Performing Arts in Postmodern Bali: Changing Interpretations, Founding Traditions ed. by Kendra Stepputat (review)

For the first half of the twentieth century, Bali was primarily portrayed in tourist literature as a paradise island isolated from outside influence, and its people, a “living museum” of pre-Islamic Indonesian Hindu culture. Scholars of Bali during the latter half of the twentieth century sought to reestablish the island’s connectedness with the outside world, particularly in writings on the performing arts, by analyzing the influences of tourism. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, such scholars have taken up a new task—to explore the tensions between performing arts tradition and its transformations, history and modernity, the mythical and the everyday within the context of a technologically mediated world in which the local and the global align. This book presents a kaleidoscopic approach that reenvisions Bali’s contemporary artistic legacy.

The book features essays on a wide variety of topics: gender wayang, music for shadow puppetry (Lisa Gold); puppeteer I Made Sidia (Kendra Stepputat); topeng, masked dance (I Wayan Dibia); women’s gamelans (Sonja Downing); cross-cultural composition (I Wayan Sudirana); arja, Balinese “opera” (Ako Mashino); improvised paired drumming (Made Mantle Hood); the performing group Sanggar Çudamani (David Harnish and Sarah Weiss, contributing a chapter each); composer Pande Made Sukerta (Christopher J. Miller); composer I Wayan Sadra (Andy McGraw); and kecak, vocal gamelan, in the films of Pasolini and Fellini (Michael Bakan).

Their essays differ in their approachability to nonspecialist readers, based on the varying degrees to which individual authors delve into musical and cultural theory. Moreover, the subjects of each chapter are so wide ranging that even a reader familiar with gender wayang, for example, might still have much to learn in approaching a chapter on arja or musik kontemporer (Balinese avant-garde music). However, this variety is one of the strengths of the book, allowing readers to draw their own connections between artistic genres.

Through masterful editorial placement of the articles, each can be read alone, in conjunction with its topically themed neighbors, or as a unified narrative of contemporary Balinese artistic developments. Like paintings hanging in a gallery in a museum of modern art, each essay provides an intricate and often provocative view of its subject. In reading the essays together—as if walking through an art gallery—the meanings and themes of each preceding essay are compounded by the next, revealing the shifting, overlapping ontological tensions of postmodernism within the Balinese performing arts. This overall perception is aided by the clever arrangement of essays within the volume. Not only are the individual chapters grouped by subject material, but the progression of chapters from beginning to end takes the reader on a temporospatial journey, creating a narrative arc that is rare in edited volumes.

The introduction sets forth the theoretical underpinnings of the work as a whole, focusing on the oft-cited concept of appropriateness within a framework of desa, kala, patra—place, time, situation—as a governing feature in the creative worlds of Balinese artists. Stepputat explains that this concept allows Balinese artists to variously incorporate aspects of nostalgia, neo-traditionalism, and futurism into their works. This concept, and many others prevalent throughout the work, features prominently in the first of the essays, by Lisa Gold, on gender wayang. She begins her discussion by demonstrating how artists mentally travel to zaman dulu—a bygone era—within their performances, therefore juxtaposing and integrating past and present in a single performative moment. Conceptualizing the Balinese performing arts as holding distinct places, or niches, within cultural ecosystems, she also posits a paradigm of balance between forward-looking and backward-looking styles and performances—an apt idea to describe the differing artistic tendencies explored in the book as a whole.

The essays on topeng by I Wayan Dibia and arja by Ako Mashino are the most historical...