The dancing body occupies the center of Rachmi Diyah Larasati's book, The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia. It brings to attention a unique perspective on a still-sensitive topic, the legacy of the 1965–66 mass killings of suspected communists, including many female artists (p. 6). An estimated half-million to two million Indonesians (p. 3) were slaughtered following the abortive October 1 coup d’état.Footnote ¹ Larasati invokes memories of her East Javanese village acutely affected by the 1965–66 violence, reflecting on the violation of the family relations and community of female dancers. Both a respected dancer and an Indonesian civil servant, she positions herself as “a genealogically subversive dancer whose critical work rests on the fragility of access to both outside thought and inside information” (pp. xxi, 9). Larasati navigates conflictive continuities—potent court and village dances versus state-constructed replicas, and naming genocidal history versus state erasure of this history.Footnote ²

Of interest to performance, postcolonial, and Indonesian studies scholars, as well as performing artists, this book privileges the interrupted identities of female dancers impacted by the New Order's anti-communist project. By orchestrating the massacres, the state aimed to obliterate oppositional voices associated with the leftist organizations of PKI, Lekra, and Gerwani (pp. 6, 36–37). New Order reportage of the coup claimed that Gerwani women were complicit in the murders of the seven Army officers (p. 31), and as Annie Pohlman states, the women were accused of dancing suggestively and using sexualized torture against the officers.Footnote ³ Any politically active village female who engaged in dancing and singing could be marked as “sexually loose,” exhibiting “barbaric or abusive behaviors,” and targeted for extermination or imprisonment (pp. 36–37).

Before 1965, female dancers produced local culture in communal spaces. New Order leaders saw local production as competing with the state's intention to be the sole producer of national identity (pp. 91, 99). To eradicate the roots of rural power, the state destroyed cultural practices, including particular dances. For example, Jejer, performed by East Javanese women at harvest time, was associated with the rural poor and, by extension, with PKI, Gerwani, and Lekra. Banned after 1965, Jejer dancers were marked as “evil” by the military and conservative Muslims, and eradicated (pp. 64, 80–81). Yet, by the 1990s, Jejer had resurfaced as a dance approved for international missions. Extracted from its shamanistic village context, movements considered too suggestive were altered.Footnote ⁴ Jejer was “politically re-aligned” (p. 78) as a national relic of an imaginary, conflict-free history.

The state decimated village life and ignored the cost to village artists (p. 10). Exterminated or banned village dance masters were replaced with non-local state representatives. Surviving female masters and promising students lost their means of economic sustenance from the arts (pp. 6, 10)—a pattern continuing into the post-Suharto Reformasi era (pp. 13, 62).

Larasati compares the post-genocide projects of Indonesia and Cambodia, assessing the effectiveness of cultural propaganda to stimulate economic development. The female Apsara court dance became symbolic of Cambodia's recovery from the communist Khmer Rouge genocide, and was used to “mediate” international investment (pp. 114–15). In Indonesia's case, dance was also crucial to “the nation-state's propaganda and economic stimulus machine” (p. 54). Unlike Cambodia's case, with no evidence implicating the leftist organizations as perpetrators of mass violence, the New Order itself appeared to be the perpetrator (pp. 116–17). Selected dances projected “purity” and “innocence,” while the state continued anti-communist Cold War rhetoric warning of renewed violence should the “insidious, murderous communist force” rise again. International powers turned a blind eye, “play[ing] along with Suharto's charade” (pp. 115–17).

Economic assistance did flow into Indonesia from the United States and other Western powers up through 1990.Footnote ⁵ Was dance reconstruction, as Larasati argues, crucial to the New Order's charade as an “‘exotic,’ and profitable place for international powers to engage in the business of investment, development and ‘recovery’” (p. 117)? The reader is left to wonder how cultural representation works as a mechanism for fostering economic development.

As an artist embodying the contradiction of identities as both “subversive” dancer and state dancer, Larasati nevertheless chooses to privilege women's resistive political and artistic agency. Larasati hopes to demarcate space for women's collaborative and collective memory resistant to forced amnesia and to confront patriarchy (pp. 9–10). Her book marks a significant step towards this goal, with examples illustrating women's agency inherent in their dancing bodies. Despite continuing harassment, female dancers quietly practice “forbidden” village dances (pp. 12–13). Rural dance transmission persists, exemplified by the dancer Poniti. The daughter of disappeared dance master Ngatini, Poniti internalized her mother's dance aesthetics, evident in her performance of even state-altered dances (pp. 72, 74–75). The Javanese female dance troupe Sahita—active in the post-Suharto Reformasi era—critiques patriarchy and state power (pp. 142–43). Larasati's performance, Tembok Mari Bicara, performed in 2008, excavated themes of death and erasure as reminders of genocide (pp. 153–55). An agent of resistance, the politicized dancer interconnects dance innovation with political practice (p. 152). Larasati insightfully observes that “a potential space of resistance is … created every time a practitioner embodies, and subtly modifies, a known form” (p. 149).

Larasati's privileging of women's agency counterbalances Heryanto's research emphasizing how state terrorism persists in victimizing Indonesians beyond the New Order era.Footnote ⁶ Pohlman's work on the 1965–66 genocide supports Larasati's perspective on female agency despite state terror. The New Order military's sexual violence directed at women associated with PKI and Gerwani is captured through testimonies of brutal misogyny, sexual assault, and torture. Women survivors resisted victimization through defiance, coping strategies, and courageous compassion.Footnote ⁷

Despite the fog of secrecy still shrouding the 1965–66 mass killings, Larasati's voice as the politically cognizant female dancer and scholar joins a community of scholars and activists dedicated to shedding light on this period. Recently released State Department documents reveal that US officials documented “tens of thousands” of victims, and were cognizant of the scale and brutality of the mass killings.Footnote ⁸ With this initial release of US embassy files, the vocal community, including Larasati, will likely have firmer ground to stand on.