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 t...
