Performance in Southeast Asian history

Performance in Southeast Asian History

Sarah Weiss and Tony Day

Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History

Edited by Norman Owen (Routledge)

Due out in Spring 2013

“Performance” is taken in this chapter to include not just theatre, dance, and music, but also

ritual, spectacle, movies, television shows, radio broadcasts, popular song, and, to a limited degree,

literature. Throughout the history of Southeast Asia, performances in these genres have transmitted

cultural and political values, whether these have been ancient or modern, indigenous or foreign,

religious or secular, elite or peasant/proletarian, urban or rural, to society at all socioeconomic levels.

This fact makes the study of performance important for gaining an understanding of the role of culture

in shaping the history of the region. Three contexts for the history of performance receive attention

here: the relationship between performance and the state; the role of performance in the

communication of ideas and values from outside the region; and performance as a site for exploring

new identities and contesting the authority of those in power.

Before there were states in Southeast Asia, tribal societies played music, held dances, and recited

or sang epic and poetic texts during significant ritual events in order to display and add memorable

emphasis to the cultural values of the community. Indigenous ideas about male prowess, female

fertility, death, ancestors, and the supernatural forces at work in the universe would have been principal

themes in such performances. Bronze technology had been present in Southeast Asia since before 1000

BCE. In a casting tradition originating in the Dong Son culture of southern Vietnam, large bronze

drums were decorated with scenes of lavish elite rituals featuring musical instruments and elaborate

costumes. The technology required to produce such intricate decoration and such large drums (some

weigh more than 200 pounds) suggests highly skilled artisans with wealthy patrons (Spiller 2004: 8-

Performance in SEAsian History Weiss and Day

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9). Participation in ceremonial performances that included bronze instruments was an integral element

of elite society in Southeast Asia; most court cultures used and continue to use ensembles of bronze

instruments – gamelan, piphat, pin peat, kulintang – in the performance of ceremonies. The technology

traveled throughout the region and gong music is found even in remote places where there was no

court hierarchy. On the island of Mindoro in the Philippines the highland Hanunoo play bronze gongs

in ensembles for feasts and celebrations. The instruments are highly prized and considered to be rare by

the Hanunoo, who acquired them through trade with other Southeast Asians (Spiller 2004: 9).

When states began forming in the first century CE, Indian and Chinese modes of cultural

expression, which had entered the region via trading contacts or (in the case of Vietnam ) direct foreign

rule, altered how indigenous performances were enacted, what their significance was, and how they

were memorialized. Scenes on the walls of temples in Java and Cambodia dedicated to the worship of

Indian gods commemorate Indian mythological stories: sculpted figures, identifiably Javanese and

Khmer men and women, perform dances and rituals that are Indic in style and function yet indigenous

in form and cultural significance. There is a similar intercultural dialog within the Chinese-language

poetry written in fourteenth-century Vietnam. Older ideas about prowess, fertility, and death are

emphasized in Javanese and Cambodian temple reliefs, while the local Southeast Asian landscape and

sense of place can be detected in Vietnamese court poetry. But these performative media also

proclaimed the “civilizing” ambitions of the state, carried out according to ideas taken from Indian

texts, myths, and visual forms or from Chinese histories and poetic conventions. The building of

Hindu or Buddhist temples and the writing and recital of Chinese-style poems were performative acts

that served to increase and centralize state power. “In Angkor, cults to deceased members of the royal

family . . . transformed relatives into powerful Hindu gods through acts of public ritual and temple

building that created the social conditions for a greater centralization of power” (Day 2002: 50).

From this early period onward, the performing arts were developed by Southeast Asian states as

a major vehicle for communicating the cultural superiority of ruling elites and their values, a superiority

based in large part on the foreign sources of “civilization” to which the state laid claim. Commenting on


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the cosmopolitan world of the tax-exempt elite (munnai) in fifteenth and sixteenth century Ayudhya

(Ayutthaya), Victor Lieberman suggests how the diffusion of elite culture throughout the kingdom

helped centralize the state: “From diction and dress to drama, religious doctrine, poetry, and

architecture, the capital set the standard for munnai throughout the kingdom” (Lieberman 2003: 272).

