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3. Constructing a Classical Tradition: Javanese Court Dance in Indonesia
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The Republic of Indonesia is politically and culturally dominated by the island of Java, which has reputedly enjoyed an unchanging history of court performance dating back hundreds of years. Subject to colonial rule, principally by the Dutch from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, the Indonesian archipelago of several thousand islands has a complex history of invasion, rebellion, and division. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Islamic kingdom of Mataram (1582–1749) in Central Java was divided into two principalities, each with their city and royal court: Yogyakarta and Surakarta, or Yogya and Solo, as the cities are popularly known today. When the independent nation-state of Indonesia was declared in 1945, the city and principality of Surakarta became absorbed into the province of Central Java, whereas Yogyakarta was preserved as a special province and city, with Sultan Ham˘engkubuwana IX (1939–88) as its governor. Both royal courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta support a distinctively styled performance tradition and rival one another in their claims to antiquity and cultural superiority . This chapter considers the historical claims for and present practice 52 3 Constructing a Classical Tradition Javanese Court Dance in Indonesia - of the performance tradition of Yogyakarta from the perspective of a British social anthropologist. Indonesia includes a wide diversity of histories and ethnic groups. During the New Order period (1966–98), President Suharto began to emphasize the development of a national culture based on regional traditions . Despite this emphasis on regional diversity, it was the history and values of the Javanese, the largest ethnic group, that were used to promote Indonesian nationhood. During this period the movement styles of court performance assumed significance in Indonesian educational policy, and Javanese court dance was transformed into the Indonesian classical tradition. Continuity and longevity are emphasized in written histories of classical court dance in Java and in stories about the Constructing a Classical Tradition 53 3.1. The Special Region of Yogyakarta. origins of the dances. Local historians play down processes of change and construct the dances as genres that are defined by essential and unchanging qualities. My anthropological research into contemporary performances, on the other hand, revealed that in practice, rather than being fixed as discrete genres, dances varied over time according to the context. Such fluidity made problematic any attempt to classify and secure the dances as belonging to wholly separate genres. Experience of this difficulty led me to look more closely at contemporary local histories of Javanese classical dance traditions and the historical sources upon which they were based. Might, indeed, such histories indicate more about present-day cultural policies and their future application than an explicit focus on the past might suggest? A major problem encountered by any researcher is how to treat and to understand speculative mythic histories that have accrued to genres of performance. Such stories about the historical origins of the court’s dance repertoire in fact formed part of the political rhetoric about Indonesian national identity and the place of Javanese culture within the modern state. I explore here some of the interpretive processes that produced the performance repertoire and its mythology in the sultan’s court in the city and province of Yogyakarta. I consider, in particular, the elaborate and lengthy ceremonial dances known as the B˘edhaya dance tradition, normally performed today by nine women. It is a performance tradition that has been especially associated with the power of the ruler in Java and, as such, has been particularly subject to mythohistorical constructions.1 Reading Histories Before my first period of research in Yogyakarta (1979–86), I prepared for fieldwork by reading across the disciplines everything I could about Javanese performance, especially the dances of the sultan’s court, written in English, Dutch, French, and Indonesian. During fieldwork I continued to read published and unpublished studies, in Indonesian and Javanese, as well as dance manuscripts in many libraries, including those of the sultan’s palace and the Institute of Indonesian Arts (then named ASTI, the Indonesian Academy of Performing Arts). My initial research aimed to discover the reality behind what had struck me as 54 - romanticized accounts by Western travelers and scholars that were colored by stereotypes of the Orient as representing ancient and authentic traditions redolent of primeval sacrality. At that time the classic model of anthropological explanation, structural functionalism, had already been under radical criticism for its neglect of the historical dimensions of contemporary experience.2 Looking back, I was still under the impression that by...