Sounding the Dance, Moving the Music

Choreomusicological Perspectives on Maritime Southeast Asian Performing Arts

Mohd Anis Nor, Kendra Stepputat, Mohd Anis Md Nor, Kendra Stepputat

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317052470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Performing arts in most parts of Maritime Southeast Asia are seen as an entity, where music and dance, sound and movement, acoustic and tactile elements intermingle and complement each other. Although this fact is widely known and referenced, most scholarly works in the performing arts so far have either focused on "music" or "dance" rather than treating the two in combination. The authors in this book look at both aspects in performance, moreover, they focus explicitly on the interrelation between the two, on both descriptive-analytical and metaphorical levels. The book includes diverse examples of regional performing art genres from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. All case studies are composed from the perspective of the relatively new approach and field of ethno-choreomusicology. This particular compilation gives an exemplary overview of various phenomena in movement-sound relations, and offers for the first time a thorough study of the phenomenon that is considered essential for the performing arts in Maritime Southeast Asia - the inseparability of movement and sound.

1 Understanding performance in Maritime Southeast Asia

Rethinking paradigms and discourses, an introduction

Ricardo D. Trimillos

Setting the stage

The present project is significant in its intent to reconsider the ways in which we think about the performance traditions of Maritime Southeast Asia (hereafter MSEA) and to problematize the prevailing perspectives from which we examine them. Our point of departure is to argue for the coherence – when not inseparability – of music and dance in MSEA. The inseparability is evident in such geographically separated genres as the Balinese arja, the Malay zapin, and the Tagalog komedya. The dilemma for scholars of performance in MSEA has been that much of current scholarly discourse continues to frame itself in terms of dyadic and bounded categories, such as village/court, male/female or – most relevant for our project – dance/music. In terms of provenance and timespace, dyadic categories are not entirely satisfactory for a totalized critique of Maritime Southeast Asian performance arts in the twenty-first century. By exploring the coherence of music and dance for this region, we hope to contribute to wider discussions of MSEA as socially and culturally coherent in historical overview (Hall 1955, Chandler et al. 1987) and, more recently, in specific domains including symbology (Le Roux and Sellato 2006) and the production of material culture (Hamilton 2012).

The prevailing research perspectives and methodologies derive largely from an early twentieth-century Western European sensibility of logical positivism that argued for the efficacy of categories rationalized by a single entity. For MSEA the entity most frequently invoked has been the single performance medium, such as the Tagalog komedya as music, the Malay zapin as dance or the Balinese arja as drama, while in reality each genre manifests a particular combination of all three elements. Many Maritime Southeast Asian genres require that a single performer have competence in all three media, for example the wayang wong of Central Java (Soedarsono 1984). This example is also instructive about change brought on by modernity and contemporary nation-building. Javanese wayang wong has been largely replaced by the ‘new’ national Indonesian genre of sendratari dance-drama, which eliminated dramatic dialogue and diegetic song. On the one hand, it effectively reduced performer competencies to two media – music and dance – and separated these competencies between two types of performers: the on-stage dancer and the off-stage musician. On the other, the absence of dialogue in Javanese language made the sendratari less daunting to Indonesians who did not understand spoken or sung Javanese and therefore made it more easily acceptable as a national expression. The implications of performance for nation-building and the reverse are a subtext to our writings.

Current perceptions of performance in MSEA are further complicated by our discourse, the ways in which we and others talk and write about its various genres. The project of rethinking and revisiting is an adventurous undertaking not without risk, as Nor implies in his analysis of Zapin Johor. Although exploring an alternative approach to any subject matter has value per se, this undertaking nevertheless becomes a twenty-first century critique of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European epistemologies that regarded dance and music as separate (and therefore separable) entities.¹ The current study of performance traditions by and large continues a methodology oriented towards the previously mentioned single medium, which can be problematic for Maritime Southeast Asian forms. Thus, regarding ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology, each tends to privilege the medium of its own identity, that is, music and dance, respectively. Scholarship produced from a mono-disciplinary perspective should be re-examined for a twenty-first-century understanding of practices and developments in Maritime Southeast Asian performance.

Further, we encounter both parallel and overlapping descriptive and analytical discourses generated in various locations during different historical periods. In the case of Javanese wayang wong (dance theatre), there is a traditional in-culture discourse that categorizes movement styles into robust (gagah), refined (halus) and female (putri). Moreover, there is a national discourse that contrasts seni tradisional (traditional arts) – including wayang wong – with kreasi baru (contemporary creations). There is also an Anglophone international discourse that designates gamelan musical repertory used in wayang wong as either ‘loud’ or ‘soft’, referencing the instrumentation for a particular composition. Finally, there is a scholarly discourse – ‘our language’ – that generates a contrasting set of terminologies arising from different mono-disciplinary biases. For example, the ethnomusicologist generally refers to wayang wong as a ‘tradition’ and the ethnochoreologist or dance ethnologist refers to it as a ‘form’. Part of our dilemma (to loosely paraphrase Charles Seeger) is how we ‘language about performance’ (Seeger 1977). For the most part, we ‘language’ about it by employing – largely uncritically – the two categories of Occidental provenance: music and dance.

