This is a great book — fun to read, thoroughly researched, informative, and a wonderfully rich topic of interest to a wide range of readers. Matthew Cohen has been researching the performance of Java and Bali on international stages for a long time, and it shows in the depth of information in the book and the fluidity of his writing.
The various chapters of the book are self-contained and fascinating in themselves, but together they give a broad picture approached in various ways. Read any chapter, and it stands alone but links to others. The main figure of one chapter reappears as a background figure in another. By the end of the book, the reader feels as though she has witnessed the kaleidoscope of performance which, in some way or another, represented Java and Bali abroad over the first half of the twentieth century.
The ‘Java and Bali on International Stages’ of the title refers to performances by dancers and musicians of various origins which projected Java or Bali on stages in Europe, the United States and India in the late colonial period. The 1905–52 timeframe covers the last 40 years of the Netherlands East Indies, and the first seven years after Indonesia's proclamation of independence in 1945, although a final chapter briefly leads the story into the present.
Cohen presents the stories of performers as varied as Dutch-born dancer Mata Hari (aka Lady MacLeod), English theatre director Edward Gordon Craig, Prague-based puppeteer Richard Teschner, Canadian singer Eva Gauthier, New York-based dancer Stella Bloch, Yogyakarta-born dancer Raden Mas Jodjana who lived in Holland, and Javanese performer of popular Malay language variety theatre, Dewi Dja, who spent much of her life in the United States. Each character comes alive as a person with a unique, complex life in a complex international world, but Cohen also uses their life stories to approach the issue of presenting ‘otherness’ from different angles, tracing the different ways the performers embraced alterity in art, and the changes in sensibility to this alterity over the first half of the twentieth century. As Cohen summarises, his book ‘historicizes two related shifts: from what Stuart Hall (1997) calls the “spectacle of the other” to ethnographically sensitive responsibility, and from the detached appropriations of exotica to the embraced engagements of twentieth-century international proponents of Asian performance’ (p. 4).
In discussing performances (re)presenting Java and Bali abroad, Cohen also looks at areas omitted by other writers. He discusses not only the more commonly discussed colonial government-sponsored groups performing at World Fairs, but also the ignored commercial world of vaudeville and Hollywood. Even when he discusses the World Fair context, he brings a new approach. His chapter on the Balinese performers at the Exposition Coloniale Internationale in 1931 deals more with Artaud and the context of his strange reaction to what he saw than to the usual discussion of Artaud's ‘theory’ on Balinese performance.
Cohen's central theme is ‘otherness’; how this was sensed, performed and perceived by performers who considered themselves to be performing Java and Bali. His choice of performers in the book is determined by his wish to ‘explore a variety of relations to Otherness’ (p. 21). Emanuel Levinas closely informs Cohen's questioning what ‘other’ meant. The question hovers not only in what was performed on stage and how audiences saw this, but also in the way the performers saw themselves, often adopting stage names and assumed identities.
The question also hovers behind Cohen's awareness of his own position as a practitioner of Javanese performance, which is omnipresent in the book. Issues of representation and notions of authenticity and ownership change over time and continue to do so within always-changing world contexts of accessibility, market, commodification, nationalism and post-nationalism. Cohen, as a performer acutely aware of the way questions of representation arise in his own time (Said and Barucha are prominent here), traces the ‘crucial changes in sensibility’ (p. 6) over the twentieth century that have led to this point.
I have only a few minor comments on this excellent book. More visuals would have been helpful — for instance, links to a website with extracts of the archival film material. There are a few slips: for instance, the statements that Claire Holt was a ‘graduate of Kridha Beksa Wirama’ (p. 178) and ‘successfully passed the school's rigorous exams’ (p. 84) are misleading. She did not follow the school's three-year course, but was given a diploma after studying for a year (1933–34). (Deena Burton's 2009 book on Holt, Sitting at the feet of gurus, which is listed in Cohen's bibliography, is excellent follow-on reading to his book.) The performance of I La Galigo (p. 223) was neither Javanese nor Balinese, but depicted the epic from South Sulawesi using movement and music from there. And Bali was actually not the area of Indonesia most prominently presented overseas in the 1950s and early 1960s together with Java (p. 215). During the Soekarno era, in the state cultural missions, Sumatra was the region most commonly included after Java and Sunda (Bali was not even included in the first two national cultural missions of 1954 and 1957).
Cohen's story ends in 1952, which is also the year when the new Republic of Indonesia began representing itself and sending its own tours of performers abroad. At the risk of self-aggrandisement I direct interested readers to my own research into the cultural missions of the Soekarno era, which picks up exactly where Cohen leaves off (Heirs to world culture: Being Indonesian 1952–65, ed. Lindsay and Liem [Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011]). Tours to the socialist bloc and cultural exchanges with communist countries over this period are an important part of the story of the development of Indonesian arts, which has been overlooked and is also jumped over in Cohen's last chapter which leaps to the later period of exchange with the United States.
As teaching material, Performing otherness is a rich source for courses in theatre and performance studies, colonialism and postcolonialism, cultural studies, Indonesian history, and even, in its picture of cultural life in New York 1910–30 and Hollywood and California in the 1930s and 1940s, for courses in American Studies.
However, I would recommend Cohen's book for any general reader with an interest in performance. It is a great read, with wonderful characters. And it is told from the heart.
