Performing Southeast Asia: Performance, Politics and the Contemporary

Performing Southeast Asia: Performance, Politics and the Contemporary is an important reconsideration of the histories and practices of theatre and performance in a fluid and dynamic region that is also experiencing an overarching politics of complexity, precarity and populist authoritarian tendencies.  In a substantial introductory essay and essays by leading scholars, activists and practitioners working inside the region, the book explores fundamental questions for the arts.  The book asks how theatre contributes to and/or addresses the political condition in the contemporary moment, how does it represent the complexity of experiences in peoples’ daily lives and how does theatre engagein forms of political activism and enable a diversity of voices to flourish.  The book shows how, in an age of increasingly violent politics, political institutions become sites for bad actors and propaganda.  Forces of biopolitics, neo-liberalism and religious and ethnic nationalism intersect in unpredictable ways with decolonial practices – all of which the book argues are forces that define the contemporary moment.  Indeed, by putting the focus on contemporary politics in the region alongside the diversity of practices in contemporary theatre, we see a substantial reformation of the idea of the contemporary moment, not as a cosmopolitan and elite artistic practice but as a multivalent agent of change in both aesthetic and political terms.  With its focus on community activism and the creative possibilities of the performing arts the region, Performing Southeast Asia, is a timely intervention that brings us to a new understanding of how contemporary Southeast Asia has become a site of contest, struggle and reinvention of the relations between the arts and society.

Peter Eckersall

The Graduate Center

City University of New York

Performing Southeast Asia – with chapters concerned with how regional theatres seek contextually-grounded, yet post-national(istic) forms; how history and tradition shape but do not hold down contemporary theatre; and how, in the editors’ words, such artistic encounters could result in theatres ‘that do not merely attend to matters of cultural heritage, tradition or history, but instead engage overtly with theatre and performance in the contemporary’ – contributes to the possibility of understanding what options for an artistically transubstantiated now-ness may be: to the possibility, that is, of what might be called a ‘Present-Tense Theatre’.

C. J. W.-L. Wee

Professor of English

NanyangTechnological University

 

Performing Southeast Asia examines contemporary performance practices and their relationship with politics and governance in Southeast Asia in the twenty-first century. In a region haunted historically by strongman politics, authoritarianism and militarism, religious tension and ethnic strife, the chapters reveal how contemporary theatre and performances in the present reflect yet challenge dominant socio-political discourses. The authors analyse works of political commitment and conviction, created and performed by Southeast Asian artists, as modes and platforms of reaction and resistance to the shifting political climates that inform contemporary life in urban Southeast Asia. The discussions center on issues of state hegemonies and biopolitics, finance and sponsorship, social liberalism and conservatism, the relevance of history and tradition, and globalisation and cultural practice. These diverse yet related concerns converge on an examination of the efficacies of theatre and performance as means of political intervention and transformation that point to alternative embodiments of political consciousness through which artists propose critical options for rethinking the state, citizenship, identity and belonging in a time of seismic socio-political change. The e

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9783030346867

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© The Author(s) 2020

M. C. C. Tan, C. Rajendran (eds.)Performing Southeast AsiaContemporary Performance InterActionshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34686-7_1

1. Politics, Performance, the Contemporary and Southeast Asia

Marcus Cheng Chye Tan¹   and Charlene Rajendran¹  

(1)

National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

Marcus Cheng Chye Tan (Corresponding author)

Email: [e-mail]

Charlene Rajendran

Email: [e-mail]

Politics and Performance in Southeast Asia

This book engages with performance in Southeast Asia, with specific focus on particular nation states, rather than as a region, and the shifting cultures and politics that inform contemporary life, particularly in the urban centres of Southeast Asia where many performances that are analysed here are created and performed. In a region haunted by political volatility and divergence, authoritarianism and militarism, religious diversity and ethnic strife, the chapters reveal how contemporary performance and performances in the contemporary reflect yet challenge dominant socio-political discourses. The authors consider the efficacies of performance as political intervention and ‘events’ in Southeast Asia in a time of seismic change, and examine issues of state hegemonies, censorship, the resurgence of authoritarianism, the persistence of history and tradition, the impact of finance and sponsorship, social liberalism and conservatism, and globalisation and cultural practice. The performance works considered here are not overtly ‘political theatres’ of the socialist left, in the manner Erwin Piscator outlines in his book The Political Theatre (1929),¹ or in the tradition of Brecht’s Lehrstücke. They are not necessarily ‘political’ in that they are not conceived solely to agitate political consciousness, though this can be the experiential outcome of spectatorship, but are works that are fundamentally ‘shaped by political commitment and conviction.’²

