The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia (Larasati, introduction and ch. 2, 2013)

=== [PDF page 1] === i n t roduc t ion Dancing on the Mass Grave Many women gather in the yard in front of my house each evening while children play and practice certain dance.1 Every day they in habit a kind of “no man’s land.” Except there is a man who hides his gun in his bedroom, who comes and goes to the Air Force base surrounded by sugar cane, in East Java. His body has the wounds of war, seven in total. Holes and strange marks cover his skin. His name is Mr. Soek. Those holes are deep, cutting his flesh and mark ing his skin weirdly because of their itchiness. My finger often wants to caress those holes, and I once was able to enter one of them to touch the scarred tissue that had replaced the skin at the bullet’s entry point. I often ask him about the cause of those injuries. He Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. forbids me to keep looking at the scars, and furthermore to keep asking him what was the cause of those injuries. Many people told me that he is sakti, possessing divine power, because he is still alive although many bullets entered him. For me he was sakti also, not because of his wounded body, but because of his signature on a piece of paper, which enabled me to be admitted to a school. Because of Mr. Soek, I could go to school, although I had to leave my childhood friends behind. They did not get the signature because many of their parents were missing and they failed to submit proper letters from the government about their “clean identity.”2 Mr. Soek was like a magician. When I needed a new school, his name suddenly became the name of my father, and he came to school wearing his Air Force xiii Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:57:47. === [PDF page 2] === xiv  Introduction uniform and introduced himself as my parent. He was the only man in the house where I stayed.3 One day he told me that his first and second wounds were from the fight for independence; the rest were from the civil war in Madiun. He explained that he was not sure who shot him. In one of his missions he was facing many women in Javanese sarongs, running around. It was confusing for him. He didn’t know if they were a rebel group or just innocent civilians. He made the decision not to shoot them, but suddenly from behind there was gunfire and many bullets flew at him. He did not have a chance to see where those bullets came from. He was very young and in the middle of a teak forest in Madiun, East Java, in 1948. I was never able to retrieve his memory and his unspoken wit ness in detail, including whether he killed the people who resided in the teak forest, who, to my knowledge, were mostly farmers. Per haps before I was old enough to be trusted with such information, a loaded truck of Army men came to the neighborhood and found me on the street playing with neighbors, singing and dancing in a circle, pretending to be a dance teacher. The leader of the Army asked if we, the children who were playing on the street, knew where Mr. Soek’s house was. All the children were pointing at me. I walked slowly in front of them, bringing the soldiers to my home. Mr. Soek was in the corner of the house, standing up straight like in the photographs of Air Force training that I often saw in magazines, yet his body was shaking. A month after that, I realized Mr. Soek did not wear his uniform anymore; he had been forced to resign his Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. position because the office discovered his connection to the family of the dancer in our house, and that was forbidden. He was married (illegally) to a female dancer, who was accused of being a former Gerwani member. Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia) was a women’s movement during the time of Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia. Although the group was legal under Sukarno, later, during the rule of Suharto (the second president), it was blamed for allegedly sympathizing with the communists and was banned and persecuted. During and after the time when Suharto came to power, many members of Gerwani simply disappeared.4 Membership in Gerwani became a monster of motherhood in my house. For me, “Gerwani women” were my aunties, dance teachers, Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:57:47. === [PDF page 3] === Introduction  xv neighbors, and the parents of many of my friends. Yet for Mr. Soek, my aunt, the woman he loved, and whose family he had knowingly protected with the strength of his name, position, and “clean” status, had caused his uniform and good standing, in effect his entire life, to be suddenly and violently revoked. For the remaining fifteen years before he died, I felt he was never quite himself again. At the house of the head of the village a few years after Mr. Soek’s arrest, I saw a program on television about “Gerwani women.” Confronted with the gap between enforced state discourse and the familiarity of my own family, the words themselves began to sound strange: ominous, but not in the direct, literal sense promoted by the government. Instead they formed an uneasy, ill-d efined space around my memories of women, my women, and their dancing. The knowledge of our own families was surrounded by the reconstructed unfamiliarity of violence that sought to re-narrativize our own expe rience. Unable to avoid it, in spite of my fear I began quietly map ping each encounter with the narratives of Gerwani and of women, moving, discussing, thinking, or “plotting.” We danced and grew up with the unspoken struggle of memory ever present in our own households. In some sense, this book is a response to the experiences of my childhood and of my later life as a performer and young scholar, as infused with my inheritance of both a powerful dance practice and a well-h idden yet horrifying political identity. As I attempt to theorize Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. my own history and that of the millions of others who were targeted and persecuted or killed by the “New Order” regime, the state’s narrative use of the female dancing body as a symbol of great power, albeit often an “evil” power, becomes a point of departure to discuss the theorization of bodily mimesis in relation to historical context, as discussed by Edward Said in The World, the Text, and the Critic.5 Following Said, in my book, the creation of “text” refers to expression through writing, bodily representation, or other media as a methodologically conscious reconstruction of identity. Here it is used as an attempt to interrogate the official unquestionable-ness of a ubiquitous, hegemonic, and mythical text: Indonesian national reality as produced by the military and state in collusion with the forces that Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:57:47. === [PDF page 4] === xvi  Introduction determine global political, economic, and artistic alliances. Yet my writing is in many ways a paradox, indebted to and enabled by the very texts and forces it confronts with all the strength I can muster. In this context, I engage with the process of subject formation, the creation of “self ” that, under pressure from the external forces of myth, is affected by dominant narratives that vie to replace embodied memory, even, and particularly, within the private space of family and household. The concept of myth, however, which is often understood to be the source of “primitive” ritualistic behavior in groups of humans outside of our own, is in this context critically expanded. Here, myth also follows the modern practice of ritualistic violence and functions to categorize certain unwanted bodies from within our own ranks as Other, as belonging to a group whose alleged actions threaten the very foundations of what we must think of as “ours.” Mimesis in this context is a creation of text that simultaneously departs from and resembles the particularities of Indonesian history, the weaving of a complex fabric of myth and experience. The resulting cloth appears as a continuous and unedited whole, yet is riddled with gaps through which millions of actual bodies have both physically vanished and been mythologically expelled. These real, vanished bodies are then replaced with simulacra that cover the holes left behind; in my writing, I use the word replica to make this connection. Replication occurs as new, historically, politically “clean” dancers are employed to absorb and embody the practices of artists targeted by the state, recreating the image of corporeality in Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. the traditions of those who no longer officially exist. The vanished dancers and their families, and those women put in prison or left at home but stripped of their practice, serve as the point of departure for my choreography of theory in this manuscript. While ethnographic research and oral history are tools I use to recapture memories and interpretations of those events, the narratives and embodied experiences I gather surround me, intertwining with the texts, and the corporeality of oppression that I must revisit. I combine my memory, corporeal experience, and interpretations to craft my own historical representation, in the form of a book, attempting a structural resistance through the precise mapping of forced political relocations and dislocations enacted by the New Order and simultaneously hidden Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:57:47. === [PDF page 5] === Introduction  xvii within the discourse of a “natural” reaction to a universalized framework of good and evil. This book is also based on my experiences growing up and making my way through the national educational system during the Suharto era. In the classroom, I learned that Suharto, the second president of Indonesia, was a national hero. At school, I was repeatedly taught that on many different occasions, such as in 1965 and during the Madiun clash, the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI) was responsible for the murder of Army generals and high-ranking officers. The PKI, then, was to be seen as a group that had betrayed the nation’s strength and thus constituted a threat to our national unity and security. Therefore, every citizen had an obligation to involve himself or herself in opposing communism and in taking certain precautions against the perceived