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Pusaka as Documented Heritage
Volume Editor:
This publication brings together current scholarship that focuses on the significance of performing arts heritage of royal courts in Southeast Asia. Royal courts have long been sites for the creation, exchange, maintenance, and development of myriad forms of performing arts and other distinctive cultural expressions. The first volume, Pusaka as Documented Heritage, consists of historical case studies, contexts and developments of royal court traditions, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Pusaka as Documented Heritage
Volume Editor:
This publication brings together current scholarship that focuses on the significance of performing arts heritage of royal courts in Southeast Asia. Royal courts have long been sites for the creation, exchange, maintenance, and development of myriad forms of performing arts and other distinctive cultural expressions. The first volume, Pusaka as Documented Heritage, consists of historical case studies, contexts and developments of royal court traditions, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Dreamwrighting for Stage and Screen
Author:
Dreamwork for Dramatic Writing: Dreamwrighting for Stage and Screen teaches you how to use your dreams, content, form, and structure, to write surprisingly unique new drama for film and stage. It is an exciting departure from traditional linear, dramatic technique, and addresses both playwriting and screenwriting, as the profession is increasingly populated by writers who work in both stage and screen. Developed through 25 years of teaching award-winning playwrights in the University of Missouri’s Writing for Performance Program, and based upon the phenomenological research of renowned performance theorist Bert O. States, this book offers a foundational, step-by-step organic guide to non-traditional, non-linear technique that will help writers beat clichéd, tired dramatic writing and provides stimulating new exercises to transform their work.
Dreamwrighting for Stage and Screen
Author:
Dreamwork for Dramatic Writing: Dreamwrighting for Stage and Screen teaches you how to use your dreams, content, form, and structure, to write surprisingly unique new drama for film and stage. It is an exciting departure from traditional linear, dramatic technique, and addresses both playwriting and screenwriting, as the profession is increasingly populated by writers who work in both stage and screen. Developed through 25 years of teaching award-winning playwrights in the University of Missouri’s Writing for Performance Program, and based upon the phenomenological research of renowned performance theorist Bert O. States, this book offers a foundational, step-by-step organic guide to non-traditional, non-linear technique that will help writers beat clichéd, tired dramatic writing and provides stimulating new exercises to transform their work.
Author:
When Dorothy Hewett joked about needing a face-lift and sex-change to improve her standing, she drew attention to forces that shaped the production and reception of her drama. Drawing on production of her plays over four decades, and interviews with Hewett’s collaborators, this book reveals how cultural memories in theatre solidify and dissolve.
Viewing theatre production as a mode of remembrance, Beaglehole grapples with Hewett as a divisive figure who was ahead of a conservative Australia. Revisiting frequently produced plays, including chapters on The Man from Mukinupin and The Chapel Perilous, as well as rarely-produced works, including Nowhere and The Tatty Hollow Story, this book articulates the ongoing relevance of Hewett’s drama to the history of theatre in Australia.
Viewing theatre production as a mode of remembrance, Beaglehole grapples with Hewett as a divisive figure who was ahead of a conservative Australia. Revisiting frequently produced plays, including chapters on The Man from Mukinupin and The Chapel Perilous, as well as rarely-produced works, including Nowhere and The Tatty Hollow Story, this book articulates the ongoing relevance of Hewett’s drama to the history of theatre in Australia.
Author:
When Dorothy Hewett joked about needing a face-lift and sex-change to improve her standing, she drew attention to forces that shaped the production and reception of her drama. Drawing on production of her plays over four decades, and interviews with Hewett’s collaborators, this book reveals how cultural memories in theatre solidify and dissolve.
Viewing theatre production as a mode of remembrance, Beaglehole grapples with Hewett as a divisive figure who was ahead of a conservative Australia. Revisiting frequently produced plays, including chapters on The Man from Mukinupin and The Chapel Perilous, as well as rarely-produced works, including Nowhere and The Tatty Hollow Story, this book articulates the ongoing relevance of Hewett’s drama to the history of theatre in Australia.
Viewing theatre production as a mode of remembrance, Beaglehole grapples with Hewett as a divisive figure who was ahead of a conservative Australia. Revisiting frequently produced plays, including chapters on The Man from Mukinupin and The Chapel Perilous, as well as rarely-produced works, including Nowhere and The Tatty Hollow Story, this book articulates the ongoing relevance of Hewett’s drama to the history of theatre in Australia.