In ‘On Political Theatre’ (1975), Michael Kirby asks if all theatre is necessarily political given that the political can broadly be conceived as simply the ‘constellations of relationships we form.’³ The term ‘politics’ is itself highly amorphous in meaning and it has come to explain all facets of human relations in a given context. Kirby, however, believes that theatre is political only if it is concerned with governance and takes sides on the issue⁴; theatre is political ‘only to the extent that it attempts to be political […] Political theatre is intellectual theatre. It deals with political ideas and concepts.’⁵ Echoing this sentiment, Joe Kelleher posits that ‘politics’ should be taken to refer to the activities of governments and organisations, the study of such activities and systems or the processes of power, its distribution and struggle over it. Kelleher turns to Stefan Collini for a simpler explanation, which we find particularly applicable to the understanding of politics and performance as comprehended by the authors of this book. Collini defines politics as ‘the important, inescapable, and difficult attempt to determine relations of power in a given space.’⁶ Ontologically, politics is manifold in its definition and therein also lies the coinciding complexities of a neat comprehension. Yet the manifestations and consequences of the practice of politics are always salient; the root of political practices, in governance, organisation, culture or aesthetics, is the ‘relations of power’ or more specifically the struggle for power, what Jacques Rancière postulates as the ‘re-distribution of the sensible’—the tussle between the invisible and the visible. As he explains, the struggle against the police—society’s distribution of the sensible, or governance through an ordering of perception that organises bodies into common traits with the established order that then divides and partitions the people into groups relegated to specific modes of doing, places where these tasks and occupations are conducted and the modes of being that correspond to these occupations and these places⁷—engenders a moment of dissensus in which the invisible is made visible; contemporary politics is essentially, therefore, the redistribution or repartitioning of the visible.

This book is then distinctly about performance and this (re)distributive relationship with politics, in the context of Southeast Asia at the turn of the century, where performance engenders potential for making the invisible visible. It engages ‘politics’ as ‘political ideas and concepts […,] [that make] explicit reference to contemporary governmental problems and issues’⁸—but also considers the ‘harder politics of performance that traces the associations of the social and interrupts the continuity of inequalities, suffering and loss.’⁹ The chapters here examine performance art, theatre and music but also politics as performance/theatre for, as David Apter advocates, politics can be aptly read as performance/theatre with the identical elements of spectacle, theatricality, agency, textuality and narrativity being evident,¹⁰ a view shared and further expounded on by Julia Strauss and Donal Cruise O’Brien (2007) who study the integrality of politics in performance and performance in politics by appraising ritual, theatre and micro performances as an imperative function of the political landscape in Asia and Africa. Theatre and performance can be considered ‘events’ that challenge or disrupt the political status quo and its distribution of the sensible, or are works that have become events because they were, inevitably, subjected to prevailing socio-political climates that deemed them controversial, contentious or threatening to the established order. As events, they are, as Jacques Derrida describes, ‘ruptures’—moments that decentre or recentre a structure through disruption¹¹—or interventions, ontological disturbances which, as Alain Badiou further explains, change the rules of the situation in order to allow that particular event to be.¹²

In an article published in East Asia Forum, political scientist Thomas Pepinsky notes that contemporary politics in the region is characterised by a ‘politics of disorder,’¹³ evidenced by the prevalence of democracy but a(n) (re)assertion of authoritarian rule. The electorate in the respective countries are ‘voting against disorder’¹⁴ by advocating not law and order but ‘order over law,’ while politicians exploit disorder and its fears as campaign promises. The 2014 presidential candidacy of Prabowo Subianto in Indonesia, Thai electoral politics since Thaksin Shinawatra’s rise to premiership (and consequently fall) and, in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte’s recent presidency are some examples Pepinsky cites.

