Resistance on the National Stage: Theater and Politics in Late New Order Indonesia

Introduction

I n t r o d u c t I o n the final decade of President Suharto’s new order in Indonesia witnessed a highly publicized series of confrontations between the Indonesian state and a number of theater groups over performances banned by the government. these clashes began with the banning of n. riantiarno and teater Koma’s Suksesi and Opera Kecoa in late 1990, at the same time that President Suharto and key state officials were calling for increased openness in public discourse. the government’s attempts to muzzle modern theater continued with prohibitions against performances of other plays by groups from the Yogyakarta-based Komunitas Pak Kanjeng (1994), workers theater groups from the greater Jakarta region (1995–97), and ratna Sarumpaet’s Satu Merah Panggung company (1997). this series of incidents brought theater into the center of national politics at a time of increasing public dissatisfaction with the Suharto regime. the bannings received extensive media coverage and became the occasion for wide-ranging public debate of a variety of related issues such as the law, good governance, democracy, and economics . they also demonstrated the resolve of the modern national theater’s practitioners to resist the state’s efforts to limit their freedom of expression . In the process of resisting the state’s censorship apparatus, cultural workers gained new solidarity, found common cause with journalists, industrial workers, and other social groups, and grew increasingly bold in the subject matter that their plays broached. through ever sharper criticism of the government’s actions and rationales for banning performances , the theater workers and their allies from other sectors of society 2 Introduction managed to put government spokespeople on the defensive well before the Suharto regime was brought to an end in May of 1998. this series of incidents highlight the important role that the Indonesian modern national theater was able to play, albeit briefly, on the national political stage. Yet the resistance to government censorship must be seen as emerging together with and, to some extent, building upon the ways in which elite theater workers, from the mid-1980s on, were exploring new modes of theater making: from difficult avant-garde performances to performances undertaken by and for central Javanese peasants, Jakartan industrial workers, and other groups not normally involved in this form of modern national culture. these modes of theater making raised new critical perspectives on new order Indonesian society and politics, and presented them to wider and more diverse audiences at a time when typical modern theater patrons were also becoming increasingly interested in such perspectives and issues. thus, modern national theater in the late new order era was becoming a site both for fostering germinal alliances between different social classes and groups, and for broaching new and daring themes in the process. these new alliances facilitated an expansion of public discussions about the significance of theater and theater bannings. Such discussions of censorship and of the themes taken up in the banned plays and other theater works helped mobilize public opposition to Suharto’s new order regime. one of the central aims of this book is to illustrate how and why this happened. I will show how modern theater became a key arena for expressing political dissent under the authoritarian new order regime, the ways in which modern national theater workers forged new theater practices in concert with a variety of social groups, how these practices were embedded in the social and political contexts of the time, and how they contributed to a sharpening of theatrical resistance to the new order regime, including the intensifying struggle of theater workers against censorship. censorship struggles are an obvious instance of the relations of power between theater and the state, and Indonesia is no exception. In this case, the Indonesian state, claiming to uphold the laws and social Introduction 3 norms of society, assumed the power to represent the nation by policing what could and could not be said and done on stage. on the other hand, theater workers insisted that their right to speak to, and often for, the nation and various groups within it by representing the nation in performance was abrogated by seemingly arrogant state officials using specious arguments or, even worse, state officials who were unable or unwilling to conform to laws which the government itself had promulgated. Loren Kruger has argued that the attempt to “stage the nation” to represent and reflect the...