The project addresses three major domains central to understanding performance in MSEA – theory (reflexive codification), praxis (established modes of operation) and practice (behaviours specific to a performance event). For example, we ‘know’ that the Ilokano pandango (couple song-dance) uses the rondalla string band for melodic–harmonic–rhythmic accompaniment (theory) and that a skilful female performer wears bakya (wooden slippers) to produce percussive sounds against the bamboo floor (praxis). However, in one spontaneous performance in Victoria, Tarlac, the couple performed to the accompaniment of a single cinco-cinco (five-stringed guitar) and barefoot, because it was in the house of a Hawai’iano who had carpeted the concrete floor. In this specific performance event there was no melodic/harmonic accompaniment (theory) and no percussive accents produced by the female dancer’s wooden slippers (praxis). Nevertheless, those present considered it a satisfactory performance of pandango (practice).

In addition to presenting a timely opportunity to revisit and rethink notions of cohesion and separability for performance media, the project embodies a diversity of subjectivities and voices in its examination of MSEA. The greater diversity of twenty-first-century scholarly participation, as evidenced by the authors for this publication, stands in contrast to an early twentieth-century Eurocentric subjectivity. Although participant diversity for this project is both intentional and notable, the present exercise does not constitute – nor should it be construed as – a grand gesture towards decolonization; rather, it represents a collective and measured rethinking by colleagues of current modes of enquiry, whose specific intent is selecting among aspects (1) that are still useful, (2) that need revision, (3) that are less useful than formerly, and (4) that are no longer relevant. Mutatis mutandis it affords a careful critique of emergent postmodern theories and methodologies framed by the same four criteria of contrast.

The term Maritime Southeast Asia requires some explanation in brevis, to clarify how we define it and to contextualize how we propose to use it. For our purposes the appellation Maritime Southeast Asia (MSEA) references the totality of cultures and societies of a region encompassing the present nation states of Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and (tangentially) Singapore. Appearance of the term in scholarly literature has increased in the last two decades (Christie 1995; Hayase 2014; Shaffer 1995; Ranker 2014).² It generally privileges elements that are conveniently glossed over as ‘Malayo-Muslim-maritime’ (Emmerson 1984:19) or ‘Malayu’ (L. Andaya 2008). However, for our purposes, MSEA references all traditional cultures and folkways of the region, including those of Occidental, Chinese, Indian and ‘Arab’ derivation.

We find the term particularly appropriate for our purposes: the descriptor maritime, connoting sea trade, foregrounds the connections of people and therefore cultures, in contradistinction to the descriptors of island (Coedes [1948] 1968), insular (Brooks et al. 1997) or archipelagic (Kingsbury 2005), which are more geographic, archaeological and notably devoid of human agency. The contact of cultures through connections by sea is evident, both historical, such as the Sulu Zone (Warren 2007) and the Malacca Strait (Andaya and Andaya 2015),³ and contemporary, such as Maritime Security (Guan and Skogan 2007) and Maritime Power (Sakhuja 2012). Thus the theme of interconnectedness that we claim for performance in Southeast Asia resonates with a more general past and present of the region. To summarize, our use of the term Maritime Southeast Asia foregrounds the domain of culture and its social dynamic – it acknowledges the centrality of the seas and related coastal societies for enabling a sense of the shared and the collective for MSEA.

Paradigms

Central to the rethinking of Maritime Southeast Asia are paradigms we find useful, both established ones and newly emerging ones. Ideally, a paradigm takes into account theory, praxis and practice – categories discussed earlier. Referencing the earlier example of the Ilokano pandango, its interrelationships of the media include three types: a single performer who produces both movement and sound – the female dancer with wooden slippers; a performer who is only a musician – the guitar player; and a third who is only a dancer – the male partner. Thus the three types of performers for music and dance consist of: the single-medium performer, a second single-medium one and a double- or mixed-media one.

A second aspect of the paradigm is qualitative: there is a sliding hierarchy of the prescriptive. For a particular genre there are elements that are absolutely critical, others that are certainly desirable, and still others that are only incidental.⁴

The highest degree of the prescriptive is the critical. There are elements considered emically critical; for the pandango example the elements include two performers who sing and dance, instrumental rhythm to animate the dancers and an interactive audience which usually shouts encouragement. The critical elements are those that must be present to define the form.