The resurgence of strongman politics reifies Duterte’s emphatic announcement, ‘[t]he politics here in Southeast Asia is changing,’¹⁵ and also reflects Pepinsky’s view about the region’s politics of disorder. While Duterte was referring specifically to the possible termination of alliances between the U.S. and the Philippines, his observation rings true of a region that, in recent years, has seen significant political uncertainty, disorder, shifting sentiments between Southeast Asian nations and of the people and their governments. Duterte, a controversial figure in contemporary Philippine politics, is known for his radical politics, disregard for international human rights and the ‘war on drugs’ or rather extrajudicial killings of drug dealers and users in the Philippines—all in a bid to ‘contain’ disorder. His assumption of the presidency in 2016 reflects the wave of profound changes in global politics and polity in recent years where anti-globalisation sentiments (and movements), right-wing populism and nationalist revivalism have taken over.

Such radical, disorderly politics is also evidenced in the success of the opposition coalition, Pakatan Harapan (‘Alliance of Hope’), at the recent Malaysian general elections of 2018. Dr Mahathir Mohamed, once Malaysia’s iron-fisted Prime Minister who has now assumed office again, mended ties with his former political rival Anwar Ibrahim, to subsequently gain a clear majority of parliamentary seats to form the new Malaysian government. This unexpected victory reflected Malaysians’ intolerance of former Prime Minister Najib Razak’s neoliberal economic policies and alleged corrupt practices which saw the misappropriation of monies from the state sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB). Wearing yellow, in performances of protest and power, the rallying call ‘Bersih’ (meaning ‘Clean’) became the people’s performative act that shifted Malaysia’s political landscape by ending the 61-year rule of the ruling coalition Barisan Nasional (National Front).

Other recent political developments signify the continued fixation with identity politics based on religious affiliation and fidelity in a region where secularism remains elusive for civil society. In 2017, Jakarta’s governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for alleged ‘blasphemy’ against Islam in his election campaign speeches, and while the veracity of that claim has been subjected to debate with some analysts believing this to be a religiously and racially motivated attack (Purnama , nicknamed ‘Ahok,’ is Chinese Christian), the tens of thousands of hard-line Indonesian Muslims who rallied in the city centre to demand his prosecution, and Purnama’s incarceration, exemplify identity politics’ stranglehold on civil society and governance.¹⁶ In Myanmar, the continued mistreatment and persecution of the Muslim minority in the Rakhine state has resulted in the mass migration of over 1,100,000 Rohingyas and this has consequently created a diasporic crisis across Southeast Asia, Bangladesh and India. A former champion of democratic rule in Myanmar’s 49-year military junta rule and Nobel Peace Prize winner, incumbent state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi is now disfavoured by the international community for her callous attitudes to what civil-society organisations and human rights advocates have called a genocide. While the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has maintained a non-interventionist policy where state affairs are concerned, emergency talks of ASEAN leaders in Yangon on 19 December 2016 regarding the refugee crisis demonstrate growing regional uncertainties and fears of a replication of the Syrian refugee crisis.

Internal relations within ASEAN states are frequently performed and projected at meetings of ASEAN leaders as strong and solid, but there are many fault lines that remain evident. In 2015, the Southeast Asian transboundary haze, caused by slash-and-burn agricultural fires in parts of South Sumatra and Riau, resulted in the highest levels of pollution recorded in the region and left countries such as Singapore and Malaysia choked in dense smog for several weeks. Hostility between Singapore and Indonesia came to a high point with Indonesian authorities rejecting foreign aid from neighbouring Singapore, and Indonesia’s Vice-President Jusuf Kalla criticising ASEAN neighbours for ‘grumbling’ about the haze.¹⁷ Territorial sovereignty and regional security have also been threatened by China’s claim to various islands in the South China Sea. Despite the Hague Tribunal’s ruling, Beijing has gone on to build new islands in the region and further militarise them. Ownership of these islands on the South China Sea has been, additionally, disputed by countries within Southeast Asia, with Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines and Brunei staking claims on the Spratly Islands, for example.

