Women in Asian Performance

Aesthetics and politics

Arya Madhavan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138917811
• eBook ISBN: 9781317422235
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Women in Asian Performance offers a vital re-assessment of women's contributions to Asian performance traditions, focusing for the first time on their specific historical, cultural and performative contexts.

Arya Madhavan brings together leading scholars from across the globe to make an exciting intervention into current debates around femininity and female representation on stage. This collection looks afresh at the often centuries-old aesthetic theories and acting conventions that have informed ideas of gender in Asian performance. It is divided into three parts:

• erasure – the history of the presence and absence of female bodies on Asian stages;
• intervention – the politics of female intervention into patriarchal performance genres;
• reconstruction – the strategies and methods adopted by women in redefining their performance practice.

Establishing a radical, culturally specific approach to addressing female performance-making, Women in Asian Performance is a must-read for scholars and students across Asian Studies and Performance Studies.

PART I
Erasure

1
THE WOMAN THING

Issues and advances for women in Sundanese performance

Kathy Foley

This chapter explores gendered genres of West Java. The court/aristocratic dancer (bedaya) of Sunda developed under Javanese influence in the courts of Ciamis and Bandung in West Java’s highlands (Durban Arjo, 1989, 2014) and the ronggeng (village professional dancer/singer-courtesan) were distinct but complementary female artists and both replicate patterns of women in the Southeast Asian performance world.¹ The court dancer was under the purview of the aristocratic lord as consort, offspring and palace lady. The village singer dancers appeared both in palace social dances (generally known as tayuban in Javanized areas) and in village/urban dance-song displays where females might be replaced by transvestite males (see Foley, 2015). Such events could include plays – usually a dance opening might be followed by melodramatic story that ended with couple dancing between the courtesan-dancers and the male audience members (Foley, 1989; Spiller, 2010). In these courtesan forms, a male clown often acted as troupe head and had ritual functions. These clowns sometimes burnt incense and did ritual opening mantra. One could argue that in the mind of the local community they were an amalgam, combining ideas of shamanic priest and pimp. In an early period the pattern may have been related to Hindu sects like the Saivite Kalamukas, who had connections with temple dancers in India, a tradition that may have affected Java and its courts (Sutterheim, 1956). The women dancer-singers had artistic careers that flourished while they were youthful, but they customarily retired as they married, or older women might become trainers of younger women and shift to comic roles as beauty faded.

Men in West Java, by contrast, were generally prized for dramatic expertise in puppetry (wayang) and mask (topeng) dance (in solo and group performance). While women ideologically could participate in these genres, in practice in the Sundanese highlands women did not do puppetry. They did solo mask dance performance (topeng) as they migrated from the north coast but, over time, generally abandoned their masks. In both traditional and contemporary work in West Java, it remains difficult for women to have access to all roles (especially strong male characters) in genres that historically were primarily male – rod puppetry (wayang golek), mask (wayang topeng) and multi-actor unmasked theatre (wayang wong). By contrast, men can rather easily – using puppets, masks or movement patterns that specify gender – play cross-gender, an imbalance in favour of males.

A cause for this differentiation comes from the preconceived functions appropriate to each sex. Female forms link to fertility/the fun of the Sundanese rice harvest and courtship. Male forms relate to power and exorcistic potential embodied in a rite called ruwatan (“making safe”; see Foley, 2001), a ritual usually reserved for the oldest male in a performance lineage. This presents a frontier which females cannot cross. Women breach boundaries in secular presentations, but the “sacred” reinforces male gender prerogatives in traditional arts, since maleness and protective potency are aligned. Will these borders maintain or will the whole idea of “cosmic performance”, which puppetry and mask theatre represent in West Java, melt in the globalized digital-technological world? The answer remains unclear. But, in the same way that the Catholic church, by maintaining a male priesthood, aligns sacramental power with maleness, ritual performance in West Java is restricted to the older men, creating a barrier that women have yet to break.

This chapter will start with personal experiences. I will point to the contradiction between a gender-neutral performance ideology – which is beyond gender – and contrasts with actuality that, except in modern dance and theatre, in tradition women had the gender-defined space of bedaya (court dancer) or ronggeng. I will conclude my discussion of gender dynamics in Indonesian performances with brief comparisons to other Asian genres.

