Archipelagic Performance: Scenes from Maritime Southeast Asia

Archipelagos are complex environments that combine land and water in dynamic ways. As geological and discursive formations, they are performatively produced, and the kinds of cultural expressions that archipelagic communities perform represent distinctive manifestations of their location and interrelations. This essay considers a recent trend in contemporary performance for exploring archipelagic conditions, and places it within the context of an "archipelagic turn" in the interdisciplinary domain of island studies. It focuses in particular on three examples from maritime Southeast Asia: the installation Dapunta Hyang: Transmission of Knowledge (2017) by Zai Kuning; the theatrical performance Epic Poem of Malaya (2010) by Paul Rae and Kaylene Tan; and the solo dance SALT (2017) by Eko Supriyanto. The essay uses these examples to demonstrate that performances are of particular significance in understanding archipelagos, because they are able to contain, in concentrated form, many of the characteristic complexities of the formation that are otherwise distributed in space and time.