Held up as a global exemplar of effective multicultural practice, Singapore is nonetheless experiencing the wave of fundamentalist identity politics and nationalist revivalism seen in the West. Lax migration policies and anti-foreigner sentiments became ‘hot-button’ issues in the 2011 and 2016 general elections, with these being redolent of the nationalist trends prevalent in Europe today. In 2013, Singapore experienced the first riot since 1969. Occurring in a predominantly Indian enclave called ‘Little India,’ a group of almost 300 foreign workers from India turned violent in protest over the death of a fellow construction worker who was accidentally killed by a bus driven by a Chinese driver. While race cannot be ascertained as the cause of the resulting violence, online negative reactions were evidently racial, with some Singaporeans attributing the socially disruptive behaviour of the rioters to their race, nationality and their ‘foreignness.’¹⁸ More recently, Singapore society has been divided over the repeal of penal code 377A which criminalises sex between mutually consenting men. Encouraged by India’s Supreme Court unanimously striking down this colonial-era law in September 2018, the gay community and more liberal-minded Singaporeans have petitioned the government to do likewise. The debate posited by religious and conservative Singaporeans reveals disturbing sentiments identical to the alt-right arguments heard in Trump’s America. Such conservatism has also been seen in the arts which has experienced stricter state censorship in recent years, oftentimes driven by public sentiment or complaint. In an interview published in Singapore’s broadsheet The Straits Times, internationally renowned Singapore theatre director Ong Keng Sen recounted the perils and problems with prohibitive state control in his time as the festival director of the Singapore International Festival of Arts.¹⁹ The relationship between performance and politics is, as Ong explicates in the interview, a multifaceted one and the chapters here examine that complex relation. Performances that expand the time and space for this relationship engage in the work of reimagining politics and Southeast Asia through mediums that allow for the fluctuations of the nation, and region, to be reflected and reflected on.

Performing Southeast (of) Asia: States of Imagination

Southeast Asia, as a geopolitical entity or cartographic concept, is, to reiterate Benedict Anderson’s still pertinent thesis, an imagined community.²⁰ The region, characterised by multiple dimensions of difference and distinction exemplified, both literally and metaphorically, by the topographical divisions in the Indochinese peninsula and the Malay Archipelago, has been described by Southeast Asian historian D.G.E. Hall, as a ‘chaos of races and languages.’²¹ Though one may contest his use of the term ‘chaos,’ Southeast Asia’s extreme diversity of ethnicities, cultures, religious beliefs and political affiliations have frequently resulted in difficult attempts at interpellating a common identity for the region. Geographically, Southeast Asia consists of thousands of islands and island states (Indonesia, for example, consists of 17,508 land masses of varied sizes); geopolitically, the region exemplifies Steven Vertovec’s concept of ‘super-diversity.’²²

The sea is arguably then the common imaginary that has given the region a political will-to-power and unitary self-image. It is the bodies of water that divide but also unite: the sea separates and adjoins. The sea is also responsible for the maritime economy the region has become known for from the pre-colonial to the contemporary periods. Maritime trade from the West and East found intersection in ports such as Malacca, Singapore and Penang, along the Straits of Malacca, Batavia and Surabaya around the Java Sea, and Saigon and Manila on the South China Sea. This maritime intersection and waterborne traffic resulted in thriving urban centres of cultural interchange.²³ Till today this economic imperative, based on the common imagination of the ocean’s vitalness (and vitality) to the region, is purported by ASEAN constituent states whose economies are dependent on the waterways.

The sea can also be read as a metaphor for the volatile relations of countries in the region and of the imagined identity that is Southeast Asia; it is ‘the site of multiple relationships that are never fixed, but constantly in flux.’²⁴ The intra-regional tensions over islands sprawled across the South China Sea illustrate the precarity and unpredictability of regional relations both within and without, and exemplify the ocean’s ever-changing currents.²⁵ This arguably leads to a regional politics defined by an ‘archipelagic consciousness’—a fragmented yet connected fluid identity and relationality in local governance and regional engagement, one that resists the ‘simple enclosure of the cartographic boundary’²⁶ and is also characterised by ‘fluid island-island inter-relations rather than the binaries of mainland/sea/island.’²⁷ Recognisably, while Southeast Asia is also composed of countries in the peninsula, it is dominantly made up of archipelagic states.²⁸ This archipelagic consciousness is arguably reflected in the constantly shifting political relations between the neighbouring countries of the region, relations characterised by obligated cooperation undergirded by caution and suspicion.