threat of its continued spread. My schooling, however, never enabled me to learn the fate or whereabouts of my neighbor’s mother, or my dance teachers, my grandfather, or all of the men and women by whom I had been surrounded who disappeared one by one and never returned. Some of the women who were left always sat in the front yard and never mentioned anything related to these disappearances. Every two weeks most women went to the military district office, leaving early in the morning and coming back after dark. I did not understand what they were doing and why they always went there, except that they all seemed very nervous and tried to put their corsets on very tightly, Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. just like when my friends and I put on our costumes before dancing Gandrung and Tari Bondan, two dances in the Javanese style practiced by women. Although my teacher always told me that each dance consisted of different values and class markers, I danced them both enthusiastically. Retracing First Performances: The Genealogy of Reappearances and Erasure It was the middle of the 1970s, the day of my first performance, my feet stepping on the pot made of clay and lightly dancing above it, my right hand holding an umbrella. A teacher had told me that I should Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:57:47. === [PDF page 6] === xviii   Introduction imagine “travel” and “optimism,” but in an elegant way, when performing those movements. Although too young to understand what she meant, I would soon be traveling to different regions across the country, and a few short years after that I would begin to perform abroad. Slowly, as I became more practiced in the forms required for official dancers, I began to forget about the people I knew who had disappeared. I was busy practicing and rehearsing for my many performances in villages, for television or government offices on Independence Day, and always on October 1, when the Army cele brates Kesaktian Pancasila. This day, commemorating the sacred power of Pancasila (the five principles of Indonesian state ideology endlessly drummed into the minds of the citizenry by every teacher and government officer) was the day in 1965 when attacks, allegedly by Communist Party members, were dispelled by both troops and civilians allied with then-general Suharto. Yet of course the commemoration, based around the events of a single day, does not remind us of the hundreds of thousands of accused “communists” who lost their lives at the hands of the military shortly afterward. In connection with the many artists and dancers who were targeted and disappeared during and after these attacks, I take the state’s imaginative transformation of a day, September 30, into the ultimate national “zero hour”—during which our country was said to be saved from destruction and born anew—as a point of departure for my argument on amnesia and remembering. As an important condition of possibility for such an argument, Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. and to some extent for this entire book, I reflect further on my inclusion in the “clean” household of an Air Force family. This move, while itself traumatic, finally enabled me to reconfigure my alienation from the social and political mainstream. This thorny gift of acceptability in the eyes of the state, for which a number of grave sacrifices were made, has ultimately provided me with greater access to the dis-familiarity and disconnects within my own memories, and by historical/theoretical extension, those of the many, many others less “lucky” than myself. From within the relative safety and obscurity of my grandmother’s yard, where I learned to dance, my life began to change quickly and permanently. I rarely looked back, as new alliances were formed and Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:57:47. === [PDF page 7] === Introduction  xix old ones erased and forgotten. After performing nationally for a few years as a teenager, one day I was told to undergo a skrening (screening), after which I received a kind of agreement letter to become a government employee of Indonesia. During the skrening I was asked to make a diagram of my family tree, to see if there were any sort of connections to the Communist Party in my family; even a distant relative known to have been in an “affiliated” organization would have disqualified, and probably blacklisted me, or far worse. This was my final test, and with the sakti-ness of Mr. Soek’s signature, my “dirty” genealogy was officially made invisible, obscuring my connection to a disappeared grandfather and many other “subversive” relatives. Soon afterward, I was inducted as a member of the civil service and began teaching at the Indonesian state Institute of the Arts (ISI), in Yogyakarta, where President Suharto, the person mainly responsible for the killings in 1965 and the “antisubversive” policies that followed, visited in 1984 for the opening ceremony. By that time I had become a member of the Indonesian Cultural Mission, an official, state-sanctioned dance troupe whose function was to promote Indonesia’s national identity abroad. Thus, drawing on my experience as a dancer, civil servant, and national cultural representative, and my transformation from a so-called unruly, unwanted body, I look at the study of travel and mobility, of “feminist” resistance and co-optation from a dislocated perspective that might approximate that of Said’s worldly exile. During one such cultural mission in 1994, in the corner of a Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. library in Europe, I found a picture from 1973 of dancers who were identified as Indonesian “political prisoners.” Recognizing the style and location as close to home, I moved closer, thinking I might pick out some familiar faces; instead, I found something that made me begin to question aspects of my education, particularly much of the history I had learned in school along with my fellow Indonesian citizens over the past few decades. Three years later, in 1997, while studying with a former staff member of the Amnesty London headquarters at UCLA, I was suddenly struck by an awful realization, as I was flooded again with the memories of my neighbors, many of them dancers like myself and my family, who had disappeared and never returned. Thousands of miles from home in an English-speaking Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:57:47. === [PDF page 8] === xx  Introduction c lassroom, my sense of historical identification was radically reoriented, as I read that in 1965, more than a million Indonesians were killed and thousands more imprisoned without trial on isolated islands. When I returned to Indonesia in 1998, with much of the “common sense” I had developed as a child and young woman altered or lost, I began to ask questions. Many people were shocked that I would even speak of such matters, others told their stories and versions of events excitedly, and others, still, simply refused to respond or react in any way at all. Later that year, driven by these questions and seduced by the opportunity to obtain an international degree, I accepted an invitation to go back to UCLA as a master’s candidate in world arts and cultures. However, even there I found it difficult to free myself from the constraints of being known as a dancer, and therefore associated with the context of official Indonesian culture missions and expected to report on issues of traditional art, which are assumed by many Western scholars to be completely unrelated to politics. (For me, such intellectual positions appear eerily similar to those of the Indonesian state itself.) Furthermore, in the year 2000 I stood trial in Yogyakarta, accused of “victimizing” my then-husband by leaving him behind at home during my schooling abroad, which was considered shocking and inappropriate behavior, especially for a female dancer and civil servant. As a result, the process of gaining a Western education became a geopolitical negotiation of the location of rights: I gained crucial access to a new perspective on my Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. nation’s history,6 yet I lost my rights to my own house and with it many highly personal belongings associated with my history, including several of Mr. Soek’s letters to me while I was completing my undergraduate education. Drawing on this experience, I discuss the interconnectedness of state patriarchy, citizenship, and mobility in the context of the (inter) nationalized female dancing body. Must the fleeting promise of femi nist resistance contained within global mobility be counterbalanced by slippage and loss of access within the space of the nation? Even as I move on and off far-flung performance spaces and the Western academic stage, I am continually reminded that I am expected to return “home,” that I am still “working” for the government (despite Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:57:47. === [PDF page 9] === Introduction  xxi my long absence, my attempts to step down from my position as an Indonesian civil servant have been held up at various levels of local and national bureaucracy for more than a decade), and that I must reiterate and reproduce Indonesian culture and obey the requirements of the state as I promised. To this end, I am also well educated: in order to become a civil servant and traveling state performer, I was required to attend several month-long courses entitled Penataran P4 or “Upgrading Course on the Directives for the Realization and Implementation of Pancasila.” 