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Abstract
The performing arts have played a vital role in Southeast Asian civilisation. They have been used to reinforce the authority of the monarchy, express and legitimise wealth, power and authority, model ideals of beauty and social behaviour, animate state ceremonies, project sacred power, mobilise the populace during crises, and preserve knowledge, history and tradition. This chapter introduces a two-volume collection of essays exploring the history and significance of royal court performing arts in Southeast Asia from several perspectives: court-to-court exchanges, intra-kingdom circulations and the continuing relevance of royal performing arts. The use of performing arts in Southeast Asian courts has evolved over time, but they have always been an important part of the political landscape. The discussion traces some of the intersections between culture and power, from the earliest evidence of such connections in the form of Dongson drums until the present. Southeast Asia is a region with a long and complex history, in which kingship has taken many different forms, from large empires to smaller principalities. Royal courts were centres of political, social and cultural activity, in which monarchs were both overseers and active participants in artistic creations. A complex and varied topography of islands, mainland, highlands, lowlands and waterways played significant roles in trade, unity, and the spread and development of culture. The analysis here deals with several important periods in Southeast Asia’s cultural development. In the premodern period, large agrarian empires were the dominant powers, heavily influenced by Indic court culture and Hindu-Buddhist rituals. The early modern era saw a rise in the circulation of texts, performing arts, instruments and performers, which helped to shape a shared Southeast Asian culture and project the soft power of larger kingdoms in the region. Royal patronage of the arts continued to grow in the colonial era, with the arts becoming central to projects of statecraft, administrative control and nation-building. In the postcolonial era, the enduring legacy of court arts in republics and increased public access to royal arts further highlight their significance and influence. The conclusion suggests that understanding the significance of the performing arts in Southeast Asian royal courts is essential to comprehending the breadth and significance of kingship itself. They continue to play an important role in Southeast Asian culture today and their study can provide valuable insights into the region’s past and present.
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This chapter examines how royal sponsorship and historical ties to royal courts in maritime Southeast Asia influenced mak yong, and how modern statecraft and narratives of royal patronage continue to shape mak yong performance in Malaysia and Indonesia today. Mak yong is a Malay folk drama that includes singing, dancing and epic tales. An exploration of written and oral history of mak yong performance in Kelantan, Terengganu, Kedah and Perlis in Malaysia and the Riau Archipelago and the sultanate of Serdang in Indonesia reveals a history of royal patronage and folk performance, UNESCO intangible cultural heritage recognition, state-level religious bans, and royal and national sponsored revitalisations. I draw upon the methods of ethnography, oral history and extant historical sources to explore the influence of the royal courts of Kelantan, Riau-Lingga and Serdang, East Sumatra, on the dissemination and exchange of mak yong performers and performance practice. Itinerant mak yong folk performers travelled over land and sea routes throughout maritime Southeast Asia. Their journeys were conditioned by political unrest in the Patani sultanate, the rise and fall of the Riau-Lingga sultanate, cultural diplomacy between the sultanates of Kedah and Serdang, the social revolution of East Sumatra in post-independence Indonesia, and the movement to create a national theatrical form in Malaysia. Mak yong as a performance genre has also been in a continual state of transformation – transitioning from village performances to entertainment for Malay royal courts, back to itinerant folk performances – adapted and reinterpreted to suit new patrons and new performance opportunities.
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I Madé Lebah was a musician in the royal court of Peliatan, Bali, in the early twentieth century. Over his 90 years, he bridged precolonial, colonial and postcolonial worlds and intersected with diverse artists, traditions, arts movements and innovations, and foreign scholars. One early task demanded by the raja of Peliatan was to join a team, including the distinguished dancer Ni Gusti Biang Sengoh, with a master artist in the village of Sukawati to absorb and then return to perform and transmit the female court dance, legong, within the court. This seminal project provided the training, networks and experiences that propelled the rest of his life. Legong – the Peliatan style among many others – would go on to become an icon of Balinese female dance and of Bali itself while other courtly forms assumed lower profiles as Bali modernised. This chapter highlights Madé Lebah’s life to explore the formations of gamelan styles gong gedé, semar pagulingan and pelegongan – all of which he mastered and taught – within the Balinese courts and to identify what was unique at Peliatan, then to examine how traditions developed following the court system’s decline. It contextualises the courtly arts from precolonial to postcolonial times, discusses relationships between varied courts, examines the contested origins of legong and its varied stakeholders, elucidates Madé Lebah’s relationships with the Peliatan noble Anak Agung Gedé Mandra and the Canadian composer Colin McPhee, and charts the seduction and rapid growth of the colonial period gamelan gong kebyar.