The sense of changing boundaries is made palpable in some of the works analysed in this book and often the performances challenge audiences to rethink their sense of nation or culture, and to incorporate more porous, ‘fluid’ options. This fluidity and porosity in encountering ‘Southeast Asia’ is underscored by Farish Noor who, in his chapter ‘The Wheres and Whys of Southeast Asia: Art and Performance in the Locating of Southeast Asia Today,’ posits that ‘Southeast Asia’ remains an incomplete project. From a historical perspective, Farish shows how much of the region’s postcolonial history has been predicated on a modern understanding of the Southeast Asian nation state and has, consequently, elided the multiple, fluid and interconnected qualities of the cultures and peoples that inhabit the region. Citing Chaudhuri, Farish argues that transoceanic trade across the Indian Ocean created ‘a sense of a common shared space where identities were created, overlapped, inter-penetrated and mutually informed, enforced and determined one another.’²⁹ More significantly, Farish posits that, given this complexity that is ‘Southeast Asia,’ a multi-perspectival approach needs to be taken and this is where art and performance assumes this responsibility since it is with art that the narratives and histories which have been silenced by the official histories of states can be heard, and seen.

Bearing in mind that Southeast Asia is often imagined in relation to dominant Asia, ‘Southeast’s’ adjectival position reflects the geopolitical realities and cultural conditions that prevail—the region is always ‘southeast’ of Asia: Asia dominant is China and India—their geographical size, economic power and cultural impact, historically and today, overshadow the smaller archipelagic nations scattered south or east of them. As historian Anthony Reid writes, Southeast Asia is often thought to be a cultural ‘hybrid’ of India and China when considering the popular beliefs, religious traditions and social practices, even though there are some significant differences.³⁰

In studies of Southeast Asian theatre, what is often regarded as ‘Asia’ is dominated by discourses of East and South Asia; these two regions have become primary determinants of Asia. ‘Asia’ remains the key semantic particulate exemplified in the syntactic location of the noun with ‘Southeast’ as its modifier; ‘Southeast’ is then considered adjunctive to ‘Asia.’ References to Southeast Asia as such are often framed, possibly determined, by these cultural nodal points whose historically established performance traditions have been used as comparative ‘yardsticks’ of Southeast Asian styles, this despite the fact that Southeast Asia has its own distinct and unique performance traditions. Southeast Asian theatres are at times regarded as consequential to the performance traditions of China and India, given that much of the cultural heritage in the Southeast today owes some measure of its heritage to these Asian countries, and this leads to such inevitable referencing and association. Historians and political scientists of Southeast Asia purport that ‘this problematic nature of the concept of Southeast Asia is not the least due to its non-indigenous origins as a convenient shorthand for Western academic institutions and as a geopolitical framework for Western powers in the form of the war-time Allied Southeast Asian Command.’³¹ The strategic considerations of the Second World War and the consequent period of postcolonial modernity and post-war nationalism gave rise to the regional identity of contemporary Southeast Asia. The contemporary nature of Southeast Asia, as Christopher Roberts argues, is a consequence of the region’s cultural, ethnic and religious diversity, an associated absence of a regional identity and a lack of region-wide and regularised interstate relations until independence from colonialism.³²

The Contemporary in/and Southeast Asian Performance

Central to this book’s objective is also an expansion of the representation of Southeast Asian contemporary performance in theatre and performance scholarship. In what is recognisably an area that has received little academic focus, Performing Southeast Asia provides analyses of recent performances, and issues related to performance, in Southeast Asia as they reflect the rapidly evolving socio-political and economic landscapes since the turn of the century.