But Indian-style dance and Chinese-style poetry were not the only kinds of performance that

represented and augmented state power in early Southeast Asia. Appearances by the king in public

processions through the countryside or on the large rivers where their palaces were located,

accompanied by their loud bronze musical ensembles (which they also took with them into battle),

were also “performances” displaying the wealth, power, and sacredness of the ruler, as well as

providing opportunities for onlookers to obtain religious salvation by offering homage to the king as he

passed by (Day 2002: 75).

European traders, who began arriving in Southeast Asia in the early sixteenth century, wrote

detailed accounts about the continuing importance of processions and other ritualized events in the life

of the Theravada Buddhist, Confucian, and Islamic states of the region. Anthony Reid remarks that

state “pageantry was the most effective way in which the citizenry was incorporated into the hierarchic

state,” but the “arrival of the northern Europeans must have sounded a faint but ominous note for this

important hierarchic function” of pageantry because Europeans often flouted “the rules of the

hierarchic game” (Reid 1988: 181). However, an account of an early seventeenth-century trade

mission to the kingdom of Aceh in northern Sumatra describes Europeans engaging in trade with a

Southeast Asian ruler according to rules of protocol and precedent and demonstrates how the

competitive choreography of who paid respect to whom and by what means took on an economic

significance (Day 2002: 175-8).

State rituals and processions gave rise to economic activity generally, which generated audiences

for all kinds of popular performances. Markets appeared when masses of people gathered to witness

spectacles of royal power (Reid 1988: 182). Performances of music, dance, and magic were a part of

these festive market days, with “actors, entertainers” along with “peddlers, peasants, itinerant monks . .


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.and scholars” drawn from the hinterlands into urban centers for the occasion (Lieberman 2003: 57-

8). A fourteenth-century court poem from eastern Java, the Desawarnana (Nagarakrtagama), which

describes and dates royal processions, economic exchanges, and religious festivals during the reign of

King Hayam Wuruk of Majapahit (1350-89), shows the interconnections among performance,

economic activity, and royal power.

World religions spread throughout Southeast Asia by means of performance, generally

reinforcing state power. But religious performances also furnished an idiom for resisting state

authority. Between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, according to Lieberman, village

culture and ritual in Burma became increasingly “suffused with the Jatakas and Buddhist maxims,” as

Buddhism spread to all levels of society, breaking down localisms in favor of a pan-Burma sense of

identity prior to the rise of nationalism (Lieberman 2003: 196). In the Philippines Catholicism,

introduced by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, reinforced the authority of both the indigenous elite

and the colonial overlords (Day 2002: 74-5). But the translation of the story of Christ’s passion into

Tagalog served as the basis for a nineteenth-century text, the Pasyon Pilapil, which was used for

dramatic readings and enactments by rural people in Luzon. In his landmark study Pasyon and

Revolution Reynaldo Ileto argues that public recitals and theatrical enactments of this text encouraged

peasants to transcend their ties to family and locality and follow the example of Jesus in a collective

fight against oppression, a struggle that would lead to the establishment of “a new era of mankind” and

a new nation (Ileto 1979: 16, 21). Anticolonial rebel leaders like Apolinario de la Cruz and nationalist

martyrs like José Rizal became associated in the popular mind with Christ’s story, seen as an allegory

for the struggle for national independence.

Another important performance genre in Southeast Asia that has for centuries played a dual

role, both reinforcing and subverting the power of the ruling elite, is puppet theatre. In central and

eastern Java the most popular repertoire for shadow-puppet theatre (wayang kulit) comes from the

Hindu epic Mahabharata. The story of the fratricidal war between the Pandawas and their cousins the

Kurawas was easily mapped onto the struggles between rival families in eastern and central Java from


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early times to the early nineteenth century, lending these petty yet violent conflicts the grandeur of

universality and a “civilized” beauty imported from afar. Wayang kulit also provided ideological support

for the authority of the ruling Javanese elite (Day 2002: 236-51). But in their local Javanese

adaptations and wide diffusion amongst all socioeconomic strata, wayang kulit performances came to

fulfill several other important cultural functions. They served as handbooks of proper moral conduct,

shaping attitudes about social hierarchy and power, particularly among the central Javanese male elite,

guiding both that elite’s rationalizing acceptance of colonial domination and its eventual nationalistic

rejection of it.