Various authors in the anthology speak to the critical.⁵ Hood points out how absolutely critical the drum stroke ka-pak is to the dancer’s quick snap of the head. The Matusky essay on wayang kulit puppet performance assumes a very specific emic view of what is critical, that of the performing musician. The features that are critical for the performing musician appear more demanding than those for general Malay society; critical for the musician is movement and sound informed by cultural foreknowledge, which Hood labels a ‘library of tacit knowledge’ for Balinese drummers and that Mashino presents in her analysis of pepeson, the initial appearance of a character on stage. One test of what is critical for culture carriers relates to changes in instrumentation. The essay by Abels describes the radical change of tagunggu’ instrumentation from traditional gong chime ensemble to electric keyboard for the Sama in Malaysia Timor. The performance on keyboard continues to be called tagunggu’, suggesting that the musical style and its kinetic patterning are the critical elements for the form. Thus, for the Sama, the tagunggu’ medium does not comprise a critical feature as it does for Javanese gamelan – the metallophone and the electrophone are an equally acceptable medium for tagunggu’. In contrast, the appearance of an electric keyboard among the Philippine Sama Dilaut of Tawi-Tawi has generated its own local genre, called pakiring (Ellorin 2008).

Sometimes in addition to an emic notion of what is critical, a second set is invoked: the scholarly – and often external – gaze constructs a second, etic set of prescriptive elements, which may not always agree with or completely match the emic set. Spiller posits that critical for Sundanese dance forms is its perception as tactile (movement felt) rather than as visual (movement seen). He further speculates that the accompanying rhythmic patterns originate in the verbalization of ritual syllables (movement voiced). His analysis moves seamlessly between the etic and the emic in terms of critical features. Other authors invoke a similar double set of prescriptions, such as Santamaria’s discussion of a Sama dance–music performance and Harnish’s analysis of a Lombok processional tradition. Particularly for the Harnish account, critical features not only define continuity within the tradition; they also comprise the template by which change, whether evolutionary or disruptive, can be measured. For the Ilokano pandango example they would be the features articulated when a culture carrier observes, ‘This dance is not pandango any more; missing are [specific features] …’

A second level of the prescriptive is the desirable. The elements in this category enhance and elaborate the critical features that define the form, whether emically or etically. Spiller in his discussion of Sundanese dance notes there are variant drum strokes to accompany a particular set of kinemes; each of the variants is a desirable and acceptable feature of the normative performance in contrast to a single and specific drum pattern being specified, that is, critical to the accompaniment of a specific movement pattern. Ross finds a similar practice for the drum and gong parts in the performance of the Thai-Andaman Orak Lawoi berana music, in which a number of variant rhythmic patterns are desirable, rather than a single set pattern. The presence of numerous desirable features not only enhances the specific performance, but in some presentational contexts – tourism for example – can add to its perception as authentic if not authoritative. In some instances, the ‘desirable’ may be regarded by some practitioners as undesirable, as in the case of Acehnese male seated dance rapa’i geleng described by Kartomi – some of the musicians felt that the frame drum with its greater volume played simultaneously with the singing and body percussion detracted from the artistry and subtlety of the latter two, which are critical to the sound and movement of the form. In such an instance, my category of desirable might include the gloss of non-desirable.

Tan’s account of the dragon dance in Malaysia also provides a clear contrast between the desirable and critical. From her descriptio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Understanding performance in Maritime Southeast Asia: rethinking paradigms and discourses, an introduction
• 2 Sonic and tactile dimensions of Sundanese dance
• 3 The Balinese kecak: an exemplification of sonic and visual (inter)relations
• 4 Persistent mutualisms: energizing the symbiotic relationship between Balinese dancer and drummer
• 5 Cari… Cari… Cari!: filling the interstices of music and dance in Zapin Johor
• 6 Necessary (re)unions: revisiting and revising studies on the Sama igal dance and kulintangan ensemble music traditions
• 7 Playing the body: female versus male elements in Aceh’s sitting song-dances with body percussion
• 8 The body as intersection: interaction and collaboration of voice, body and music in Balinese arja
• 9 Shadow puppets, drums and gongs: movement–music relationships in a theatrical genre
• 10 Dancing the sound, musicking the movement: contextual dialogues between music and dance in northern Borneo
• 11 Performing community, identity and change: the Chinese dragon leaps to the beat
• 12 Gendang beleq: the negotiation of a music/dance form in Lombok, Indonesia
• 13 The Orak Lawoi pelacak festival: how music and movement connects an erstwhile semi-nomadic people to their vanishing history, environment and culture
• 14 Moving music: the performing arts, space and travel among the Sama Dilaut
• Index