7 This is, however, also “useful” for the crucial project of historical reflection in the context of this book. From the deeply ingrained experience of learning at the hands of the government, I depart on an analysis of the Indonesian state’s emphasis on certain kinds of indoctrination. Further, I examine the ways in which culture, art, and performance are made ideologically inseparable from national history and the politics of memory, the reconstruction of which serves to erase the extreme violence and chaos on which Suharto’s New Order state itself was founded. Thus, I trace the history of the female dancing body that vanishes and is then “replaced,” its experience and the fact of its disappearance erased from view by new, highly indoctrinated, strictly trained female bodies—not unlike the idealized Indonesian citizen that lives within myself. The art forms once practiced by the vanished dancers, after being reclaimed and ideologically retooled by the state, are considered sufficiently cleansed of the “subversive” aura of those who once mastered and embodied Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. them, and, as such, safe to be included as part of the official concept of national tradition. A Note on the Ethics of Categorization and Publication As I began this research and book project, I interviewed people who could be considered victims of recent Indonesian history, as well as those often thought of as perpetrators (both terms are problematic and I apply them sparingly) of the violence in 1965 and the years that followed. In Indonesia, these two categorizations have very different implications and interpretations, depending on where you stand in relation to the events of this period. In the course of my work, I Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:57:47. === [PDF page 10] === xxii  Introduction d ocumented people’s stories through photographs, as well as occasionally with video and audio recordings. The ethnographic notes in this manuscript mostly reflect my childhood memories and familiarity with the oral histories of the women surrounding me as well as the violence perpetrated against them, including rape, imprisonment, and murder. Because of the continuing political sensitivity of information related to 1965 and the treatment of suspected communists, the stories and impressions I gathered have become elements of an ongoing process of negotiation. At stake are difficult decisions as to which parts of this long journey it is possible to mention specifically or describe in detail in order to support my arguments in this book while minimizing the potential to cause harm or put others at risk. This research also looks at written reports, magazine articles, and newsletters by Human Rights Watch, documents prepared by Amnesty International, Komnas Perempuan (National Commission on Violence Against Women), and certain nongovernmental organization (NGO) reports. Because of the continuing sensitivity of the issues dealt with in this book, all people involved or who have been interviewed for this text remain anonymous, except those who specifically wished to speak out regarding the Suharto regime and asked that their names be included. To respect them, I follow each person’s individual requests. As a consequence, there are some inconsistencies in my approach, especially regarding interviews with specific individuals. Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:57:47. === [PDF page 11] === 2. w h at i s l e f t The Fabricated and the Illicit Saina told the investigating team that she participated in a “dirty, indecent dance, the dance of the ‘Fragrant Flowers’ which was performed nakedly everyday, both during the day and at night. The 400 men present would watch 200 women, after which free sex would occur, in which every woman sometimes had to serve three or four men sexually.”1 This quotation is the “confession” of Saina, a seventeen-year-old identified by a military newspaper in 1965 as a member of Gerwani (the acronym for “Gerakan Wanita Indonesia,” or “Indonesian Women’s Movement”), a progressive women’s association that was later banned by Suharto. In the official state narrative of the events in ques- Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. tion, Gerwani was held partially responsible for the death and alleged torture of six Army generals and one high-ranking officer on September 30, 1965; its members were suspected of being communist sympathizers who had participated in special revolutionary training. As Saskia Wieringa argues in her book, these kinds of descriptions were produced in order to establish extreme anti-communist sentiments within Indonesian society, simultaneously making convenient scapegoats of Gerwani members2 —who were already highly unpopular with much of the patriarchal establishment—by associating them with the killing of the seven officers. Meanwhile, a blind eye was turned to the mass murders perpetrated across the country by the 31 Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 12] === 32  What Is Left military, as it was to the support and participation in the murders of several civilian groups. In this chapter, I examine how post-m assacre cultural reconstruction in Indonesia has been a form of domination, mobilized to maintain control over cultural identity formation, and by extension both domestic order and international relations. I focus on how state narratives surrounding the 1965–66 massacres were reproduced in society through the fabrication of memory. I argue that this tactic primarily affected, and in various ways continues to affect, those bodies that were viewed as unruly for political reasons and were thus made into convenient, corporeal symbols of the ongoing “evil” against which the New Order claimed its legitimacy as protector and representative of the idealized nation. I also analyze the political connections between state narratives and the “voluntary” cooperation of the populace. Taking Benedict Anderson’s analysis of nationalism in relation to Western imperialism as an important point of departure,3 I seek to show that the New Order’s particular approach—combining very specifically sculpted “remembrances” of a national past with a massively enforced forgetting of actual historical experience—cannot possibly provide true reconciliation or healing for those victimized. Rather, that which may be remembered and that which must be forgotten—the sequence and importance of certain events—has simply been edited in an attempt to shape and guide consciousness and public memory on a national level. Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. This strategy is meant to direct individual members of society in their understanding of the past—most crucially the recent past and the events of 1965—where passed time has essentially been extracted from the progression of history and returned to citizens as “ours” only after its reconstruction by the government. As Indonesians, then, the version of the massacres we must remember is the centralized and founding narrative created by the state; recalling or narrating events as they transpired and were experienced would perhaps be tantamount to blocking out or forgetting the state itself. Conversely, if the legitimacy of the state is recognized, then the death and imprisonment of citizens that enabled Suharto’s New Order regime to take control of the nation are erased from view or forgotten. In order to Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 13] === What Is Left  33 create a selective amnesia toward the facts of history, then, the state has produced its own narration of the past through various media: film, educational curricula, museum exhibits, sculpture, and, perhaps most ubiquitously, the “traditional” performing arts. Politics of Memory: Body and the Disciplining of Alliance We are standing in lines, grouped by grade, stretching many rows back. Each group has a supervising teacher and one older student assigned to lead them. We are hot and sweaty in our nylon and polyester uniforms, but we are used to standing like that during our frequent training for baris berbaris, or marching in line, which is meant to instill discipline and provide physical exercise. This particu lar march takes us into town, walking carefully in different rhythmic patterns while the leader shouts at us, imitating the familiar call of the Army sergeants: satu, dua, tiga! (one, two, three!). On the street we pass many honking cars, buses, and trucks, showing their support and approval. We are marching to celebrate Kesaktian Pancasila on October 1, which the government has declared a day to com memorate the strength of the nation and its freedom. The freedom we are honoring, however, is not our independence from the Dutch or the Japanese, but our “liberation” from what the government officials call Pengkhianatan G30S–PKI, or “The Treason of the September 30th Movement and the Communist Party (PKI),” words indoctrinated by the state, which all children must learn in class. Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The marching, street parade, and uniforms are adapted to cultur ally represent each region and school; the event is thus turned into a “cultural” performance competition, judged on variations, complex ity and synchronicity of steps, combinations of movements, costume design, and songs. The competition and creative participation— albeit in a highly predefined context—function to drum up enthu siasm among students such as myself, giving it the feel of a special event in which we are personally invested rather than a mere civic obligation. Every year on October 1 we also go to a small local theater to see the film bearing the same title as the government slo gan: Pengkhianatan G30S–PKI.4 Again and again the film “showed” us the PKI’s evil betrayal of our young nation, fixing and Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 14] === 34  What Is Left e mbedding the words from our history textbooks—which form the state’s version of the events leading up to the mass killings in 1965— with explicit, graphic, and melodramatic imagery. Viewing is man datory, and each student would single out and memorize different scenes, depending on which part he or she would chose to describe in a report that was always assigned the next day in class. I preferred to focus on the dancing scenes, especially those parts accompanied by singing, that often showed forbidden art forms that we were allowed to see only by viewing the film at this special time of year. The women in this cinematic narrative—created by a special team under the Ministries of Education and Defense and the military—are portrayed as bloodthirsty, sexualized extremists.5 These brutal sexual politics, repeated and reproduced throughout the media and national education systems, have constituted the dominant ideological force in the construction and establishment of a widespread Indonesian collective memory. This phenomenon includes the portrayal of women who take active roles in voicing their sociopolitical concerns and making themselves seen and heard in the form of street protests. In the film, the image of such women is reconfigured through a pointedly arranged scene. In it, a military wife’s activism and membership in political organizations are presented in stark opposition to the longing of her husband and children for her comforting, feminine presence in the domestic space of the home. Like other socially, politically active women in the film, the woman’s “low” Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. moral character is signified by the then-modern look: short hair and a skirt hemmed high enough to walk comfortably while keeping in stride with men. Through similarities in wardrobe, the politically involved wife and mother is thus visually equated with those other “liberal” women believed to have taken revenge—in the form of torture, mutilation, and castration—on the bodies of prominent, dominant men: Gerwani. The clear implication was that all wives, mothers, or daughters actively participating in shaping the conditions of their own sociocultural surrounds—whether rural or cosmopolitan, informal or overtly political—potentially constituted a grave threat to national morality and domestic patriarchal order. Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 15] === What Is Left  35 The watching of the film, particularly its required viewing by schoolchildren, was embedded like a centerpiece in a specially tailored journey through national history lasting several days. On the mornings following the screening, the teachers, especially those who taught us PSPB (Pelajaran Sejarah Perjuangan Bangsa, or Study of the History of the National Struggle) and P4 (Pedoman Penghayatan Pengamalan Pancasila,6 Course on Guidelines Embodying Pancasila [The Five Principles of Indonesian Citizenship]) would review the details of the film, drawing parallels between its cinematic realism and the pages of our textbooks. From their precise, “empirical” lectures, we learned, again, exactly what we needed to remember about the rebirth of our proud nation, including the identities, roles, and qualities of all the major and minor characters, heroes, and villains. From the time of the event until now, more than forty years later, the narrative journey has stood its ground remarkably well, despite the subsequent fall of its most heroic protagonist from power and from any semblance of grace. Suharto’s resignation amid heavy protests in 1998 has perhaps been taken as a separate episode of the same, longer story: a tragedy in which the dictator falls, and yet the nation, and its history, remain still as promised. The perspective of the millions who were imprisoned or murdered post–September 30, 1965, has never been given official space for expression, nor has evidence been brought to public light of who is to blame for their deaths. Their lives cannot be returned, and many of the children they left behind remain in a state of confusion as to the fate of their Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. parents and the true significance of their loss. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson elucidates the “strange habit” of European colonizers’ frequent construction of a “new version” of their existing capitals on occupied territories—as in New York, New London, New Amsterdam, or “Nouvelle Orleans.” Anderson sees this practice as historically similar to the earlier, intraregional renaming of Asian cities such as Chiangmai (New City) in Thailand or Kota Baru (New Town) in Central Java. In the latter instances, he argues that the claiming of a “new” often functioned to signify a succession, inheritance, or geographical shift in the locus of regional power, as if the “old” had vanished and been replaced: “‘new’ and Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 16] === 36  What Is Left ‘old’ are aligned diachronically, and the former appears always to invoke an ambiguous blessing from the dead.” In the case of the Europeans, however, what is indicated is an expansion, rather than a shift in the locus of power. There, the “‘new’ and ‘old’ were understood synchronically, co-existing within homogeneous, empty time.”7 In my analysis, the rise of Suharto and the renaming of Indonesia’s ruling elite as the “New Order” (causing Sukarno’s ousted regime to be referred to as the “Old Order”) accomplished both of Anderson’s versions of the transfer of power simultaneously. The establishment of the New Order signified a shift in the locus of control as the mantle of president was diachronically passed down, or “inherited,” by Suharto; yet through the reconstruction and foregrounding of Indonesia’s “timeless culture,” the new leader conjured his synchronic existence in parallel with the mythical status of the Javanese royal hierarchy, located at a remove in the Central Javanese city of Yogyakarta, where the sultan has “always” held court. Even the deposed leader of Orde Lama (the “Old Order”), Sukarno, continued to “exist” as a now-g hostly, yet irreplaceable, icon of independent nationhood, mutely haunting the capital city under house arrest until his death in 1970 (and thereafter in the still-ubiquitous, legendary images of his defiant heyday).8 Thus the Suharto regime systema tized the establishment and legitimacy of its own rule by engendering specific patterns of memory and forgetting, inserting itself in a new, yet “time-honored” national identity reconstructed by the state following its rise to power. Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Through this fabricated memory, the state restructured not only national history but also the cultural identity of certain groups, in particular the politically active women mentioned previously, by making connections between their cultural activities of dancing and singing and barbaric or abusive behaviors that flouted the norms by which female citizens of Indonesia are typically expected to behave. This reconstructed identity was applied to women who were involved in organizations and activities that, during the events of 1965, were suddenly deemed illegal and swiftly banned. One might say that their activities were transformed retroactively into a mark of deviance in order to justify, post facto, the harsh treatment they received. Women who were targeted included those with purported links to Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 17] === What Is Left  37 the PKI (membership in almost any left-leaning or Sukarnoist group, including organizations with no direct affiliation whatsoever with the PKI, also came to serve as sufficient evidence of “contamination” by leftist ideals), those who provided friendship or assistance to a Communist Party member, or those who were married or related, even distantly, to a party member. Such citizens, whether involved in a direct or tertiary way, were officially stigmatized by the application of the label tidak bersih lingkungan, or “unclean environment.” This powerful defamation thus turned those who had been cast out—many of their bodies, and the traces they left behind, had both physically and ideologically “disappeared”—into political and social outcasts. The state defended its violent actions by claiming they were necessary in order to maintain peace and national security. They further mobilized these concepts to codify and legalize both the guidelines for civil conduct and the duties of good citizens as well as to establish procedures for state action to be taken against those who fell outside of these newly marked boundaries. Behavior that was officially labeled “subversive” was not limited to direct participation in communism or public dissent but included any act that might be construed as indirect involvement, assistance, or fraternization with those considered in violation of social and political norms and therefore in opposition to the government. Both direct and indirect involvement with such groups was viewed as a political crime, known as terlibat (“implicated”), or simply as a “subversive act.” Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. In this way, the identities of Gerwani members and other female political activists who were victims of the New Order were taken— often along with their bodies—and hidden or destroyed, then re constructed and finally presented to the public in their subverted forms.9 Instead of being viewed as victims of the New Order and its military oppression, then, because of state propaganda and official history, such women have been framed as citizens who knowingly committed a grave error, and, if they were “lucky” enough to have remained alive, must now struggle nationally, locally, and even within their own families to be seen once more as potentially useful members of society. Through photos, film, news media, and doctrines in public meetings and educational curricula, this reconstructed identification Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 18] === 38  What Is Left of progressive or artistically oriented female citizenship cohered, creating a body of reference within national and international understanding that came to be considered a valid resource. Because it was important for the state to portray itself in a favorable light in order to construct the consent of the public through control of collective memory, it defended its claims of the necessity of exterminating the PKI while paradoxically avoiding admission of any kind of responsibility for the mass killings that had occurred. If people revealed memories of the event that differed from the state narratives, they too were categorized as subversive or anti-nationalist and silenced through various repressive state apparatus. The blame for such actions was consistently placed on the victims, who were accused of betraying their own country. In this context, people suspected or categorized as communist, either with connections to the party or members of Gerwani, Baperki or Badan Permusyawaratan Kewarganegaraan Indonesia (a Chinese association in Indonesia), BTI (a farmers’ association), or SOBSI (a labor union) all became scapegoats, even though they were not necessarily Communist Party members. This entire, large group of citizens was then considered socially, politically, and legally suspect in the extreme.10 Benedict Anderson called the military’s reports of sexual atrocities committed by Gerwani members on behalf of the PKI “icy lies... planned to create an anti-Communist hysteria in all strata of Indonesian society.”11 Despite a few strong outside critiques, however, the fabricated knowledge surrounding the events of 1965 was Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. in large part successfully transformed into the dominant narrative, as differing accounts were suppressed. This imposed, self-serving historiography was then supported by books published by the New Order and was immediately added to the national educational curriculum, the production of which was centralized in Jakarta. Under this policy, by the early 1980s, the content of obligatory core courses in national history from first grade through university level was focused on 1965, providing an ever-more detailed political analysis from the state’s perspective. This massive, tightly woven historical tapestry, tactically designed to affect local and national perceptions of the events of 1965, also ultimately skewed international conceptions of, and responses to, the Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 19] === What Is Left  39 rise of the New Order, despite the criticisms leveled by Robinson, Anderson, and others. According to Dwyer and Santikarma, whose work focuses on the effects of 1965 in Bali, the state’s claims that the heavy killings there in particular were based on localized cultural tendencies were also quickly picked up on by foreign reporters: “Most western news accounts of the time tended to strangely echo these claims by the state that the violence was a product of the uncontrollable masses, describing Indonesians slaughtering each other in a mad frenzy, betraying their cultural propensity for falling into mass trance or running amok or simply demonstrating their Third World savagery.”12 With much of the international political and academic community either lauding or simply ignoring the actions of the Indonesian state and their widespread effects, Suharto was able to operate with relative efficiency and impunity, without the threat of international sanctions or censure. Domestically, those whom Suharto had targeted during his rise to power became known as “Illicit Citizens”: a threatening, destructive force continually working against statehood, against the development of nationalism, peace, and religious strength—everything that by national norms constitutes the category of “human”—a nd thereby necessitating the presence of a vigilant, authoritarian state. Furthermore, the actions of such “leftists” were portrayed as severely tarnishing the honor of Indonesian women, and the particular slander of “betraying women’s honor” was used, bolstered by the salacious rumors of the fate of the murdered generals, Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. to convince other women’s organizations to turn against Gerwani in favor of alliance with the military; the portrayal of Gerwani women as “liberated” and sexually loose also convinced many Islamic and Christian associations to turn against them.13 In this way, the New Order’s strategies to promote nationalism functioned to build the imaginative “unity” of Indonesia through killing, slandering, and scapegoating certain groups in order to establish an absolute, collective “moral” and legal code that would sacralize the legitimacy of the new state. Within this strategy, the construction of new “traditional” dance forms or the reconstruction of old ones constituted an important element of the government’s effort to represent itself in the international Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 20] === 40  What Is Left arena. More recently, this practice has also led to the expansion of the symbolic role of dance traditions in strategies aimed at increasing foreign support for economic development and national security programs. This practice, however, is not necessarily “new.” As Matthew Cohen has shown in his richly detailed work on the history of Javanese and Balinese performing arts, contemporary Indonesian cultural/ historical memory is in fact quite short.14 Thus the New Order discourse of channeling the “ancient” Javanese artistic past—a realm of tradition claimed to have been barely touched by the long ravages of history—of course fails to “remember” that artistic change has consistently followed the diverse cultural, economic, and religious exchange that Java has always engaged in. The exploiting, colonizing Europeans (whose full-to-bursting museums provide much of the contemporary evidence of historical Indonesian contact with outsiders) were relative latecomers to this process, following millennia of local trade with other parts of Asia as well as the entrance of Hinduism from India, bringing with it, among many other things, the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics that continue to figure hugely into what is now referred to as “traditional Indonesian dance.” According to Cohen, the first record of European interest in Javanese cultural practice was made after the rise of Islam (which occurred largely through the peaceful influence of Arab and Indian merchants) and describes a 1580 meeting between Javanese and European traders, mediated by an exchange of music sent drifting Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. across the waters between the “native” orchestra of Raja Donan and the musically inclined crew aboard the anchored boat of Francis Drake.15 While for Cohen, Javanese and Balinese (or later “East Indies”) artistic practice has, unlike those of certain other Asian cultures, been consistently valued as catalyst for interest, attraction, and profitable exchange with a vast variety of “foreign” entities and powers, it is for precisely this reason that the arts have undergone a continuous process of change, and, depending on one’s perspective, “dilution,” since the beginning of recorded time. Thus, the heightening of European interest in the arts of the Javanese palace in the late nineteenth century (roughly the middle of a period during which “the Indies” were an officially national- Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 21] === What Is Left  41 ized colony) ushered in both new opportunities for artists to travel and perform abroad and a “period of hyper-development of dance, music and theatre in the central Javanese royal courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta.”16 The New Order (and contemporary) emphasis on the use of “ancient” traditional arts in the context of diplomacy and international economic interests, then, is in many ways a mirroring of past practice that nonetheless obscures the reality of historical change. The “cultural night abroad,” state cultural missions, artist exchanges, and the inclusion of Indonesian forms in European and U.S. curricula are now the result of the “new” policy of exporting culture as a major element of the nation-state’s self-promotion on the global political and economic stage. The uncanny presence of centuries-old Javanese and Balinese musical instruments, masks, and dance costumes tucked away in the dark corners of many of the less-recently explored European archives, however, marks only the beginning of a potentially endless historical voyage of discovery that for me has both continued and begun with the ability to travel provided by interest in dance. Misi Kesenian and Bedhaya: Femininized Power and Dancing Myth Misi Kesenian or “arts mission” (also sometimes called Misi Kebudayaan or “cultural mission”) is a term used in Indonesia to refer to stateadministered performances of traditional arts, presented abroad for Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. various official events and functions, including the promotion of foreign policy and international goodwill, the honoring of government guests, the opening of new embassies, the development of new trade relations, and the exchange of arts faculty or visiting or resident artists. Typically, such cultural missions feature Javanese or Balinese ritual or court-based dance forms, which have been given the highest status and most attention within state cultural reconstruction. Under Suharto, the intense efforts to ban and vilify certain art forms while skillfully promoting and funding others for development slowly sculpted the nation-state’s new identity in the form of a basic set of fixed cultural expressions available for local, national, and global distribution and consumption. As the arts became a major Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 22] === 42  What Is Left component in the promotion of the Indonesian state in global communications, the state simultaneously redefined “the arts”—and the apparent tastes of Indonesian artists and audiences—in alignment with its domestic ideological needs and its reading of the global cultural market. In this process of transformation, the “contents” of many existing dances were often reinterpreted in terms of more mythical frameworks, in which they were given an apparently ritual or religious value, and standardized under the refined concepts of Javanese court artistry. In the years following 1965, the continuing standardization and nationalization of culture by the New Order indeed appeared to be popular with most civilians. However, artists’ and patrons’ expressions of approval or support for such policies were often necessarily entangled with their own defensive efforts to erase or disclaim their histories of alignment with certain groups or institutions now banned under the bersih lingkungan, or clean environment policy of the New Order.17 These blanket policies, however, had far less relevance for artists in the palace and courts because the royal hierarchy and the Javanese high court culture were believed to be inherently ideologically opposed to the communist agenda, due to the fact that court dance, known for mythologizing the power of the Javanese king or promoting the ideal of a refined and aristocratic female, seemed solidly anti-proletarian. The fear that the arts of the Javanese palace might be promoting proletarian values simply never materialized; in fact, the mythical stature of Javanese kings has been strongly promoted Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. since the massacres in 1965–66, and many of the written kejawen, or Javanese myths, have served as a resource for new, state-approved repertoires. It would seem that Suharto’s New Order was attracted to the kejawen because it found an affinity with the aristocratic power structure of these stories. Accordingly, the Javanese court dances chosen for reconstruction were often those understood as representing a symbolic centralization of the