Wayang kulit became an encyclopedia of Javanese social and gender stereotypes so universal that

they were used to “read” the character and motivation of the Dutchmen who invaded and colonized

Indonesia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. This misreading of actual Dutch colonial

intentions, along with other baleful effects of Javanese culture on modern Indonesian society, was later

decried by modern-day Indonesian critics. Wayang kulit characters and plays served as an allegorical

prism for viewing Indonesian national politics in the twentieth century, too.

From the nineteenth century onward, wayang kulit has also become a repository of Javanese

cultural values and aesthetics: in the areas of music, ethnic identity, and language; through the

development of a repertoire of musical pieces played by the gamelan orchestra as accompaniment to

performance; through the theatrical representations of male and female character and behavior

(constantly updated to reflect the times); and through the way in which it continues to display, even at

its most modern, the nuances and beauty of the Javanese language, still the mother tongue of millions

of people who also speak, read, and write Indonesian in their workday lives (Weiss 2006).

This is not to say that puppet theatre in Java or elsewhere in Southeast Asia has never addressed

issues of change in a critical fashion or expressed values of the rural or urban poor. Even in the most

courtly form of wayang kulit social commentary critical of the elite has been delivered by the down-to-

earth, everyday-vernacular-speaking, and supernaturally powerful clown characters, who act as servants

to the knightly Indic heroes with their rarefied manners and courtly speech. In southern Thailand since


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the nineteenth century the most important characters in nang talung (a rural form of shadow-puppet

theatre) were the clowns. From the 1980s onward, in “modern”-style plays (as opposed to the

“traditional” style favored by the Thai government and educational institutions), these clowns, who are

also thought to possess saksit (magical potency), have adopted a contemporary, regional perspective on

religious, social, and political issues, singing popular songs taken from radio and television, and

speaking the southern dialect of Thai to humorous and much appreciated effect. They crack jokes about

sex, regional identity, and the Westernized consumerist culture of the audience who flock to Buddhist

temple fairs, the venue for performances. In Java, too, puppet theatre has been a source of regional

identity and pride. In the 1990s, observers noted that performances of the eastern Javanese regional

style of wayang kulit and of the highly popular wayang golek (theatre with hand-held wooden puppets)

of western Java celebrated regional identities, musical styles, and local language, while also conveying

sharply critical commentary on the authoritarian military state under General Suharto, dominated by

men from central Java.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Southeast Asia played host to myriad international

performance ensembles working their way through Asia and across the globe. Circus troupes,

vaudeville acts, and variety shows (called komedi, “comedy,” in the Netherlands Indies) from Australia,

Great Britain, and the United States; acrobats from Japan; Wild West shows; opera singers from

France; magic shows from China and Europe; and Parsi theatre companies from India were among the

offerings. All of these itinerant performers travelled back and forth among the towns and cities of

colonized Southeast Asia, widening the “horizons of imagination, the possibilities for self-

transformation, and the potentials of interethnic solidarity” in the region (Cohen 2006: 1-27). Such

performances complemented and brought to life, through their multinational casts and the eclectic

nature of their repertoires, the information, images, and sounds of the outside world that were also

reaching Southeast Asian urban audiences via newspapers, which began appearing from the middle of

the nineteenth century; radio broadcasts, which began in the 1920s; and phonograph recordings,

increasingly popular from the 1890s onward. These modern media and types of performance helped

create an urban public culture in the early twentieth century that was largely independent of ruling


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elites and state control.

Parsi theatre in particular, with its mixture of “melodrama, song and dance, and spectacle” that

anticipated Bollywood film, its Western stage technology, and its use of the proscenium stage,

stimulated the formation of multiethnic, commercial theatre companies in British Malaya, Singapore,

and the Dutch Netherlands Indies. Called bangsawan (“of the aristocratic class”) in Malaya and komedi

stambul (“Istanbul comedy”) in the Netherlands Indies, these two variants of early twentieth-century

Western-style theatre performed on proscenium stages, which assumed similar forms throughout

Southeast Asia, offered plays filled with song, dance, and spectacle, based on Hindustani, Arabic,

Chinese, European, and Malay stories or on current events, with modern stage effects that “shocked”

and thrilled urban audiences from the 1890s to the 1930s (Cohen 2006).

