Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

1. A Colonial Dyad in Balinese Performance

41 1 As I said this morning to Charlie There is far too much music in Bali And although as a place it’s entrancing, There is also a thought too much dancing. It appears that each Balinese native, From the womb to the tomb is creative, And although the results are quite clever, There is too much artistic endeavour. —Noel Coward to Charlie Chaplin A COLONIAL DYAD IN BALINESE PERFORMANCE By the 1930s, when Noel Coward turned to Charlie Chaplin with this ditty about the surfeit of “artistic endeavour” in Bali,1 reports had been filtering out to Europe and America that the island, “not Fiji or Samoa or Hawaii, was the genuine, unspoiled tropical paradise, known as yet, even by reputation, only by the cognoscenti, a category with which all of the more affluent world travelers sought to identify themselves, as did a certain few more or less learned scholars.”2 Coward’s wry ascription of magic to the Balinese native, at once a kind of Asian encounter and a colonial spell, is also a queer repartee between two men undoubtedly among the cognoscenti on vacation in Bali. While one can only guess whether the generic or gender-ambiguous “Balinese native” so central to the island’s magic is a brown woman, brown boy, or both, a colonial dyad in balinese performance 42 it is clear that a colonial dyad is involved in the making of the native’s creative queerness from “the womb to the tomb.” The poem’s opening couplet, with lines ending in “Charlie” and “Bali,” sets up the dyad as an informal relationship and suspends it across the remaining rhyming couplets, “entrancing/dancing,” “native/ creative,” “clever/endeavour,” for a seductive and incantatory effect. Like a spell that is contingent upon the arrangement of words, the tightly woven metrical verse brings out the magic of Coward’s performatives while indexing Charlie’s amused if not entranced posture in Bali. Tellingly , Coward hints at the native choreography as a design that is in fact unnatural, parodying the prevalent discourse about how “everyone in Bali is an artist” with the bio-claim that the Balinese “womb” incubates creativity.3 One can thus interpret his ironic quibble about the surfeit of creative production—“far too much music” and “a thought too much dancing”—as a queer moratorium on colonial artistic production even if “the results are quite clever.” In other words, Coward’s version of the queer dyad is set apart from, even as it is imbricated in, the colonial invention of the Balinese native and the island paradise of Bali. Bali’s makeover from “feudal” and “vestigial Dark Age”4 to “unspoiled tropical paradise” is a remarkable testament to Dutch colonial “ethical ,” “protectionist,” and “conservationist” policies implemented in the 1910s.5 These policies sought to preserve selected traditions, customs, and performing art forms that the Dutch deemed essential to native Balinese culture while also appealing to tourists. Within two decades of Bali’s annexation by the Dutch in 1908, Bali’s nativized performing arts became a magical trope for the island’s idyllic character and gained a seemingly indissoluble cultural currency thereafter. One of the nativized rituals that became iconic of the island’s cultural traditions is kecak, the Balinese performance at the heart of this chapter.6 Widely known to tourists as the “monkey dance,” kecak features a large Balinese male chorus performing a polyrhythmic chant with synchronized gestures and throbbing bodies in a multilayered circular structure. Much of its appeal centers on the transmogrification of the men into entranced monkeys from the Ramayana epic. Kecak and its possessive embodiments is a key analytic of the tropic spell cast by or cast upon the queer dyad. It enables a reading of the ritual’s choreography as the interplay of colonial, indigenous, and queer crossings. a colonial dyad in balinese performance 43 Such crossings of the dyad inflect colonial power with a queer cognate fraught with paradoxes, and have several implications for studies of race and sexuality as they pertain to performance in the Asias. The spell is thus a different kind of magic than the one generated by the colonial mandate or its cognate anthropological gaze, which together resulted in the rabid exoticization of the island’s cultural traditions. Even as kecak is performed as a secular dance, spectators are charmed by the tantalizing assumption that it is a trance ritual that serves as...