Like Babi Buta, 9808 addresses several SARA themes, sex, religion, race and social divisions. Five out of the ten films present concern the disowned histories and identities of Chinese-Indonesians. A vital aspect of the film screenings was the following discussion, where directors and viewers often commented on how the films affected them personally. In this way 9808 succeeded in its aim to present alternative histories and restart a discussion on post-Soeharto social constructions and identities. The post-Soeharto generation of independent film-makers clearly believes it is important to address topics of ethnicity, gender, homosexuality, and religion. Issues that may seem rather clichéd in a transnational context in Indonesia are still troubling and controversial. In Babi Buta and 9808 the different film-makers came up with the ideas for the films themselves, and demonstrated a strong personal attachment to the topics. They are attempting to, if not change society, at least change their own lives through filmmaking. Hopefully others who watch and discuss the films will help raise awareness of the ongoing struggles of contemporary life.


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AMRIH WIDODO SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite

14-6-2010

Grassroots hip hop and political activism in local world music in Java. Amrih Widodo, ANU

This paper will depict how globalisation is at work in a given locality and how local hybrid creativity has taken advantage of globalized media and technology to participate in the production and circulation of fusion music while raising local and national issues on good governance, corruption, social justice, environment and pluralism. Using the case of Sampak GusUran, a rurally based musical group of hybrid music which mixes western diatonic tune and Indonesian ethnic musics, particularly the pentatonic Javanese gamelan orchestra, this paper will demonstrate how the local artistic and cultural communities adjust themselves to the global trends and take benefits from the new formatted technologies to produce and disseminate Indonesian fusion music. Through their artistic expressions and production strategies, local artists attempt to demonstrate the viability of their local cultural practices, reassert their identity in the national arena, and compete with other genres of popular and hybrid music in the commercial music industry. The are three characteristics which make this group particularly curious. Unlike the more established and urban based fusion groups such as Krakatau, Balawan Batuan and Kua Etnik, Sampak GusUran is rurally based and inevitably has to cater for local middle class and peasant communities as their first consumers of their musics. Initially totally unknown by national music community, Sampak GusUran gained its recognition from global albeit specified indie music community through the internet. And finally, even though at a first glance their music is heavily coloured with Islamic nuances, they refuse to be categorized as Islamic musical group. In this paper, I am looking at identity politics in the context of globalisation/localisation, and consumption where interborrowing of genres to create new hybrid or fusions have been one of the common features, in the context of political, social and cultural discourse in Indonesia.


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Stage and Myth in The Transformation of the Practice of Community Life Yoshi Fajar Kresno Murti This paper takes the form of a reflection on the practice of community life, on the process of living and working together of the residents of several kampung areas of Yogyakarta. It is acknowledged that the entities known as ‘city kampung’ in Yogyakarta have a particular history, and the term is understood differently from other cities of Indonesia. City kampung in Yogya will be discussed in their connection with the transformation of community life which has continued from the time of the formation of the unitary state of Indonesia until today. The city kampung dynamic in this discussion is a representation of the process of civilising the city, not only in a physical spatial but also in a global cultural sense, which has produced an extraordinary transformation of a number of areas of community life. IN working together in the kampung we often use words such as ‘performance’, ‘art’, ‘artist’ and so on, as a language of interaction and communication. Actually a number of kinds of cultural media that we usually refer to with these terms in practice cannot be separated from community. Kethoprak, wayang, jathilan, reyog, srandul, coke’an, kerawitan, or other performances of this current era like dangdut, campursari etc together with their variants, represent different kinds of cultural media ( not just entertainment) that grow and develop in Javanese communities. The diversity of form and practice of these ‘media’ is closely connected with the transformation of community life. Performance, art and so on have become part of the performativity of society, a mass product and at the same time a medium for many ordinary people seen to overcome the allure and threat of modernity, through daily life and by building up audiences which are complex, unique and specific. It is a celebration of a coming together of people, communities. Building identity, building language. Through several projects of performance as a cultural medium carried out together by city kampung, this paper will describe processes of contestation, negotiation and contemporary kampung dynamics in the context of post -1998 reform. Several forms and media of ‘performance’ create a space and a moment, not just International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010

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providing a mechanism for self-expression and the release of tension, but more than that, presenting actual reality. They don’t force people to regard thought, word and social action as three different things. We have to acknowledge that what lives in the brain and the gestures of the whole body need to be re-examined, not only to understand their traces but to be amazed that there are thoughts and movements which escape the increasing pressures and restrictions of contemporary life.


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The Lettuce Song and Its Vagaries: A Pop Song in Three Eras. Bernard Arps, Leiden University

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