Most importantly, bangsawan and komedi stambul showed Southeast Asians “what it meant to

enact a role and fostered a belief that it was possible to transcend the limitations of birth and transform

oneself into something else” in ways that puppet theatre, for example, with its fixed Indic repertoire of

sacred epic stories and limited range of character types, could not do (Cohen 2006:15). In the

Netherlands Indies, radio and phonograph recordings brought to households throughout the

archipelago kroncong music, which absorbed and further popularized the melodies of komedi stambul

and gamelan and eventually became the musical form that many nationalists selected for their

revolutionary lagu perjuangan (songs of struggle) in the 1940s (Lockard 1998: 63-6).

“I am a tactful person/And enter and perform in pants”: These lines, from a poem about an

actress and her Chinese lover, are attributed to one of the most famous woman actors and directors of

komedi stambul from the 1890s, Lien Gemser, and suggest the transformative effect of urbanization and

modernity on gender roles in Southeast Asia in the early twentieth century (Cohen 2006: 249). A play

that explored the new feelings of empowerment and agency being felt by women was Nyai Dasima,

based on a Malay-language novella published in 1896. Popular in the repertoires of both bangsawan

and komedi stambul, the story concerns a concubine who decides to abandon the security and status of

her life with her colonial master, along with their daughter, to return to the village, convert to Islam,


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and marry a local man. Although the moral of the story is given a paternalistic, colonial twist, since

Dasima is murdered by her new husband, who is really only interested in her money (as if to say:

“Beware the attractions of Islam and its anticolonial, proto-nationalist message!”), the tale highlights

the fact that women in early twentieth-century Southeast Asia were freer than ever before to make

decisions for themselves, a freedom that included the ability to imagine being not a colonial subject but

an independent “Indonesian.” Njai Dasima was made into a film in 1929, three years after the very

first locally produced movie was shown in the Netherlands Indies, with two sequels the following year

and a post-independence version in 1970.

American films dominated the market in the region from the early twentieth century onward,

stirring anxiety in the minds of colonial authorities already fearful about the spread of communism.

These movies, with their “scenes of crime and depravity” and actual kissing, according to a report

published in The Times of London on 18 September 1926, accounted for the growing “loss of respect

for the European” in Southeast Asia (quoted in Heide 2002: 121-2). In the Netherlands Indies,

Chinese filmmakers who had emigrated from Shanghai, the undisputed capital of the movie industry in

Asia, produced films in the late 1920s and 1930s that reflected diasporic Chinese nationalism rather

than the “Indonesian” national pride of the local Chinese community (Sen 1994: 14-5). The first

Chinese-directed film to address a pan-“Indonesian” audience, and the first to employ sound, was

Terang Boelan (Full Moon) (1936), based on The Jungle Princess, starring Dorothy Lamour (Said

1991: 24-7). Although Terang Boelan criticized traditional prohibitions against young lovers choosing

their own partners in marriage, it was largely set in “the glamorous, foreign settings of Singapore and

Malaya” rather than the villages or cities of the Indies (Sen 1994: 16-7). In the view of at least one

leading Indies intellectual of the time, the film industry in the Netherlands Indies was too “Chinese”

and thus at odds with the concerns of the nationalistic “Indonesian” intelligentsia (Said 1991: 29).

By contrast, the first locally produced Malay-language film in British Malaya, Laila Majnun

(1933), reflected the strong influence of Indian Parsi theatre and Malay bangsawan in Singapore and

Malaya (Heide 2002: 124-6). Singapore's Shaw (originally Shao) Brothers, part of the filmmaking


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diaspora from Shanghai, made use of bangsawan themes and actors in their 170 Malay-language

movies, but other Chinese directors did not. Indian immigrants directed the most popular Malayan

films. The most famous Malayan movie star of the 1950s, former bangsawan performer P. Ramlee,

appealed to audiences across ethnic lines by playing roles “embedded within the melodramatic form,

with an emphasis on heightened emotion and starkly delineated conflicts, exemplified by constructing

the relationship between hero and heroine across class, ethnic or religious borders” (Heide 2002: 138-

9).

The first film was shown in Bangkok in 1897, with British and American film companies

visiting Siam soon after to exhibit their latest productions. But local movie making did not begin until

the arrival in 1904 of a Japanese businessman, Watanabe Tomoyori, who showed strongly nationalistic

documentaries about the Russo-Japanese war and established the first permanent movie theatre in

Siam the next year. These documentaries “provided a good deal of inspiration for budding Siamese

nationalists by projecting potent images of a ‘progressive’ Asian nation defeating a European power in

war and forcefully asserting its own independence.” The leading Siamese filmmaker in the 1910s was a

Sino-Thai businessman who was fluent in English, Malay, and Hokkien in addition to Thai and

successfully competed against a film company backed by King Vajiravudh. In 1922, a brother of the

future king Prajadhipok (himself a film enthusiast) established the Royal Siamese Railway Film Unit to

make documentaries about the Siamese royalty and their participation in the modernization of Siam.