The term ‘contemporary’ is often understood to be ‘modern’ or ‘current’; it is framed primarily by a temporal dimension of the ‘present’ as opposed to the past. In scholarship that examines contemporary Southeast Asian theatre (and more broadly Asian theatre or theatre in Asia), the term is positioned chronologically in relation to the ‘traditional’ or more specifically ‘traditional theatre/performance’ and refers to performance forms and modes that are not characteristically indigenous and/or have been imported into, or influenced by, Western theatrical discourse. Such was the ethnographic concern and approach of thick description taken by early scholarship of Southeast Asian theatre. Kathy Foley, in her article published in the Asian Theatre Journal 28, no. 2, provides an excellent overview of the key players and founders of the field of Southeast Asian theatre scholarship, which we will not repeat here.³³ The search for ‘authenticity’ in what was ‘ethnic’ and ‘local’ became a prevalent concern when theatre and performance became appropriated for national(ist) agendas, particularly in the years of postcolonial independence; ‘traditional’ art indigenous to the region became a means of stirring political consciousness that reified the demarcations between the newly independent state and the former Western coloniser. Evan Darwin Winet’s book, Indonesian Postcolonial Theatre: Spectral Genealogies and Absent Forces (2010) proves, for example, how colonialism’s dissolution of the Indonesian archipelago’s cultural complexity and heterogeneity into a simplistic distinction between Natives and the West persisted in the imaginations of national discourse. Contemporary Indonesian theatre as seen in Jakarta, Winet argues, has reified these distinctions in their adaptations of Western conventions and dramaturgies as they seek to transcend the parochialism of performances of the ‘local’ and ‘ethnic.’

Although there have been works that examine contemporary performances in the region, such as Doreen G. Fernandez’s Palabas: Essays on Philippine Theater History (1996) and Nur Nina Zuhra’s An Analysis of Modern Malay Drama (1992), an engagement with the currents of modernity in confrontation with tradition, and the consequent evolution of these forms, seems inevitable. At this point, we would thus like to distinguish between ‘contemporary performance in Southeast Asia’ and ‘Southeast Asian performance in the contemporary.’

The phrase ‘contemporary performance in Southeast Asia’ encourages a discourse on the impact of modernity and its associate forces on traditional theatres. These include the ways in which traditional forms have become appropriated by governments for nationalist agendas, and now assume the former role of patron once held by royalty or religion, as national icons of culture and heritage, a view posited by Matthew Isaac Cohen and Laura Noszlopy in their introduction to Contemporary Southeast Asian Performance: Transnational Perspectives (2010). Additionally, Catherine Diamond’s Communities of Imagination: Contemporary Southeast Asian Theatres (2012) considers such transitions of traditional forms and evaluates the ways the traditional arts have evolved as a response and reaction less to artistic necessity and more from foreign or commercial forces; these changes are often seen ‘not as legitimate innovations but as bastardizations.’³⁴ She succinctly charts the socio-political changes from traditional performance modes, with the introduction of Western forms brought about by colonisation, to modern hybrid theatres and spoken drama.

In practice, reassessing forgotten histories, excavating quotidian memories and reconfiguring cultural boundaries as alternative strategies of decolonisation and reimagining the national were characteristic of initial approaches to creating contemporary performance that began in the 1960s. An ‘experimental passion’ which was ‘propelled by influences from Western avant-garde theatre’ marked a crucial ‘break with Western naturalistic drama’³⁵ and informed the shift towards interdisciplinary, devised and multilingual forms that consciously reflected the pluralities of culture. Theatre doyens such as Arifin C. Noer in Indonesia, Krishen Jit in Malaysia, Rolando Tinio in the Philippines, Kuo Pao Kun in Singapore and Kamron Gunatilaka in Thailand responded to critical questions about becoming modern and revising the boundaries of what was local, attending in turn to issues of cultural change, social injustice and political bias, using Asian dramaturgies that were not determined in advance but which emerged as a result of particular fusions of performance forms and cultural vocabularies. Based primarily in urban centres, this work appealed to, and still does, an often ‘Western’ educated elite, seeking to be contextually grounded yet post-national all the same. Resisting the mainstream and inventing new frames for social and aesthetic engagement was effectively a ‘differing artistic response’ that practitioners took on to dismantle entrenched methods of artistic production, and thus veered towards ‘reacting more effectively to the demands of the immediate present.’³⁶ This locates the impulses of the contemporary practitioner as critically responding to the political in the broadest sense, while no less affected by local convulsions that occur.

