Balinese society is undergoing rapid change, but remains discursively situated in a 'timeless' ethos of cultural tradition. This tension can be observed in relation to the cultural activities of the island's young people, particularly the young men. The staging of buzur (neighbowhood fundraising parties), the making of ogoh-ogoh (giant papier-miich6 effigies to mark Nyepi, the Balinese New Year) and the competitive flying of oversize kites d e s p i t e their sometimes contentious reception from older generations-popularly dubbed as 'traditional' expressions of Balinese youth culture. This recourse to tradition must be viewed in relation to two pervasive discourses: that of udut (customary law) and ujeg (a new protectionist ethos in the discourse on Balinese cultural identity). This paper argues that in contemporary urban Bali, male youth culture finds its most visible expressions in relation to the abiding standards of established public ritual and the equally abiding gender divisions that serve to guarantee the reproduction of 'traditional' social life. Rather than fighting aggressively against the grown-up norm, these expressions replicate the public culture of the adult worlbwhile drawing on global and national youth styles-and strive towards the expression of a specifically 'Balinese' youth culture.
This issue presents a panoply of historicised writings on theatre, dance, and music from Indonesia, ranging from the early 20th century to the present. Common to all the articles is the view that the last century has been a period of great change for both modern and traditional performing arts, which was co-articulated with advances in communication and transportation and the opening up of Indonesia to multinational capitalism.Indonesia is a maritime nation deeply etched by lines of traffic in goods, ideas and people, yet its performing arts have been primarily thought about in static terms. Performance is usually considered to be grounded in particular regions or centres of production, inscribed within the non-permeable bounds of genre and traditional patronage arrangements and constrained by ritual prohibitions and ancestral reverence. Such traditionalism is at least in part a legacy of Dutch scholarship which tended to reify Indonesian performance by assuming fixedness and strict adherence to immutable rules. Writers such as Jaap Kunst, Jacob Kats, and Th. B. van Lelyveld interpreted the music, dance, and theatre of Java and Bali as continuous with western Indonesia's ancient Indic past. They were quick to dismiss hybrids and modern performance as corruptions and bastardisations. Such a prejudice was also embraced and promoted by indigenous colonial elites, instituting a discourse of heritage preservation which continues to generate anxiety and strategies aimed at containing any possible cultural loss.Modern performers such as dancer Raden Mas Jodjana (1895-1972 were thus dismissed as inauthentic due to their overly 'individualistic' interpretations of tradition (Lelyveld 1931: 38) which would compromise its purity, and hybrid arts such as keroncong or kethoprak merited little consideration. Only recently have scholars begun to unearth histories of itinerant performers and travelling art forms in order to describe and analyse processes of innovation, hybridisation and crossfertilisation.This issue considers traditions of Javanese and Balinese performance as being in constant flux and movement, subject to appropriation and expropriation and radical reinterpretation by both Indonesian and non-Indonesian artists and intellectuals. Authors in this volume offer insights into performers, agents, institutions, writers, and ensembles whose work has generated new insight into how Java and Bali are conceived both in Indonesia and abroad. Rather than staging received
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