This was the beginning of the Thai state’s use of documentary films to give the public “a heightened

sense of their rulers, their fellow compatriots, and the territory they inhabited” (Barmé 2002: 44-5,

53).

Movies in pre-World War II Siam introduced local audiences to a wide range of Western

heroes, heroines, and locations, displaying new behavioral options, new fashions, and new social

practices, like smoking for women. From 1918, movies also stimulated new Thai writing. A new group

of middle-class writers produced Thai-language film booklets (plot synopses), then film magazines, to

which audiences could send letters expressing their own opinions, finally original fiction inspired by the


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movies. “Over time,” observes Scot Barmé, “the cinema-publishing nexus proved to be a particularly

fertile training ground for aspiring young middle-class writer-journalists.” Movie houses provided a

public space where classes and sexes met and clashed. Women in particular showed their independence

by going to the movies, a scene reproduced in many works of fiction of the time. Moviegoers included

aristocrats as well as “middle- and low-level government officials, clerks . . . sales staff . . . wage

laborers, rickshaw men, washerwomen, street vendors, prostitutes, and petty criminals” (Barmé 2002:

51, 70, 43-95).

After the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932, the Thai state “recruited” an idealized

“Miss Siam” (after 1939, “Miss Thailand”), building Thai nationalism through promotion of an

annual beauty pageant. The government of Phibun Songkhram (1938-44), in particular, used the

pageant to project an image of Thai women as naturally beautiful, healthy, and “exemplary procreators

of the future,” reflecting Phibun’s admiration for European fascism but framed in traditional,

aristocratic terms of “social class and looks” (Barmé 2002: 234-36). Phibun made two films of his own

in 1934 and 1940 promoting militarism and nationalism, themes that the Japanese occupiers of

Southeast Asia (1941-45) also highlighted in their documentary films about military victories over

European colonial powers, radio broadcasts of martial songs, staged displays of traditional Japanese

warrior skills, and military parades before mass audiences.

In the Cold War period in Southeast Asia (from 1948 to the late 1980s), cultural

decolonization was complicated by the challenge posed by new kinds of imperialism, as the region

became a battleground between the Eastern and Western blocs. Despite the communist victory against

the United States in the battle for Vietnam (1975), American culture won the war for control over

hearts and minds in Southeast Asia. American films and popular music in particular saturated postwar

markets in the region. In Vietnam, 70 percent of the films shown in 1945-6 were American. In

Thailand, Hollywood films that heightened paranoia about a global communist takeover stimulated the

production of Thai movies in which not just communists but local Chinese were labeled “Red” enemies

of the nation.


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But nowhere was Cold War cultural imperialism more apparent than in the Philippines, where a

massive postcolonial American cultural, economic, and military presence, together with a communist

insurgency (1946-54), the persistent legacies in politics and language of the American colonial past,

and the multiethnic, archipelagic character of the nation provoked an intense search for an independent

and unitary Filipino national identity, a search played out in the films of Lamberto Avellana between

1953 and 1957, for example. In 1983 critic Doreen Fernandez said that “Philippine films, TV

programs, music, comics, and popular literature” are “patently built on the American plan” (quoted in

Lockard 1998: 129).

Since before the war, Filipino musicians had been mimicking American singers at home and

performing American music before audiences all over Asia. But during the period of martial law

declared in 1972 by President Ferdinand Marcos (1965-86), a style of popular music known as pinoy,

