AcademiaEdu Curatorial Text IDF

Asian Theatre Journal, 2017

This book references huge quantities of primary and secondary historical source materials in Indonesian, Malay (as Indonesian was known before 1928), Javanese, and Dutch. As with any book dealing with Indonesia before 1972, orthography is complicated and needs explaining. After 1972, Indonesian (bahasa Indonesia) and other languages spoken in Indonesia used a standard orthography, the Enhanced Indonesian Spelling System, which is largely phonetic like Italian. Before then, aspects of spelling were derived from Dutch conventions. So c (pronounced like the "ch" in church) before 1972 was written tj, j was written dj, ny was written nj, and sy (pronounced like the "sh" in ship) was written sj. In addition, before 1947, the vowel i (pronounced like the "ee" in feet) was written ie, and u (pronounced like the "oo" in boot) was written oe. Spelling was not standardized in the pre-1947 period, and the same word could have multiple spellings even in a single source-thus stamboel, stambool, and stamboul for stambul. My tendency in this book is to use the Enhanced Indonesian Spelling System except when quoting from period sources, referring to titles or names of organizations, or referencing personal names better known by other spellings. Where relevant, I tend to use Javanese over Indonesian spellings, so pendhapa rather than pendopo. All translations, unless indicated, are my own. Emphases are in the original with ellipses in brackets to indicate omissions. In Indonesian, Javanese, and other source languages, there is no marked difference between singular and plural word forms, and in this book I follow the academic convention of not adding s's to the end of words in these languages to indicate plurality, assuming the reader can make sense of this from context of use. Artistic forms (wayang wong, keroncong) are in lower case and italicized, following the house style of Asian Theatre Journal, but on subsequent uses regularly appearing foreign genre names and terms appear in plain face.

Both Indonesia and Cambodia have extensive histories in the performing arts. Their traditions are different, but they share similarities that are closely linked in traditional stories, types of dance and theater. Both nations have faced political situations that created difficulty for art forms to survive. Through exchanges with Indonesian artists, dance and theater organizations, I hoped to bring key aspects of their success and apply them to Cambodia’s context. I examined the models of arts management, management of art space and the government’s role in supporting artistic expression. I wanted to live among artists to see how their lives might be different or similar to the lives of struggling artists in my homeland. I lived with artists to witness what they believed to be their most important and serious concerns as living artists. This experience helped me see the complex issues related to how individual artists, arts organizations and government agencies must see the arts as a valuable treasure for the whole nation and work together in making the arts grow. This value, when seen on a larger scale, makes civil society stronger and can help nations build their own identity and national harmony based on connected communities through arts.

In 1956, while on a Rockefeller Foundation grant to research contemporary art and culture in Indonesia, Claire Holt wrote an article for an Indonesian magazine , compared Graham's modern dance with Javanese dance. Translated into English, it was and published in the US dance annual Impulse in 1958 Holt herself was in an almost unique position to make this comparison. Born in 1901 a Latvian Jew, she grew up in Moscow before emigrating to the US in 1921. She trained as a journalist while taking dance classes, and in the late 1920s reviewed pioneering US modern dance work for the New York World. She spent the 1930s in Java as part of a vibrant western artistic and intellectual community living there at the time, working for Rolf De Maré's Paris-based Archives International de la Danse on an exhibition, book, and film on Javanese dance. She spent the war years, and much of the cold war in the US where her knowledge of Indonesia got her a job for the Intelligence services. Seeing the Martha Graham Company in Indonesia in 1955 in effect brought together two different parts of her life. This paper will present a close reading of Holt's article, identifying within it tensions between her in-depth knowledge of traditional Javanese court dance, her understanding of the liberal modernist ideologies underpinning Graham's work, and her enthusiasm for contemporary Indonesian art at a time when the country was newly independent from Dutch colonial rule. Paper presented at the conference 'Re-constructing Asianess(es) in the Global Age’ International Federation of Theatre Research. Seoul, 14-19 July 2008

Ethnomusicology, 2007