Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java (review)

Male-focused social dance in Sunda (West Java) has gone by a number of names, among which ketuk tilu, tayuban, tari kursus, and jaipongan are the most common. However these forms relate to a much wider range of important music-dance practices in Southeast Asia, which focus around seductive female singer-dancers, most often called ronggeng. To gong chime accompaniment with soaring notes, they sing while partnering male customers who improvise choreography as the drummer in the gong chime orchestra uses his instrument to accent the man's gestures. The small steps of the woman with her sinuous rotation of wrists (ukel) or hips (goyang) contrasts with the broad stances and more martial-arts derived gestures of the male. The man may playfully try to embrace his partner but she slips away. A flourish of steps leads to the moment when, just before a gong stroke, the partners approach one another and their heads seem almost—but not quite—to touch. As the music concludes, payment will pass to the female for herself and the drummer/orchestra from the pocket of the man. Male display, female acceptance, and supportive drumming/ music are the essential elements of the genre. Historically dancer-courtesans were linked with both rice rituals (with the ronggeng representing the rice goddess, Sri) and prostitution. While the genre was widespread in the Malay world, it was especially strong in highland West Java—even in the early colonial period, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (l781-1826) found ronggeng particularly lively here. Given that jaipongan, a modern staged genre inspired by ronggeng traditions, is one of the most prominent art innovations in late twentieth century Sundanese music/dance, and bajidor, an entertainment of the Subang area of West Java, remains very active today, the ronggeng arts continue to be central to Sundanese culture.

Erotic Triangles is an important book with deep insight into Sundanese performance. Henry Spiller is a seasoned ethnomusicologist who came to his topic through his study of gamelan. Mastery of the ensemble means learning drumming, and drumming in West Java is intimately related to following and, at times, leading the dancer, while simultaneously directing the gamelan. Spiller's path to the male dance via the drum shows in the writing, which includes drum syllables and insights direct from the drummers' mouths. He understands the male dancer, too, and empathizes with this amateur performer who approaches the spotlight resisting culturally enforced shame (malu) and sharing macho pride (bangga) to show dancing skill.

In some sense, this book is a long and dense reflection on the male-to-male drummer-to-dancer relationship/rivalry, which Spiller argues is triggered by the presence of a female ronggeng. Spiller sees her primarily as an object of desire situated between the two men. Using gender analysis from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lacan—and considerations of how myth and performance work structurally from Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Butler, and Bourdieu—Spiller theorizes the two competing males. He gives pride of place to the sonically empowered drummer, seeing the solo male dancer, who appears to spontaneously improvise, to be less free than he thinks. The musical and drumming structure limits the self-presentation choices. Spiller reiterates models of power, which Ben Anderson, Clifford Geertz, and others have made popular: that which moves (dancer) is less than the still center (seated drummer). These two males with the female ronggeng, who evokes the rivalry, form the three sides of Spiller's erotic triangle. This contemporary gender theory analysis sees heteronormative behaviors as forming the subtext of the homosocial form, and argues that, though the ronggeng may appear to be a contrast to the traditional Sundanese female ideal given her sexy presence and husky voice, she is actually conforming to deep gender ideology. He grants the ronggeng some musical freedom, noting that her voice drifts above the gamelan and slides across the musical structure in ways that sometimes escape its strict form. But, as a dancer, she...