“a deft blend of rock, folk, and ballads not sung in English but in Tagalog (Pilipino),” became

immensely popular among all classes of Filipino society and represented “a conscious attempt to create

a Filipino national and popular culture.” In the 1970s, the “pinoy pioneer” Florante sang of the

liberating effect of his song Laya (Free): “If you listen to my song now/ You will say that you’ve heard

this before/ But now the words are different/They’re already in Tagalog.” The greatest of the pinoy

singer-songwriters was Freddie Aguilar (b.1953), who dropped out of school at the age of sixteen to

become a street performer, composing in that year his hit song Anak (Child), which sold 100,000

copies in the first two weeks of its release. In albums appearing between 1983 and 1985, Aguilar’s

songs addressed problems of Christian-Muslim conflict in Mindanao, child prostitution, the plight of

the powerless, poverty, and the “arrogance” of both the United States and the Soviet Union. Aguilar

became an active participant in the EDSA revolution that ousted Marcos from power (Lockard 1998:

133-46). Since the end of the Marcos era, Filipino musicians like Joey Ayala and the group Asin (Salt)

have used both traditional and regional ethnic as well as Western instruments to make music that

addresses questions of national and regional identity and experience (Lockard 1998: 154-7).

Throughout Southeast Asia regional as well as diasporic identities were interrogated or


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confirmed by means of performance. Since the 1960s phleng luk thung (country music), broadcast to

every corner of Thailand via radio and audiocassettes, has been exploring what it means to be rural,

poor, from the northeast, and a migrant worker in Bangkok. On the other hand the art films directed

in the 2000s by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, from Khon Kaen in the northeast, transform provincial,

rural Thai – who in phleng luk thung songs and socialist realist movies from the 1970s and 80s embody

“moral decency” confronted by the corruption and evil of the Westernized city – into alienated,

postmodern, transgressive figures who resist the authority both of the state and of linear, historical

time, searching for the meaning of existence in the primordial jungle. During the 1990s in southern

Vietnam, the “sensual rhythms, harmonies and melodies, themes of lost love, and sultry croonings of

yore” from re-recordings of pre-1975 music, smuggled back home by Vietnamese now living in

Orange County, California, could be heard on every radio and in every roadside café (Taylor 2001:

55). The revival of traditional Cambodian masked theatre (lkhaon khaol) became a source of cultural

renewal in rural Cambodia after the end of the Pol Pot era (1975-9), while the study of classical dance,

which received more support from international agencies than any other Khmer performance genre in

the 1990s, reawakened memories of being Khmer among immigrant families living in Los Angeles.

Indonesia’s most popular contemporary music, dangdut, developed out of band music from Deli

in northern Sumatra dating from the colonial period, influenced by music from Indian films popular

during the 1950s, with an added transcultural infusion from British and American pop music, which

began flowing into and all around Indonesia by means of audiocassettes after the fall of Sukarno in

1966-7. In the 1970s dangdut became the favorite music of the powerless “underclass” of Indonesia,

the common masses or rakyat, true heirs to the ideals of the Indonesian Revolution, yet still not truly

liberated in an economic or political sense. Dangdut gave “mournful” voice and “joyous” release to these

people (dangdut is always accompanied by sensual, joyful dancing), but offered them moral instruction

as well, with a strong Islamic emphasis: how to conduct themselves as husbands, wives, and upright

individuals in everyday life. Dangdut also commented critically on the social problems of the poor,

appealing to those opposed to Suharto’s New Order regime. In the 1990s the state promoted in

sponsored concerts and on TV “a glamorous and subdued” version of dangdut as the “national” music


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of all Indonesians. For the rakyat, however, the “public approval of dangdut by high government

officials, bureaucrats, middle classes, or elites made little difference,” since it had always been and

would always remain their music (Weintraub 2010: 171 and passim).

After Suharto’s fall in 1998, recordings of live performances have been locally and privately

made, circulating widely in unregistered video compact discs [VCDs], bringing regional styles and

sexually liberated, provocatively “porno” female performers to larger and larger audiences of

Indonesians eager for greater cultural, gender, and political freedom. The most famous dangdut

performer, Rhoma Irama (b.1946), once said that dangdut “has become so popular because it is so

basic to the soul of indigenous people”(Weintraub 2010: 83-84). Dangdut may be Indonesian “soul

music,” but it has been constructed as such by performers, the rakyat, and the Indonesian state out of a

multicultural musical grab bag of (Sumatran) Melayu, Indian, Arab, and Anglo-American elements,

mixed together, performed live, and commodified in the form of audiocassettes and VCDs, radio, TV,

and the movies.

