Remembering a Deathly Dance

Larasati’s The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-genocide Indonesia is haunted with memory. Analyzing the rise of Suharto’s Cold War right-wing regime in Indonesia (1965–89), Larasati uncovers the hidden violence of the state: the disappearance and genocide of artists and cultural practitioners—especially women—and, in the wake of that violence, the production of dance replicas who perform for the nation and its global alliances. Jumping across time and space and between memoir and analysis, practice and theory, The Dance That Makes You Vanish is a compelling and ambitious ethnography that draws on dance theory and history, performance studies, and transnational feminist cultural studies.

Individual memory rubs against national myth-making to craft a “structural resistance” to Suharto’s rise and his regime—the New Order. Drawing on the cultural studies of Edward Said, Larasati is the critic, an “alchemical translator of texts into circumstantial reality or worldliness” (Said 1975, 4). The Dance That Makes You Vanish is a fight against the amnesia organized by the state, where dance as a practice of self-making becomes a means of conveniently “forgetting” one’s history and buttressing the state’s impunity. As Larasati states, “As I became more practiced in the forms required for official dancers, I began to forget about the people I knew who had disappeared” (xviii). In response, her method is rooted in remembering: her dance training in Indonesia, her performance as a civil servant and touring state dancer in Cambodia, and her current role as a Western-educated dance practitioner and scholar in the American academy. Influenced by the transnational feminist work of Gayatri Spivak and Caren Kaplan, Larasati unfolds the process and concealment of territorialization and imperialism forwarded on and through women’s bodies.

Her premise is that prior to 1965 and Suharto’s ascendance, cultural construction in the immediate postcolonial era staged a cooperation of different ethnic and cultural practices, allowing for multiple class-based practices to be shared and permitting flexibility in the representation of tradition. With the New Order, strengthened by the U.S.-advanced Cold War policy, artists, mostly women, were suspect. Arrested, imprisoned, or eliminated, these women were targeted because of their suspected association with the progressive Left and their involvement in artists’ guilds and feminist organizations. As Larasati puts it, the disappearance and social and economic rejection of thousands of artists forced a production of replicas dancing simulacra. The state created and enforced a dance curriculum that ensured domestic surveillance and control. Dance gained newfound meaning under the New Order and became useful in the era of international development that followed.

As she travels abroad to Cambodia and the United States, Larasati takes issue with her own body and practice as a dancing replica, civil servant, and agent of the state. Her analysis of world dance and the dancing “foreign” body critically situates the dancer in the histories of colonialism that exoticize her and strategically incorporate her presence to promote Cold War alliances and present-day global tourist economies. However, within this mobile dancing practice also lies the potential for transnational alliances of resistance that, through performance, continue to reveal Indonesia’s “hegemony of patriarchal rule and connection to international structures of power” (xx).

Although dance reconstruction and reform have been discussed in several different contexts and countries, Larasati’s work stands apart in its feminist ethnographic inquiry and its contemporary cultural critique. The Dance That Makes You Vanish is beautifully written and theoretically rich. Larasati brings the reader intimately close to the experience of surveillance and control, the minute shifts in movement, and the dilemmas of the global critic who questions the practice through which her access is garnered.