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Despite their common customary law (adat-istiadat), each court in the Malay world developed its own music culture based on veneration of its royal ancestors and its partly distinctive rural and nomadic subjects’ music, dance, bardic arts, martial arts and in some cases musical theatre. However, each ruler needed to assert their right to rule by maintaining possession and exclusive use of a spiritually sanctioned musical ensemble as the main royal heirloom (pusaka) in which resided royal power. In most courts, the sacred musical ensemble was a nobat, which had to be played at the ruler’s installation and other ceremonies. As recounted in Sejarah Melayu, a ruler’s loss of his essential musical heirloom meant a disastrous loss of legitimacy. Thus when the legendary prince of Palembang sailed from Bintan to Singapura (Singapore) and his nobat was thrown into the sea in a storm to save his life, he had to acquire another nobat from the queen of Bintan before being installed as ruler of his new kingdom at Singapura. However, Malay courts where Javanese influence was strong – Jambi, Palembang and Banjarmasin – were gifted with gamelan ensembles from Demak, which became their icon of legitimacy. This chapter argues that inter-court power relations determined whether a polity adopted a nobat or a gamelan as its icon of legitimacy and that this governed the subsequent development of its musical arts, though one Malay court gave its gamelan to another court but maintained its nobat for its legitimacy.
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Zapin is a hybrid performance tradition adapted from the zaffin of Hadhrami Arabs. It has become a highly respected dance and music tradition in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, evolving from an Arab-derived tradition into a Malay performing art, and shaped through the syncretic adaptations of the dance and singing genres of Hadhrami traders and settlers. Zapin thus represents an embodiment of indigenous creativity merging two different worlds: Islamic Arab performative traditions and Malay cultural influences. Palace–village exchanges of zapin in the period from the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries in the Malay royal courts (istana) of north-east Sumatra (Deli, Serdang, Asahan [Batu Bara]), East Sumatra (Siak, Pelalawan, Indragiri), South Sumatra (Palembang) and the Malay Peninsula (Perak, Pahang and Terengganu) brought refinement and standardisation to an otherwise loose configuration of music-making and movement motives. The adoption of zapin and the gambus (oud or ‘ud) ensemble as court-based performing arts reveals Hadhrami influences in instituting a courtly high culture. This was embedded within a distinctive Arabic-Islamic performing art that articulated the dualities of extrinsic and intrinsic socioreligious practices: the former as secular performance tradition, the latter incorporating zapin within Sufi orders or spiritual regimens of a specific teacher or master called tariqah. The demise of court patronage after the Second World War did not end court legacies when zapin reverted to the desa. The istana–desa–tariqah dispositions of circulations between the istana and desa continue to enunciate the ‘imagined’ tradition of the sacred and the profane in contemporary zapin.
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This chapter is an investigation of the compositional and performance elements in Lanna court music, which developed inside the royal palace of Chiang Mai in northern Siam (Thailand) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This study adopts an ethnomusicological perspective together with sociological, historical and literary insights to delineate the broader significance of this courtly tradition. The analysis highlights the way that Lanna court music was performed for a number of different purposes, such as court entertainment, as an accompaniment for dance and singing, and as part of Buddhist ritual ceremonies. Equally important, it drew on a multiplicity of sources: aside from local traditions, including associations with Mon culture, over time Lanna music composition absorbed and adapted influences from central Siam, Burma (Myanmar) and, to a lesser extent, Western classical music. Particular attention is given to a key personality in the evolution of Lanna court music: Princess Dararatsami (Dara Rasmi, 1873–1933), a remarkable Chiang Mai princess who became a consort of the powerful Siamese king Rama V (Chulalongkorn). Her influence ushered in what is considered to be the pinnacle of court music and dance in Chiang Mai. As a result of both absorption and adaptation, the idea of a distinctive modern Chiang Mai cultural identity emerged that was founded in part on court music compositions and new performance creations.
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The history of the royal courts and Khmer performing arts of Cambodia is long and fascinating. Reaching their zenith in the Angkor period from the ninth to fifteenth centuries, thousands of remnant ancient stone monuments, epigraphic inscriptions, sculptures and bas-reliefs across Cambodia, and beyond, attest to the great and opulent Khmer civilisation and culture. Today’s Khmer performing arts are the continuation and further development of the priceless legacy of Angkor, though this evolution has not always been smooth or straightforward. Broadly speaking, the arts are the interwoven fabric of Khmer life, reflecting the daily activities and temperament of the people, through which culture is integral to the Khmer soul and identity. And in particular, court-related functions – such as birth anniversaries, crowning anniversaries and celebrations, royal ceremonies, state occasions, diplomatic receptions and entertainment – have been the major means by which the country’s performing arts have been refined and presented. This chapter examines the history, development and sociocultural context of Khmer courts, with special focus on court music and dance-drama, through different epochs down to the present. The discussion suggests that Khmer performing arts are a source of pride and inspiration; they serve as the magnet and glue to shape, form, seal, affirm and reaffirm the unity and solidarity of the Khmer people and Cambodian nation.