Resistance on the National Stage: Mocern Theater and Politics in Late New Order Indonesia

by Bodden, Michael H.

• ISBN13: 9780896802759
• ISBN10: 0896802752
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-02
• Publisher: Ohio Univ Pr

Summary

Resistance on the National Stageanalyzes the ways in which, between 1985 and 1998, modern theater practitioners in Indonesia contributed to a rising movement of social protest against the long-governing New Order regime of President Suharto. It examines the work of an array of theater groups and networks from Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta that pioneered new forms of theater-making and new themes that were often presented more directly and critically than previous groups had dared to do. Michael H. Bodden looks at a wide range of case studies to show how theater contributed to and helped build the opposition. He also looks at how specific combinations of social groups created tensions and gave modern theater a special role in bridging social gaps and creating social networks that expanded the reach of the prodemocracy movement. Theater workers constructed new social networks by involving peasants, Muslim youth, industrial workers, and lower-middle-class slum dwellers in theater productions about their own lives. Such networking and resistance established theater as one significant arena in which the groundwork for the ouster of Suharto in May 1998, and the succeeding Reform era, was laid. Resistance on the National Stagewill have broad appeal, not only for scholars of contemporary Indonesian culture and theater, but also for those interested in Indonesian history and politics, as well as scholars of postcolonial theater and culture.

Author Biography

Michael H. Bodden is an associate professor of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. He has published numerous articles on contemporary Indonesian theater and literature, as well as a collection of translations of the fiction, the essays, and a drama by Indonesian writer Seno Gumira Ajidarma, Jakarta at a Certain Point in Time.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
The Modern National Theater and the Indonesian New Order State	p. 22
Indonesian Grassroots Theater: Arena Teater, Rural Development, and the Travails of Creating a Media For the People	p. 56
Asas Tunggal and Laughter in the Mosque: Indonesian Islamic Theater on the National Stage	p. 96
Teater Sae, Teater Kubur, and Avant-Garde Performances of Urban Alienation	p. 131
The Limits of Bahasa Indonesia and Teater Payung Hitam's "Theater of Pain": Crisis of Representation of the Nation and Political Allegory	p. 188
Workers' Theater and Theater About Workers in 1990s Indonesia	p. 221
Staged Openness: Theater and Censorship in Indonesia's 1990s Era of Keterbukaan	p. 273
Conclusion	p. 310
Glossary	p. 317
Appendix	p. 327
Notes	p. 333
Bibliography	p. 361
Index	p. 381
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