Recognising the value of the approaches taken in earlier scholarship we have, as such, delineated the contemporary to, firstly, be demarcated temporally—as ‘contemporary performance in Southeast Asia.’ Three chapters—Varela’s examination of Wayang Kontemporer in Indonesia today, Polachan’s demarcation of authenticity in contemporary Thai musical theatre and Tan’s study of a recent Cambodian orchestral work, Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia—remind readers that theatre and performance in Southeast Asia today is inevitably tied to the past, to history and to tradition, their aesthetic practices, principles and beliefs, even if that relationship is marked by resistance and transformation. This umbilical affiliation reflects the inevitable regard of Southeast Asia’s identity (and its constituent countries) as a consequence of the postcolonial imagination. In ‘Wayang kontemporer : the politics of sponsorship and innovation,’ Varela writes about the transforming practice and reception of wayang kulit (Javanese shadow puppet) in Indonesia today. Wayang kulit being one of the oldest performance traditions in Java is a form that has been the target of government intervention, most notably during Suharto’s New Order (1966–1998). As Varela observes, wayang is a site of artistic contention and many contemporary experimental theatre companies have actively rejected wayang for its feudal values and antiquated conventions. Its elevation to the status of a national form also does not sit well with non-Javanese audiences and artists. These critical attitudes have not been lost to the practitioners of wayang kulit , and several dalangs (puppeteer-directors) have been making widely experimental, controversial interventions in the form during the past 15 years. The chapter examines how some current practitioners of wayang employ a variety of adaptive strategies to remain relevant to a rapidly modernising Indonesia. These include explicit questioning of the feudal values of wayang and its transformation to explore the perspectives of urban, working-class audiences. Some performances uncouple wayang from its Javanese context by embracing languages, stories or aesthetic conventions that speak to the cosmopolitan sensitivity of younger Indonesians within and without Java; others introduce radical experimentation with the explicit aim of conveying and safeguarding traditional values. The chapter considers wayang performances today that are located in between teater (western influenced theatre) and wayang, freely juxtaposing wayang conventions with hip hop music, video projections, live actors and puppets made of unconventional materials. As Varela posits, wayang kontemporer (contemporary) must be read against the complex political history that has included attempts to co-opt, resist and reimagine the performance tradition.

In her chapter, Polachan argues that contemporary Thai Broadway-style musical theatre produced by commercial theatre companies for commercial purposes, while perceived by the common imagination as that which is not ‘Thai,’ given that it does not explicitly present any traditional Thai aesthetics and is primarily a Western performance mode, embodies very much the qualities of authentic Thai theatre. Such forms of Thai theatre have been regarded by some Thai scholars as symptomatic of the current socio-cultural and political landscape of Thailand, which has seen significant Western influence in terms of capitalism, consumerism and materialism. One might then be led to believe that Thailand has lost its authenticity in the theatre arts as evidenced in these modern musical forms; these mainstream, contemporary musical productions, while based on Thai fables, folklore and novels, are staged in the format of Western musical theatres. By examining the various dramaturgical aspects, philosophies and principles reflected in Thai musical theatre, Polachan argues, on the contrary, that Thai contemporary theatre still retains authenticity amidst the shift to and adoption of Western performance principles and modes. Throughout history, assimilation and avoidance of confrontation have been core strengths of Thai culture, politics, religion and Thailand’s identity as a nation. Her research reveals that contemporary Thai theatre is authentic to the Thai core identity. Through assimilation, the main components of traditional Thai theatre are present in today’s Broadway-style performances: Thai contemporary musical theatre is a hybrid, a meeting of aspects of persistent authenticities in Thai performance and culture.

