Inventing The Performing Arts: Modernity and Tradition in Colonial Indonesia by Matthew Isaac Cohen (review)

Matthew Cohen is one of a small group of researchers who is filling in the gaps on twentieth-century Indonesian theatre historiography by determinedly combing archives. His most recent book will be of interest to those researching Indonesian dance, music, theatre, popular entertainments, and cultural history. It surveys how the performing arts reflected and modeled the altering social, political, and economic circumstances of colonial Indonesia. The information comes from detailed readings of colonial-era newspapers for information on performance events and artists' lives, which Cohen then filters through contemporary research on Indonesia's history and elucidates via contemporary cultural theory. His detail work allows him to revitalize our understandings of popular entertainments that were in their own era often ignored by elites and have subsequently been overlooked in Indonesian theatre histories.

Cohen's characteristic style of examining newspapers and journals for evidence and then interpreting them via historical and cultural analysis was initiated in his The Komedie Stamboel: Popular Theatre in Colonial Indonesia, 1891–1903 (2006), which did a particular case study focusing on the work of the Eurasian theatre maker Auguste Mahieu (1865–1903), showing how his innovative popular theatre company reflected the intercultural interactions around the turn of the twentieth century when Chinese, Indos (Eurasians), and Javanese artists collaborated to develop their new popular urban theatre form. His second book, Performing Otherness: Java and Bali on the International Stage, 1905–1952 (2010), took a larger frame in terms of time and geography but used some of the same research style and interpretive techniques: he looked at international reception and intercultural interactions of multiple performers of Javanese, Balinese, and European descent who toured Europe and the United States representing—or in some cases misrepresenting—Java and Bali. Performers who lived in or toured Europe included Dutch East Indies performers such as Dewi Dja, who began as a street dancer in east Java and ended up in Hollywood movies after doing stints touring internationally and performing in an American nightclub in Chicago. Western artists who presented themselves as Javanized were also detailed, for example, Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer who had spent time in the colony as a wife of a Dutch military man and found that Orientalism pleased her clientele in Paris, and Eve Gauthier, an opera singer who, after a relatively short period in the Dutch colony, began representing Java on vaudeville stages and then went on to Western avant-garde art music circles. In Performing Otherness, Cohen showed how touring was a two-way street whereby Dutch East Indies performers garnered new ideas and status in creating their modern arts (in a way that might be compared to Sada Yakko and Kawakami Otojirō in Japan or Mei Lang Fan in China), while many Westerners who had some Javanese or Balinese experience became interpreters of the colony's arts in a transnational frame from the late 1890s to Indonesian independence.

Cohen's current book covers the same time period as Performing Otherness, but instead of focusing on Euro-American spectatorship, this text gives the view from inside the modernizing colony, as thinkers and artists selectively borrowed Western forms or rethought local heritage for their changing audiences. Some topics that have been rarely reported in other sources are included: for example, impacts of Western or Japanese circuses and other late nineteenth-century touring companies, Japanese propaganda theatre in World War II, influences of Hollywood or jazz on Dutch East Indies popular culture, and so on. We also get a sense of the connections of companies and personnel between Malaya, the Philippines, and China. The work envisions an interconnected world in flux.

Cohen has gained a wealth of information though reading memoirs, popular literature, newspapers, and other sources. His explanations, of course, remain significantly more detailed for the forms that garnered the attention of the elite or experienced Dutch or Japanese censorship (which thereby created records), but Cohen additionally turns up important information...