Context and the Emerging Story: Improvised Performance in Oral and Literate Societies

At Kasiman a solid wall of people surrounded the clearing that had been prepared for the actors near the marketplace. I managed to break through to the inside. At one end hung a pair of curtains; at the other sat the musicians. Two air-pressure lamps hung down the middle, lighting up the faces which rose around the clearing in tiers. Around the edge, forever inching forward, each hoping to get a better view, sat an unbroken line of naked infants, solemn, patient, wide-awake.

The swift, light music had already begun. Two flutes rose high above the rapid, fluttering drums, now one ahead, now the other, clashing at times in casual discord, dissolving again in the purest of unisons. All at once there was the sound of singing; the first actor was announcing himself. The curtains quivered, opened, closed again, as though the actor could not bring himself to appear. At last they parted; the mantri, the prime minister, stepped forth; the play had begun.

What is the play? I asked Madé Tantra.

It's not yet certain, he replied. The story has not emerged.

Colin McPhee (1944:64)

When the American music scholar and composer Colin McPhee arrived in Bali in the early 1930s to study "the music of the East," he was surprised to find not only musicians able to improvise in performance, but also dramatic performers who followed a similar system (1944:2). Since in Bali music and drama go together, he had the occasion to attend many performances. In spite of McPhee's fears that "such music could not survive much longer," improvised musical as well as dramatic performances continue to take place: modernity and twentieth-century tourism have not stopped them (1944:79).

The fact that presentations by a group or a single actor are improvised is often lost on the Western observer. On the surface, while the actor struts about, when the musicians chime in just at the right moment, or when the audience rises because the event is over, a Balinese performance looks much like one in the West. But the processes by which a performance is created in Bali are very different from the processes familiar to us all in the Western tradition. The most important difference, I believe, is that the Balinese performers do not memorize their roles from written librettos (although literacy among them is high), but continue to create improvised performances.¹

In this paper I examine why the Balinese continue to improvise in performance in spite of the presence of writing, which leads me to investigate the more general supposition in Western scholarship that the advent or presence of literacy will, over time, supersede orality, and thus reduce the domain of oral (improvised) performance. Such an assessment can provide insights into other traditional systems, specifically the Greek performances of the Homeric poems. To provide a background to what follows I will briefly describe the relevant developments in orality research, from its initial framing to its current, more open, position.

The conflictive relationship between orality and literacy-where you have one you cannot have the other-was a key concept in the first phase of research into orality. A poet cannot be "both an oral and a written poet at any given time in his career,"² wrote Albert Lord in his seminal work, The Singer of Tales, which came out in 1960. Why the separation between writing and orality was so important to both Lord, and Milman Parry, his mentor, had more to do with the reasons that drove their initial research: the search for an explanation for the origins, transmission, and final fixation in alphabetic writing of the Homeric poems. Their fieldwork-based model convinced scholars that literate performers would hold an advantage over their illiterate brethren. Lord argued that singers would use their reading skills to simply memorize a text, and then perform it. Over time such literate memorizers would edge out their oral improvising colleagues because they offered their audiences a superior product: performances based on texts that had gradually undergone improvement until these texts became...