Personal perspectives on taking up a “male” genre

When I turned up in Indonesia in 1978 to research the wayang golek rod puppetry of West Java, I did not realize that gender was an issue. I knew of the presence of some Javanese female dalang (puppetmaster), whose history goes back at least to the legendary Nyi Panjangmas, who in the 1670s is said to have served as a dalang for the forces of Raden Trunojaya in East Java that were fighting against the ruler Amangkurat Agung (1646–77) and his Dutch allies (Cooper, 1994; Sky, 2011). As a student in the USA, I had been part of a class in Berkeley in 1974 that included women students, which inspired I Nyoman Sumandhi to train the first Balinese female dalangs at the high school of performing arts in Denpasar, Bali (Goodlander, 2012). I had even heard that there was one Sundanese woman in the Karawang area of West Java who was a puppeteer. When my dalang friends encouraged me to become a pasinden (Sundanese, female singer [Javanese: pesindhen]) or tukang ibing (Sundanese dancer) – contemporary roles where females were welcome in the arts – I would cite the lady dalang of Karawang. I later learnt that she was unusual – seen as a lesbian with her pasinden as partner – and she was not considered a normative woman.

As I grew more conversant, I was directed toward the women dalang of Losari near Cirebon (still in West Java but outside the Sundanese area), notably Ibu Sawitri, later my teacher of mask dance. Though I personally only saw her do topeng dance, she had on occasion performed wayang kulit (shadow puppetry) like the men in her family (Sawitri, 1988). I found some Javanese and Balinese women puppeteers when I went to the (once every five years) Pekan Wayang Indonesia (Indonesia Wayang Festival) in 1978, but in Sunda there was little movement in a female direction. The lone female student at the high school of performing arts (in the wayang course that was soon closed down) did not persist to a professional career, and teachers and all other students were male. Female friends from dalang families would sing or dance (usually only in their home village performances) but did not perform puppetry. Most married by 18, the age when their brothers were just emerging as solo puppeteers. Prior to that age the boys would usually only do short kaul (vow) segments in their fathers’ shows to advertise skills in manipulation and humour, allowing the father/teacher a break in their night-long show. With marriage, women in dalang families (except for some topeng cirebon dancers discussed later), would normally stop dancing/singing. Husbands and sons were the musicians, carvers and puppeteers. The women were conversant with these wayang arts, but not performers. To date there are no continuing practising female dalang in Sunda, perhaps because there has not been the ongoing intervention of training puppeteers in the West Java academy, as there has been in Bali and Java. Additionally, there is the persistence of wayang as a largely rural phenomenon in an era where Islamic values have encouraged conservatism, especially outside the city, so most dalang families have not encouraged females to join the practice. The closest, perhaps, was one daughter of my teacher Dalang Abah (Abeng) Sunarya, who in 2014 reported that she had begun, after her children grew up, to teach dance (not puppetry) at a local high school. In selected instances, women from traditional arts families could and do continue to dance and sing if their husbands approve, but more often one finds women participating regularly only if they are widowed/divorced. Puppetry is male.

My dalang friends/teachers frankly told me that wayang was too abot (heavy) for a woman. Technique and themes were created by and for male bodies. There was the vocal technique that I learned to roughly emulate, but which was based upon resonances for males with a falsetto head voice for female characters, contrasting with a chest voice to produce deep, guttural demonic cries. Dance movement in wayang wong for strong characters read best when large body size or strength was available. It is arguably easier for men to learn to scale down energy use than it is for females to blow up – the small, internally controlled female gestures could contrast with large and externally scattering male/demon gestures. Upper body strength to hold heavy puppets and full body height in strong dance characters is useful.