Tan’s ‘Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia: The Politics of Memory and an Aesthetics of Remembrance’ analyses a recent polycultural and intermodal performance that toured the U.S., France and Australia. It was commissioned by arts collective Cambodian Living Arts and created by two artists who are survivors of the Cambodian genocide. An interplay between music, song, film and choreography, the production commemorates the 40th anniversary of the end of the Khmer Rouge regime in which as many as three million people were persecuted and killed from 1975 to 1979. Bangsokol is a performance of memory and forgiveness through an excavation of the past, where performance and ritual intersect. Through a performative reiteration of the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal governance, presented as the interaction of dramatic forms, the production sought to excavate the past so as to exorcise present hauntings and reclaim a future through reconciliation and remembering. By interweaving Khmer Buddhist funerary rites with the Catholic requiem, Western orchestral sounds with Khmer sonicities, Bangsokol took the audience on a journey from lamentation to liberation. The chapter examines the performance’s politics of memory and considers what Marianne Hirsch terms ‘an aesthetics of remembrance in the aftermath of catastrophe.’ ³⁷ Tan analyses how the unique the polycultural and intermodal form in Bangsokol renegotiates history as legitimations of social and political power through an interpellation of shared affective memory to renew social memory: Bangsokol combined a Western requiem form with a libretto of Buddhist funerary texts in Pali, and the music involved sounds from a Western chamber ensemble, a traditional Cambodian court ensemble and Khmer smot chants. Such a polycultural dramaturgy advances Buddhist universal truth about suffering, hope and loving kindness. In its aesthetic politics, Bangsokol was not simply a performance of a ‘Cambodian experience,’ but a contemporary act of advocating the transformative potential and political responsibilities of performance in the contemporary.

Attempting to engage ‘the contemporary’ more broadly beyond that which is not simply a temporal adjective but a geopolitical condition which shapes artistic and performance practices in Southeast Asia, instead, permits alternative considerations of performances that do not merely attend to matters of cultural heritage, tradition or history, but instead engage overtly with theatre and performance in the contemporary. Earlier notions of political theatre in Southeast Asia were often tied to the struggles of citizen-artists in newly formed nation states who addressed unjust practices and authoritarian structures of effectively neocolonial governments, ironically the new oppressors of the people. Giving voice to the disenfranchised in society and questioning prevailing policies of discrimination rendered some performance makers targets of the state and susceptible to scrutiny and censorship, if not detention, for their purportedly ‘dangerous’ activity. The arrests in the 1970s of theatre leaders such as W.S. Rendra and Kuo Pao Kun for allegedly ‘illegal’ involvements can be read as potent deterrents to others becoming similarly critical of the government. In some instances, particular artists were blacklisted, such as Cecile Guidote, who founded the Philippines Educational Theater Association (PETA ), and other PETA leaders including Lino Brocka, Socrates Topacio and Lutgardo Labad who developed the idea of ‘theatre as a weapon for liberation’³⁸ during the martial law period. More recently particular art forms have been banned, such as Forum Theatre and Performance Art in Singapore, which were effectively disallowed for almost a decade from 1994 due to their being ‘seen as indirect threats to the authorship, authority and political legitimacy of the state.’³⁹ While this has never fully stemmed the tide of critique, with the effective use of allegory and metaphor to sustain oppositional voices and resist abuses of power, oppressive and suppressive climates also prod artists to innovate creative strategies for averting restriction and find loopholes that allow their work to continue being provocative, and remain incisive.

As contemporary artists in the region are not always burdened by the weight of aesthetic tradition and neither do they feel the need to adhere to state-prescribed national styles and forms, what is meant by the contemporary is then enlarged by experiments that engage politically with emergent content and diverse forms, drawn from multiple, perhaps even disparate, sources. In the Asian Theatre Journal’s special issue 31, no. 2, editor Matthew Cohen observes that ‘a new paradigm is emerging in which Southeast Asian theatre and performance are not being treated as the West’s exotic Other or in relation to nation building but as a site drawing interested parties into a conversation regarding both local and global issues.’⁴⁰ As inter-Asian cultural traffic increases, the notion of ‘global’ is redefined for ‘global’ in the context of Southeast Asian performance and is ‘no longer a surrogate for Western neo-imperialism.’⁴¹ Performance in Southeast Asia is to be seen as a ‘site of intersection’⁴² that involves all communities from various cultures; contemporary theatre is a conversation of local particularities and shared global concerns.

This forms the book’s second, more theoretical, underpinning of ‘the contemporary’ (as Southeast Asian theatre and performance in the contemporary) where local particularities attend to prevailing global concerns, such as the obscurity, precariousness and precarity of the political present consequent of the actions of and reactions