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

One: The Modern National Theater and the Indonesian New Order State

Chapter 1 T h e M o d e r n n aT i o n a l T h e aT e r a n d T h e i n d o n e s i a n n e w o r d e r s TaT e during the 1990s, modern national theater practitioners in indonesia frequently displayed a critical attitude toward society and even clashed with the indonesian new order state over several theater banning incidents in a dramatic series of confrontations from 1990 to 1997. such attitudes on the part of theater workers, and the resulting battles with the state over censorship of the theater, can best be understood in the context of the development of an often antagonistic relationship between the two institutions in the preceding decades, as well as in the confluence of larger political circumstances with this basic antagonism. For if the modern theater was often at odds with the new order state, this friction was amplified and heightened during the last fifteen years of President suharto’s rule by the increasing restiveness of large numbers of the indonesian middle-classes, professionals, peasantry, and industrial working classes, as well as by a protracted fissure in the ranks of regime supporters. These developments created an atmosphere in which theater workers felt encouraged to mount bolder critiques of conditions under the new order, and in turn pro-democracy movements may well have drawn strength, images of desire, and sources of rhetoric from the various critiques, experiments with new actors and audiences, protests, and acts of defiance carried out by modern theater workers at roughly the same time. The Modern National Theater 23 To better understand the rift between the new order state and the modern national theater that formed the basis for much of the theatrical social criticism and protest that this book presents, i will first summarize in this chapter the rise of the modern theater in indonesia in relation to the parallel rise of the indonesian state. as a part of this background, i will demonstrate that the antagonism between the modern theater and the state in indonesia was part of a process of social contestation that had been developing for some decades, reaching back even to the preindependence period. Furthermore, i will show how ideologically, and in form and practice, the modern theater’s practitioners were, as is common in postcolonial circumstances, already culturally hybrid from the very beginning of the process of constructing national culture. Yet the process ofhybridizationcontinuedandledmoderntheaterpractitionerstodeepen their engagement with local and traditional cultural and performance traditions. in the end, this led theater workers to contest the new order state’s own version of what constituted a properly indonesian culture. i will then describe some of the mechanisms of control that the new order state established in order to better police what was presented on national theatrical stages as well as suggesting several reasons why these controls ultimately failed. Finally, i will also situate the productions discussed in succeeding chapters within a wider socio-political context by providing a brief overview of new order political developments during the 1980s and early 1990s. Theoretical Approach i view indonesian national culture as consisting of cultural products in the national language, Bahasa indonesia, but also including contemporary painting, sculpture, and graphic arts, which are considered as contributions to the new national culture that is itself related to the broad currents of international culture. This culture and the various subfields that constitute it (literature, theater, film, television, dance, music, visual arts) can be imagined as complex institutions or spheres of activity formed and constantly being reformed by the interplay of a variety of interests. These cultural fields then appear as institutions-in-process that incorporate several ideologies and sets of artistic conventions and techniques. 24 Chapter 1 For purposes of my argument, modern theater has been shaped as a sphere of activity by nationalism, forms of modern western theater, knowledge of traditional performance genres, modern and traditional aesthetic ideologies, desires to connect intimately with various audiences from the local level to the international, ideas that art should refrain from politics and, conversely, that it should take up important social issues and defend the socially marginalized. This form of theater has also been constructed by government desires to mute or restrain open criticism of its policies and actions, relations between theater and arts institutions, relations between modern theater and the...