Themes in the repertoire highlighted “male” concerns and the material presented targeted a primarily male viewership. A wayang plot often pits two groups of male warriors – one more gagah/kasar (strong/rough), and the other more lemes/alus (refined/well-bred) – against each other, arguing over a bride/magical power/ kingdom to be won. The male-focused classical structure was articulated to me during lessons at the Sekolah Menengah Karawitan (SMKI [High School of the Arts]) of Bandung, where I studied in the late 1970s (even if the model was not consistently found in contemporary performances). Three battles occur. One is inconclusive in that no one dies (perang gagal); the second, perang kembang (flower battle), represents the coming of age of a male hero who conquers negative forces represented by the defeat of stock ogres; and, finally, comes a perang agung (great war) wherein the hero normally kills the major antagonist. The female was, of course, included. But, aside from those odd plots, where Srikandi and Sumbadra, two beautiful wives of the hero Arjuna, get bored waiting for their husband to return and disguise themselves as males (a story type more normal to book synopses than performance practice), women were largely a plot device. “She” represents the prize in the marriage contest or the kidnapped person needing help. Even when Srikandi and Sumbadra set off disguised as men, they would normally be captured, requiring their husband’s rescue mission. These stories are not about her: “she” triggers male interactions. Narratively, women often functioned as points of exchange/contention between two sets of males (customarily the Mahabharata’s sets of cousins, the Kurawa and Pandawa, with the latter group normally meriting the bride). Women-focused material/issues seemed scant. A lower-class female or Banowati, the wife of a Kurawa hero, could be sexy in love scenes. An upper-class woman could normally watch her marriage contest, give birth, dissuade her man from going off to war or weep on a son’s/husband’s bier. The story was generally about male trauma and triumph, and female pathos was usually there to accent the male heroics.

Male focus made sense – the wayang performers and audience were largely men. Women viewers were present for the first hour or two but most of them (some teens excepted) left, putting drowsy toddlers to bed as the all-night performance continued. Men and boys had leisure to watch; women and girls were guarding the house and grabbing sleep before rising at dawn for market, cooking and getting their children ready for school.

My teachers, Dalang Abah (Abeng) Sunarya and his sons Ade Kosasih and, Asep Sunandar Sunarya, encouraged me to send them a son. “Kirim naik becak dari Amerika” (“Send him via a rickshaw from America!”), intoned Dalang Asep. A son they could certainly raise to be a splendid dalang.² Many nights I found myself called upon during the clown scene to sing the popular tune “Warang Pojok” (“The Corner Food Stall”) as a pasinden, no matter how off-key I might be, and I was even sometimes sent a tip when the song was requested – my fan mail from across West Java noted that this particular song was my kostim (speciality).

When I would interview women from the families that could in theory move flexibly between wayang and topeng, primarily in the Cirebon area along the north coast, where wayang kulit and not golek was their normal form of puppetry, I found they seldom did wayang. Topeng mask dance from the Cirebon area was their norm – a cycle of four or five masks danced by a single dancer, with a male clown sometimes spelling the soloist. And yet, even as these now elderly women topeng artists remembered their youth, they noted that the host would often want them to dance unmasked and they would break up the mask performances with ronggeng/courtesan style ketuk tilu (“three gong” music for a couple’s dance), partnering male audience members in social dance (Sawitri, 1988).

There were advantages for the female performer singer-dancer, especially when youthful. She would be laku (frequently hired), but, unlike her brothers, she seemed to have problems keeping her mask on for topeng or the puppet in front of her in wayang. Why, I wondered, did these women keep getting pushed back toward ronggeng interactions with the audience – toward the singer-dancer’s short sharp shocks of sung poetry and dancing with/for male audience members? Why did males dominate puppetry, the prestigious, tragic and narratively focused genre, while women seemed to focus on dance, so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Erasure
• 1 The woman thing: issues and advances for women in Sundanese performance
• 2 Women in a man’s world: gender and power in Japanese noh theatre
• 3 “Just like a woman”: female impersonation, gender construction and role playing in Begum Barve
• 4 Feminist Asian cosmopolitanism in Singapore tango clubs
• 5 Stars on the rise: the jingju actresses in Republican China
• Part II Intervention
• 6 Between roars and tears: towards the female kathakali
• 7 “Ruined by several actresses who added pornographic elements”: the popularity of emerging actresses in Chinese jingju (Beijing opera) and the censorship of two plays
• 8 Theatre of Kishida Rio: towards re-signification of “home” for women in Asia
• 9 Foreign female interventions in traditional Asian arts: Rebecca Teele and Cristina Formaggia
• 10 An unexpected voice: performance, gender and protecting tradition in Korean mask dance dramas
• Part III Reconstruction
• 11 Rasatrialogue: the politics of the female body in Asian performance
• 12 Nangiar kuthu: interference, intervention and inheritance
• 13 Women in British Asian theatre
• Index