This book is about dance in modern, postcolonial Indonesia. It is grounded in a long-term case study conducted between 1982 and 1999 into the dance traditions of the Sultan’s court in Yogyakarta, in south central Java.

Dance matters because local and national communities use it to represent themselves to themselves and to others. It is part of a politics of representation, but in contrast to other material symbols, it is embodied. It has a special power because of this, and is both part of a system of representation and a form of action. My interest in dance is in how...

Court dance survived the end of colonialism because of processes which occurred in the last thirty years of colonial rule during the reign of Sultan Hamĕngkubuwana VIII (r.1921–39). This period also marked the start of the nationalist movement in Java. The eighth Sultan’s reign made it possible for court dance to have a place in cultural politics after independence, and also consolidated the court repertoire.

Javanese court dance is not an invented tradition, nor does it demonstrate an unbroken tradition stretching back to antiquity. The influence of the concept of ‘invented tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) is evidence of...

This chapter examines the changes that transformed the court repertoire into an Indonesian classical tradition. When a nation gains independence, its leaders and citizens try to represent the new political entity as a tangible reality. This often takes the form of expressive spectacles, including music and dance, which make the nation visible and audible. These undergo processes of ritualization even as they create new communities.¹ Despite these changes, family patronage and the ritual nature of Indonesian bureaucracy have been crucial for the survival of Javanese court dance in Indonesia, and for constituting embodied communities in the nation state. Rather than...

This chapter explains Javanese values, their embodiment in court dance and their contribution to the production of citizens in the Indonesian Republic. Javanese court dance has become a resource within the domain of cultural politics as a performance event, but learning to dance has also provided individuals with useful resources in the domain of social interaction. Javanese socialization processes have been extended and transformed to shape an Indonesian model of identity. The principle developed in the Tamansiswa educational system that dance reflects the character of the person has resulted in a restricted set of physical practices and performance contexts becoming...

Court dance movement is valued for itself, and for its instrumental power to produce effects in the social world. This chapter examines the relationship between dance movement and political symbolism with reference to courtbĕdhayadances, using both oral and written accounts from the court circle. Courtbĕdhayadances have long been the prerogative of the sultan (lĕlangĕn dalĕm). Since 1945 they have normally been performed by women, and have high status as Indonesian culture. As such they are strongly associated with power and prestige.

Bĕdhayais a dance form where the court’s highly valued system of allusiveness is

most...

I now explore the philosophy of Joged Mataram, ‘the dance of Mataram’. Joged Mataram, the title of an influential text by Gusti Suryobrongto (1976) about the principles of Yogyakartan court dance, which are traced back to the seventeenth-century Javanese kingdom of Mataram. Joged Mataram represents the transformation of ritually resonanced performance into art with an aesthetic rather than a ritual instrumentality, but it has not eliminated the relationship between expression and spirituality which we have already encountered.

From one perspective, Joged Mataram is a product of the court, and inspired by the ethos ofwayang wong(dance theatre) during the...

As we have discovered, the colonial dance repertoire of the Sultan’s court in Yogyakarta has changed into a classical Indonesian dance form, but it retains references and identifications from Javanese world-views of the late colonial period. Joged Mataram in particular is a reformulation of court dance as classical Yogyakartan dance and aesthetics founded in an ethical and spiritual ethos from the reign of the eighth Sultan. Those values resonated with early postcolonial concerns, but have fitted less well with subsequent normalization. Joged Mataram framed dance as a resource to develop national character, but this ‘educative capital’ was already being challenged...

This account of Javanese court dance has raised a number of questions about what the anthropology of dance can contribute to the theorization of culture, society and the body as it moves into the city and the global village. An anthropology of dance is distinctive for including a cultural account of embodied movement elicited primarily, though not exclusively, through local and emergent categories used against backgrounds of nationalism and postcolonialism. It has an important part to play in explaining how bodies and performance are understood and conceptualized culturally, and in reminding ourselves that modernity is not uniform.

The epigram for...