Two other examples from twenty-first-century Southeast Asia illustrate the complex

interactions among transnational cultural flows, the state, local culture, commoditization, and the

formation of national or subnational identities. Started in 1977, but with an ancestry that stretches

back to 1963 and the first South-East Asia Cultural Festival, the Singapore Arts Festival has become

one of the major arts festivals on the regional and international circuit. Presented in a US$345 million

dollar performing arts center, the Festival’s events are watched by hundreds of thousands of

international visitors every year. Since 2000, international Festival entries have become more and more

experimental, but although they are “slickly packaged,” they lack “a visceral punch or [any

engagement] with contemporary life or politics.” Although one of the Festival’s stated aims has been to

introduce international audiences to the best new plays from Singapore, the commissioned work at the

2007 Festival was, in the view of theatre critic William Peterson, “generic and uniformly contentless . .

. in spite of its cleverness, surface gloss, and the overlay of Singaporean culture” (Peterson 2009: 123-

24). What the Singapore Arts Festival adds up to, according to Peterson, is an effort to produce and


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market what the sociologist George Ritzer calls “grobal” culture (i.e., growth + global = “grobal”):

apolitical, gutted of local content, and, like Coca Cola or Gucci bags, designed to be marketable to

everyone everywhere (Peterson 2009: 116, 119, 123-4, 128). Like the decision to end discrimination

against Singapore gays and allow the staging of gay-themed plays and Mardi Gras celebrations in order

to turn the city into “Asia’s new gay capital,” the Singapore Arts Festival expresses a marketing strategy

to “sell” Singapore to the world rather than actual openness to new ideas and lifestyles.

Singapore’s backing for gay events is also a tactic to strengthen the loyalty of gays to the nation-

state, while at the same time defusing the potential of any gay rights movement to radicalize local

culture and politics. A similar motive lay behind state support for a sports and culture event for the

Mien (Yao) highland ethnic minority in northern Chiangmai Province, Thailand, in 2001. The Thai

state, particularly under King Vajiravudh (r.1910-25), had long promoted sports like soccer and

boxing as part of royal effort to build a modern nation-state. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, the

Thai military attacked Mien, Hmong, and other highland minorities whom they suspected of

supporting the communist insurgency. As Hjorleifur Jonsson notes, for “decades, highland peoples

have been defined as an obstacle to national integration” because of their “primitive” slash-and-burn

agriculture and border-crossing migratory practices.” At the Mien Fair of 2001, Thai schoolteachers

served as referees for matches of soccer, takraw (a kind of volleyball played with the feet using a rattan

ball), volleyball, basketball, table tennis, handball, and petong (bowls). State officials and regulations

were involved in all aspects of the four-day event (Jonsson 2003: 302-22).

In the evening, cultural performances highlighted the cultural changes that have taken place as

the Mien have become increasingly integrated into the Thai nation-state. The various musical pieces

and dances presented were no longer aspects of ritual exchange and status display among competing

Mien households, but performances that re-invented the meaning of “traditional” Mien culture for

both participants and onlookers. Similarly the display of a color photocopy of the Mien charter text, the

Kia Shen Pong, which formerly defined their relations with the outside world, now served “to define

Mien to themselves.” The whole event shifted the Mien social hierarchy, foregrounding the sports-


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playing and Thai-educated young, as opposed to the older generation, while raising the status of men

and diminishing that of women. “Engagements with the national sphere have facilitated the

embodiment of Mien as an entity,” Jonsson writes, “and sport plays a central role in mapping the ethnic

community through the nation’s administrative units into a league that identifies Mien to themselves”

(Jonsson 2003: 329-34).

This chapter has sampled some of the different kinds of performance that have played an

important role in shaping the cultural, political, and economic history of Southeast Asia over many

centuries. Since the beginning of recorded history, Southeast Asian states have made use of

performance to display power and communicate certain values to their subjects. Performances have

served not simply as a conduit by which new ideas, both religious and secular, have entered the region

from the outside world, but also as a creative matrix through which those ideas have become localized,

absorbed, and reimagined within the cultures of Southeast Asia. In the modern era, music and film,

whether heard on the radio, seen at the movies, or watched on television and the Internet, have been

the most important performance media for the transmission of transformational values. Yet despite the

persistent ability of the state to co-opt performance genres of every kind, there has never been a

performance in Southeast Asia that did not provide opportunities for performers to contest the state’s

authority or explore the possibilities for new kinds of individual and collective identity.

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Performance in Southeast Asian history

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