Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Vol. 165, no. 4 (2009), pp. 459-492 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/btlv URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-100119 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0006-2294 CHRISTINA SUNARDI Pushing at the boundaries of the body Cultural politics and cross-gender dance in East Java One of the most fruitful activities of my field research on dance and gamelan music in the East Javanese regency of Malang1 from 2005 to 2007 was attend- ing live performances with my teachers.2 Those occasions were key learning experiences: my teachers explained playing techniques of the various instru- ments, expounded upon conventions of dance movement, and, to my delight, sometimes took me to sit and play with the musicians who were accompany- ing the dancers. During performances they also shook their heads, clicked their teeth, or chuckled with dissatisfaction. Particularly disturbing to them were recent transformations in the performance of Ngremo Tayub, a male-style dance performed by women, and Ngremo Putri, a female-style dance most often performed by men. Strikingly, my teachers were not bothered by the transvestism, but by what they saw as dancers’ technical and artistic short- comings. Unlike dancers and musicians ‘in times past’ (dulu), they said, per- formers ‘nowadays’ (sekarang) are departing too far from ‘tradition’ (tradisi), are not as competent technically, and are less concerned about artistic content than about making money from spectacle. As they talked about ‘tradition’ and ‘times past’, performers of older gen- erations expressed their discomfort with the ways the younger generation 1 Malang is also the name of a city, but unless I specify ‘the city of Malang’, I am referring to the regency. 2 My research was funded at various stages by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Re- search Abroad Program Fellowship; a University of California Office of the President Pacific Rim Mini Grant; University of California, Berkeley Center for Southeast Asia Studies Grant-In-Aid Scholarships; and a University of California, Berkeley Graduate Division Travel Award. I thank Didik Nini Thowok, M. Soleh Adi Pramono and Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (LIPI) for sponsoring my fieldwork. I am grateful to Benjamin Brinner, Patricia Shehan Campbell, Sonja Downing, Jeffrey Hadler, Midiyanto, Lois Roland, Laurie J. Sears, Sunardi, Bonnie C. Wade, and two anonymous reviewers for careful readings, productive comments, and help with transla- tions. I take full responsibility for any flaws that remain. CHRISTINA SUNARDI is Assistant Professor in the School of Music, at the University of Wash- ington, Seattle. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her main field of aca- demic interest is ethnomusicology. She is the author of ‘Making sense and senses of locale through perceptions of music and dance in Malang, East Java’, Asian Music, forthcoming. Dr Sunardi can be reached at [email protected]. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI) 165-4 (2009):459-492 © 2009 Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 07:07:24PM via free access 460 Christina Sunardi performs gender. Older performers indicated that the performance of male- ness in Ngremo Tayub is too ‘feminine’, commenting that dancers (who are women) execute their head movements like women instead of like men, and perform the knightly character too coquettishly. Similarly, older performers criticized the performance of femaleness in Ngremo Putri for being too ‘mas- culine’: the dancers’ legs are too far apart, the tempo is too fast, and accents in the music are too harsh. These criticisms reveal that many older performers expect cross-gender dance to reinforce constructions of gender that they have come to consider normal, suggesting generational differences in the percep- tion of cross-gender representation. These complex contemporary attitudes on cross-gender performance have been informed by an equally complicated history in which local, national, and international discourses and practices have converged. From earlier writings and his own observations, Theodore Pigeaud (1938:277, 301, 321- 3, 328) provides evidence of cross-gender performance in masked dance, social dance, and popular theatre traditions in East Java from the 1820s to the early twentieth century. Paul Wolbers (1989, 1993) and R. Anderson Sutton (1993) link transvestism, in which boys have performed female-style dance for ritual ceremonies in Banyuwangi, to centuries-old Hindu and indigenous Javanese imagery in which androgyny represents cosmic power and fertility. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch colonial and Islamic discourses have also strongly affected constructions of gender in East Java, and in Indonesia more generally. As Evelyn Blackwood (2005:866, 869-71) emphasizes, a separation of maleness and femaleness and a mapping of male- ness to men’s bodies and femaleness to women’s bodies characterize these discourses, shaping the gender ideologies that the Indonesian government has promoted since independence in 1945. Blackwood, Benedict Anderson (1996), Dédé Oetomo (1996), Tom Boellstorff (2004a, 2004b), and Jan Mrázek (2005) show that by embodying the gendered characteristics associated with the opposite sex, individuals in many parts of Indonesia have resisted such state-sanctioned constructions. In short, ‘cross-genderedness’ has been both an accepted practice integral to local worldviews in East Java and also a sub- version of official constructions of manhood and womanhood. Performers in Malang selectively contend with these different logics and meanings of cross- gender performance in order to articulate their own senses of their maleness and femaleness. To understand performers’ attitudes, I analyse their comments about several East Javanese dances: Ngremo, Beskalan, and masked dance.3 These 3 Ngremo and Beskalan, similar to each other in terms of music, movement, and costume, fre- quently open other performances and events. Masked dances may be performed as part of a drama or as individual dances to open other performances and events. Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 07:07:24PM via free access Pushing at the boundaries of the body 461 dances include male and female styles, which, for the most part, either men or women may perform.4 Because performers’ senses of gender are particu- larly visible in their discussions about how men’s bodies ‘become’ female and women’s bodies ‘become’ male, I focus on discussions about the performance of these dances as cross-gender dances. Although musicians and dancers did not consistently refer to a category of ‘cross-gender dance’, for analyti- cal purposes I have chosen to use this term to refer to an individual dancing in a gendered style that is the opposite of his or her biological sex. Heeding Judith Butler’s argument (1999:10) that biological sex, like gender, is a cultural construction, my reference to two sexes – man and woman – is based on the categories that I heard generally used in Malang. I have several aims in writing this article, one of which is to develop approaches to the study of the body. My attention to the cultural and ideo- logical implications of the body builds on Susan Leigh Foster’s view (1986) that the body is a signifier of historically specific meaning, and Deborah Wong’s argument (2004:161-93) that individuals use their bodies to align themselves with particular histories and cultural practices. I foreground per- formers’ perspectives about bodies in order to understand their insights into the meanings of their practices, the cultural impact they have as artists by performing or talking about performance in specific ways, and the reasons behind multiple and sometimes conflicting perceptions. No less central are my intentions to underline the strategies performers employ to negotiate ten- sions between official ideologies and social realities, expectations about their onstage personas and offstage lives, and differences of opinion between their personal aesthetic sensibilities and those of others. While attitudes towards the performance of gender vary by individual, a degree of consistency exists among performers of the same generation. I use ‘generation’ as an analytical framework to refer to the time an individual begins to actively perform as an independent musician or dancer.5 However, I am careful to recognize that the attitudes of a particular individual in a par- ticular generation might not necessarily represent the attitudes of the whole generation. Furthermore, an individual’s attitudes might be characteristic of one generation in one way and of a different generation in another way. Some inconsistencies are not surprising, as generations overlap and individu- als often learn from and perform with musicians and dancers from different generations. Despite the multiple factors that contribute to an individual’s perspective, using generation as a framework facilitates my examination of relationships 4 The performance context (including the historical moment) usually affects whether men or women perform a particular style of a particular dance (Sunardi 2007). 5 I thank Andrew Weintraub for a conversation that led me to think further about generation. Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 07:07:24PM via free access 462 Christina Sunardi between larger cultural forces and performers’ views. I have used my teach- ers’ references to ‘old people’ (orang tua), their ‘friends’