power of the king, in an attempt to draw connections between the current government—w ith Suharto as “monarch”—and the mythic powers of past rulers. Javanese dance also manifests the symbolic power of the current king of Yogyakarta, in Central Java (after independence from the Dutch, several regional Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 23] === What Is Left  43 kings retained representative positions as cultural figureheads), and the “orderliness” of the kingdom, symbolized by the refinement of danced expression, slow movements, flowing, soft gamelan music, and chanting. Although it is normally only performed at top-level diplomatic meetings amid appropriately refined settings, Bedhaya (pronounced “Bedoyo”), a Javanese court dance practiced solely by women, is considered to be the ideal model for state missions, as it foregrounds both the aesthetic of “ancient” palace rituals and the (now state-employed) women who once occupied the role of courtesans to the kings. The dance itself describes the mythical relationship between the king of Java and the supernatural forces said to emanate from the spirit Nyai Lara Kidul (the queen of the South Sea), and the Abode of the Dead, where she resides. The movements symbolize the union of the king’s power with that of the underworld, when the goddessqueen of the South Sea becomes his consort; as a result of this coalition, the king is believed to be imbued with the power to rule over the country (formerly Java, or parts of Java, and the various other islands and provinces under its control). If we focus on the ritualistic relationship between the king and his mythical ocean queen as represented in Javanese dances such as Bedhaya and Srimpi (a less complex version of Bedhaya that is frequently performed on culture missions), the king appears to possess a potent authority over the realm of the sea; in this context, the water can be seen as a symbol for an omnipresent, all-encompassing, and natural structure of power. Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. In addition to the established kejawen and choreographic adaptations, the New Order in fact commissioned a few “new” works from the palace, although still in Javanese court style, that describe the fight for independence and revere Suharto’s role as a national hero, making rather obvious allusions to his status as the new king of Java/ Indonesia, and to his alignment with the omniscient, mythical power of the sultan. Since their inauguration in the early New Order years, these “historical” dances have been taught at many arts institutes, colleges, and high schools as a part of the core curriculum in national culture and tradition. Bedhaya, however, is always referenced as the “original” palace form and thus the most important and valuable as a symbol of national cultural heritage; according to many Javanese Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 24] === 44  What Is Left court dancers, the queen of the South can “appear” during a Bedhaya performance, called forth by the representation of her spiritualpolitical relationship with the once-powerful king of Central Java.18 As the second most common Island-based tradition within national cultural representation, Balinese performance also sometimes reflects the court context and former political might of Balinese kingdoms, but it more often relates to temple practices that when performed in a ritual context are said to facilitate communication with Balinese Hindu gods who must be placated and served. Occasionally, Sumatran dances are also performed on state culture missions, but usually only when the Indonesian ambassador or embassy representative in the target country is from Sumatra. For example, in the 1994 mission to Vietnam, after the Javanese offerings, the Indonesian government troupe also performed Rantak, a West Sumatran dance, and Saman, an Acehnese dance and chant. Although in that year the political situation in Aceh was extremely volatile as a result of an ongoing struggle between a local secession movement and government troops, no mention of the situation there was made during the mission; the focus, as per state policy, was on highly visible events and encounters, furthering information, which, although deeply political in nature, was disguised in a translucent veil of “culture.” In the case of Javanese court and Balinese temple dance, these practices are still frequently deployed on state missions because their long-term foregrounding on the international stage has led to their renown as visually spectacular and aesthetically pleasing in terms Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. of both movement and costume as well as musical accompaniment. These dances, then, are thought to increase the prestige and status of the Indonesian state within the larger community of nations. Accord ingly, the government considers (and requires) its performing artists to be official diplomatic representatives, charged with the important task of embodying the symbolic “face” of the state, aesthetically mediating its commerce and exchange with Indonesia’s most powerful allies on the global stage. The artists, then, and the special “missions” they execute, function to legitimize the state, conveying subtly packaged yet essential ideological meanings that symbolically construct the significance of Indonesia according to a set of rigid cultural codes. Because of the Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 25] === What Is Left  45 crucial diplomatic role they play, the artists and their affiliated institutions (that is, national schools of the arts, conservatories, artists’ associations, and so on) are carefully chosen and closely controlled by the Indonesian state through detailed written doctrines and strict rules of conduct. In addition, the individual dance numbers chosen to be performed abroad are further revised in a number of ways to make them more amenable, or “appropriate,” for large foreign audiences. At the very least, they are taken out of their usual context, be it at the palace or temple, and presented as staged events that aim to impress and capture the interest of large groups of non-Indonesians. Official state rhetoric, as well as that of affiliated private art institutions, emphasizes the missions’ fostering of cross-cultural understanding; more realistically, such missions emphasize and exploit the well-established “ancient” and “exotic” status of local performance traditions in order to draw international tourists to Indonesia and satisfy the multiculturalist agendas of the missions’ host countries. When performed domestically, centrally regulated national culture in many ways has a similar effect: that of the ideological transformation of Indonesian citizens into touristic consumers of their own traditions in a highly controlled, museum-like environment.19 The Ritual: Bedhaya and the Imaginary King Suluk, a type of chanting using the higher vocal registers, is begun by a Dalang, who conducts the music ensemble and directs the dance Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. called Bedhaya. His chant breaks the silence in the court pavil ion, followed by gendhing (a type of musical arrangement for the gamelan orchestra), guiding the dancers’ movements. His hand starts beating the keprak (a percussive instrument consisting of a specially designed hardwood box) with the sound thro thok thok, thro thok thok. One by one the dancers kneeling on the floor of the sul tan’s pavilion are led to center stage by two old women, positioning them directly in front of the king’s throne. The senior women are in charge of fixing and maintaining the dancers’ costumes and ap pearances while on stage, making sure they are presented properly, with skirts always covering their legs so as not to disturb the refined elegance of the ritual. Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 26] === 46  What Is Left The dancers get up slowly, make a line, and stand straight, their left hands holding a corner of their skirts, defining a wide arc that hangs below the arm, like a f lag. The skirts are decorated with special, hand-drawn batik that supposedly marks class association, visually linking the dancers to royal society. Gold and diamonds on their hands show the elegance of their bodies decorated with accesso ries, glamorized corporeality on the dance floor. The king sits poised in his chair at the front of the pavilion, his costume also quite elabo rate.20 Behind him, many guests and servants sit very upright and still, causing me to have difficulty breathing as I watch from behind the door, although I am not even dancing that night. Observing the performance from the audience, with its highly ritualized movements and sacred symbolism, I wonder if my menstruation is the reason I am forbidden to perform even the role of emban (a helper on stage during the performance). Or perhaps I had simply fallen out of favor with those defining the intricate politics of control and display underneath the apparently smooth and refined exterior of the Keraton palace, Indonesia’s primary symbol of its ancient “mythical” heritage and “modern” national culture. The dancers walk slowly, in synch with the keprak combined with the sounds of the Dutch cornet. Marching one by one, their bodies are properly disciplined and controlled, seeming to have the same height and weight. I praise their self-restraint highly, as do the other members of the audience that night. The dance, as always, is so slow, yet no one sleeps. Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. While this version of Bedhaya is generally considered too “sacred” to leave the context of the palace (and is therefore rare even on state culture missions), on a few occasions, similar performances have nonetheless been held abroad in nondiplomatic contexts, such as the Los Angeles Festival in 1990.21 There, however, the effect seemed quite different: after the performance, the musicians reported that much of the audience had in fact dozed off. While preparations for the trip were also beset by myriad disagreements, such as who would take the position of leader of the group during the tour and who would stay in which hotel room, the troupe nonetheless returned home Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 27] === What Is Left  47 proudly, having experienced a rare (for dancers who mainly perform inside the Yogyakarta palace) trip to the United States. Domestically, in 1988, I also witnessed a complete Bedhaya performance that was held at the Presidential Palace in Jakarta by the same dancers and musicians; there as well, no Javanese king was present. Presiding in his place, however, was Suharto, the reigning dictator. In this context, then, the (dis)placement of Bedhaya was a conscious shift, and, accordingly, this event and the performances for the king appeared nearly identical in terms of corporeal layout and conception. The music also skillfully mimicked the gamelan of the sultan’s palace, and as in that context, the marching and the sound of the cornet reminded me how profoundly the Dutch were able to influence the Javanese king’s choice of music to accompany the female dancers. Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Performance of Bedhaya Sumreg, created by the king of Yogyakarta Hamengkubuwono I (1755–92), at the Yogyakarta Palace. The narrative is centered on the meeting of the sultan of Yogyakarta by the queen of the South Sea (a mystical and mythological figure) in response to the separation of the Mataram kingdom (which was split into the Yogyakarta and Surakarta palaces in 1755). Photographer/copyright: Himawan. Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 28] === 48  What Is Left Observing the scene, I was drawn into memories of the training in body movement and control that I, like the women performing in front of me, had undergone since I was very young in a variety of different contexts. As a child, the European elements in Javanese mysticism, which infused and informed our daily practice, were taken as obvious and natural, as if they had always been a part of that which we were learning to do: to symbolize the “effortless” unity of our heritage. Cultural Policy: Flashback Prior to 1965, Sukarno promoted national cultural policy to build and develop the young country “on its own terms.” During his reign as president, cultural construction was based on what is known in Indonesia as the “unification of ideas,” which referred to and drew upon the cooperation of many different ethnic and cultural practices, assembled in order to strengthen a new and distinct Indonesian national identity in opposition and resistance to colonial and imperial influences. Under Sukarno, then, dance narratives were not necessarily representative of an ethnically centralized agenda, in the sense that Javanisation and Balinisation were not the only dominant priorities in cultural policy. Rather, from independence until 1965, there was a greater sense of flexibility in the representation of tradition and frequently an emphasis on the use of a variety of “everyday” (non–palace-affiliated) practices to represent local cultures.22 Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. The influence of European theater was present as well, alongside folk or village-based performances and the “high” culture of the palace. During that time, among many other forms, folk dances such as Gandrung, Tayub, and Jathilan and other popular performing arts such as Kethoprak (a famously raucous and satirical form of traditional theater from East and Central Java), Ludruk (East Java traditional theater), and Gambuh (Balinese theater) were produced in many different contexts and at local, regional, and national levels. At that time artists and performers were not nationalized through induction as civil servants, and there were no pembinaan, the official domestic arts missions to rural areas. (Pembinaan were aimed at information gathering and at retraining and “improving” village Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 29] === What Is Left  49 performers according to official guidelines.) With the strong presence in the 1950s and early ’60s of so many different political parties competing in each region for membership, many performers split their association between two or more groups with differing ideologies. Both the communist PKI and the right-leaning, nationalist PNI (Partai Nasionalis Indonesia) attracted numerous members throughout the nation. A large percentage of both rural and urban artists were also involved in Lekra (the People’s Cultural Association), an arts guild that offered both support and a commitment to helping members, and the general public, with a wide range of daily necessities.23 In the more open and varied political environment of the Sukarno years,24 many artists also performed at functions for both of the major political parties without being members of either. Popular artists or art forms were employed at rallies and events because of their proven ability to draw and hold the attention of large crowds, and thus arts production at the village and national levels played a significant role in the representation of political alliances, especially with the growing competition between the two major parties (PNI and PKI). In the early years of Sukarno’s presidency many theater and performance groups also made use of Western, and especially European, influences. With the Cold War, however, came changes, many of which were aimed at instilling a national opposition to the perceived emptiness and moral corruption of the West, and particularly American culture. Yet since before independence, many local art forms were influenced by the global ubiquity of European style and Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. thus had frequently become less concerned with attachment to the expression of any particular local ethnic group. For example, the group Dardanella, formed in the late Dutch era, claimed members from many different ethnic and geographic backgrounds within the archipelago and performed widely in both cities and villages. During the late colonial years, the Japanese occupation during World War II, and the early Sukarno years, Dardanella (along with many of its members, who became famous performers in their own right) was able to represent a varied, local character without focusing on royalty or myth 25 —its representations were not dependent on the symbolism of the Javanese high court. For such artists, this disengagement from specific ethnic codes resulted in a greater sense of openness Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 30] === 50  What Is Left and possibility in the creation of performing arts, which at the time was also generally detached from fear regarding appropriate content. Unknown to its practitioners at the time, such “universal” art would also provide relative discursive distance from suspicions of having harbored proletarian concerns or promoted class awareness, which would become sensitive and deadly issues post-1965.26 Although clearly, such liberating detachment came from the connection to or the embracement of a style considered more European, still, Dardanella’s choices enabled it to gradually move away from the central position of Java while continuing to exist within the general context of domestic ethnic representation. As such, it also gained the opportunity to tour other Asian countries such as Burma/Myanmar, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and India, and then further extended their presence to Europe and the United States.27 However, for postindependence diplomatic occasions hosted by Sukarno, such as the visits of Ho Chi Minh or other political leaders to Indonesia, the performances often featured Balinese dance, staged in the Istana Tampak Siring Bali (the presidential house in Bali). Also, many groups from the Javanese court were sent on delegations, especially to Holland, and Balinese groups were sent to Russia as well as to other European countries and the United States. There was, however, no clear official document guiding these choices; the state policy regarding what may be considered an “Indonesian” art form did not directly address issues of Javanisation or Balinisation, although these trends and strategies were obviously being practiced Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. in parallel with many others.28 It was not until the violent arrival of “regime change” in 1965 that the state began a concerted, nationwide effort to unify and control Indonesian cultural arts according to a rigidly defined framework. Before the New Order came to power, Sukarno’s political stance and policies, which initially legalized all political parties and youth associations, both religious and secular, worked in concert with his openness to non-court culture within national representation, especially to alternative “traditional” forms of Indonesian arts practice. At the same time, however, mindful of how he wished to represent his country abroad and how foreign societies might influence Indonesians of certain classes, particularly those who were young Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 31] === What Is Left  51 and impressionable, he maintained a very specific—and certainly not unproblematic—idea of what distinguished Western culture from Eastern culture. Following from this, Sukarno began to probe the possibility of a new relationship with China, building economic and mercantile cooperation and determining other common interests. In the context of the Cold War, this potential alliance served to heighten the U.S. alarm over the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, which was compounded by the significant membership of Indonesia’s Com munist Party, despite the nation’s status as a noncommunist “democratic” republic. Theodore Friend puts the PKI membership in 1965 at a massive 27 million—the largest such entity in any country without a formal communist government.29 Even before then, by 1957, the United States was concerned about the strength of the PKI as well as the young nation’s robust policy of political and economic resistance to the West under the leadership of Sukarno. Sukarno’s willingness to allow Communist Party representation alongside Islamic and other nationalist political parties (the largest of which was the PNI) produced a stern, critical reaction from the United States. Local opponents of the left, primarily Islamic conservative groups and those factions of the military under Suharto’s influence, also opposed the government’s openness to political diversity and thus became key agents in the eventual restructuring of Indonesia post-1965. Toward the end of Sukarno’s presidency, as economic difficulty developed and political chaos began to Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. emerge, opposing sides of national disputes were gradually brought into rough alignment with the international Cold War axis, partially influencing the rise of conditions under which Indonesia was subjected to frequent instability and eventual mass violence.30 In the two years following 1965, the charismatic Sukarno’s nearuniversal popularity in Indonesia, which had created a strong sense of nationalism throughout his presidency, slowly collapsed as, among other things, the MPRS (Decree of the Provisional People’s Consultative Assembly of the Republic of Indonesia) was created under Suharto’s influence in opposition to Sukarno’s call for national responsibility and due process after the attempted coup on September 30. This loss of confidence in Sukarno was exacerbated by the breakdown of the Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 32] === 52  What Is Left economy and the widespread influence of the Cold War. With the blame for failing internal and international affairs increasingly placed on Sukarno by the right, the door appeared to be opening for Suharto to stake a claim on leadership of the nation. The massacres of 1965–66 occurred at the point of greatest public tension between right-wing and left-a ligned parties, which also led to the implication of artists and their practices as a kind of populist “weapon” that might be picked up and used by either side. Under the New Order, then, an immediate effort was made to harness the capacity of cultural production and mold it into a dedicated instrument of state power by centralizing administration of the arts under a nationwide system of government authority. Following the waning of Sukarno’s popularity and the subsequent intimidation and murder of his allies and followers, Suharto’s nationalized policy, distributed through many branches of government, gained the support of large numbers of conservative, nationalist civilians (many of whom carried strong anti-communist beliefs) in favor of “moralizing” dance and other performing arts through homogenization of the representation of aesthetic values and customs. (The policy was also “supported,” as mentioned earlier, by many others as a result of state coercion and widespread fear.) The homogenization spread quickly throughout Indonesia, from the village level up to the large arts organizations, which were destroyed, nationalized, or subsumed by state cultural policy under Suharto’s New Order. According to Geoffrey Robinson’s detailed analysis of the regu- Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. lation of culture in Indonesia after 1965, state officials propagated the notion of beauty and sacredness in all aspects of Indonesian life in an attempt to cover up the violence of genocide still fresh in the minds of the populace while promoting the legitimacy of the new government.31 The purification of the image of the state in association with that of the nation also served to retroactively place blame for the violence that occurred on the PKI, who were depicted as having brought in dangerous, “foreign” ideas such as Marxism and women’s rights. With the strong presence of nationalism already well established since independence, the appropriation and construction of a new “special” identity for Indonesia was made synonymous with Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 33] === What Is Left  53 patriotic duty. The state’s policies took hold quickly within the popu lace, forming a rigid veneer of beauty to cover the vast landscapes of violence, while simultaneously and profoundly dominating the sphere of cultural production within the territory bounded by federalist ideas. In my understanding of this approach to building nationalism, I depart from Partha Chatterjee’s analysis of nationalism as a struggle of colonial exploitation that aims at demonstrating the falsity of colonizer’s claims. 32 As an Indian writer, Partha Chatterjee of course examines nationalism from his own location and perspective. Thus, for him, nationalism reveals the falsity of colonizers’ claims that “backward” colonial subjects were culturally incapable of ruling themselves under the conditions of the modern world. In this context, the ability of so-called underdeveloped nations to nationalize functioned as an assertive demonstration that they could modernize themselves while retaining their cultural identities. In turn the nationalized populace created “indigenous” discourse that functioned to challenge colonial claims upon which the exercise of political domination was based. In revealing some of the differences and similarities between India’s and Indonesia’s histories of colonialism, Chatterjee’s analysis has helped me to understand the process of discourse formulation, especially as to how Indonesian nationalism gradually changed its function. In Indonesia, the nationalism that was a means of de colonization and a form of resistance to Western imperialism became Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. entangled with the agenda of Suharto’s regime, which incessantly and selectively manipulated such ideas in the process of building the second, “new” postcolonial nation- state, following independence from the Dutch and the subsequent overthrow of Sukarno’s leftleaning and emphatically anti-imperial “Old Order.” In this context, the particular structuring of national identity through the manipulation of cultural practices and the privileging of art forms associated with royal lineage and “ancient,” established systems of power functioned seamlessly as an ideological support system for the continued economic and political dominance of the ruling class. The end result of cultural reinvention through the reconstruction of Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 34] === 54  What Is Left the performing arts, and dance in particular, was a unified memory field through which the state also convinced citizens to actively support its agenda of economic development. People were specifically encouraged to participate in this national plan through engaging in officially sanctioned cultural practice and maintaining vigilance over the control of its structure and display. Within the sphere of Suharto’s reign, the effort to sustain the participation of citizenry in performing arts led to the expanded role of dance traditions, the goal being not the welfare of each citizen-practitioner but rather an increase in foreign support for economic development and national security programs. Through the arts, representation of the nation was accomplished from one, hegemonic perspective rather than the various—a lbeit also sometimes domineering—a ngles employed in the past. The “cultural night abroad,” cultural missions, artist exchanges, and inclusion in European and U.S. curricula were all key elements of the new policy that sought to export culture as part of the nation-state’s propaganda and economic stimulus machine. On-Screen Betrayal: The Fall and Rise of the “Unrefined” Arts Carried off within the gears of that very machine, exhausted from marching, yet strangely elated at the prospect of “skipping school” to go to the cinema, each year I sit and watch as the screen magically Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. turns from white to red, as the lights are extinguished and all eyes are instinctively drawn to the front of the theater. Women in crimson dresses come in and out of a room, while men hold a political meeting, looking at maps, planning abduction and murder: actresses portraying Gerwani members. They dance in a field, singing and reciting a nowinfamous song called “Gendjer-Gendjer,”33 then, walking slowly, with a blank face that simultaneously conveys and “masks” the will to do harm, one actress raises a hand in which a razor blade is tightly gripped and the horror of official Indonesian history begins. In the haunting image of this woman’s cold, expressionless face and in the echoes of the forbidden song, I find a special fascination, a resonant jolt of powerful Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 35] === What Is Left  55 memories that refuse to become perfectly clear, repelling me yet affixing my eyes to the all-too-familiar ghosts on the screen. It was surely not just me. This narrative of female political violence infiltrated the lives of Indonesian citizens in myriad ways. The homes of many children such as myself were invaded by rumors of horror and barbaric femininity, forcibly immersing us in a dilemma of memory, of how to understand the film’s narrative in which those committing acts of sexual terror against our nation stood for our mothers, our aunties, our grandmothers and dance teachers. In addition to their gender-based political attack, however, the images call upon and extend familiar, preexisting codes within the coinciding spheres of dance and social standing. For most citizens, the difference in status between court and non-court dance is considered quite marked, often distinguished by the perception of the lack of a quality of “control,” which may be indicated both by environment and by the style of physical movements. The bangsawan, or high-class royalty, are believed to produce or enjoy dances that are slow, highly symbolic, and performed in a sacred or royal environment such as the pendopo, or traditional Javanese pavilion. These dances, then, are very much in—or under—control. Meanwhile, folk dances are often faster, employing “unrefined” movements of the body, and may be enjoyed in a village courtyard or an open field. Through the use of an outdoor, folk context in the film, the state-a ligned producers drew specific correlations between a type of dance, a social class, and progressive politics, connecting them Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. through the group of dancing Gerwani women and corresponding members of the PKI (also pictured dancing), who appeared violent, unrefined, and out of control, and therefore subversive and dangerous. The free expression of the “proletariat,” as interconnected with both workers’ and women’s rights, was thus choreographed as something lethal to the state body and to national stability. As this suggests, the state did not limit its intense scrutiny to those “refined” art forms that would be trotted out at national and international festivals and diplomatic events. Rather, if anything, at times it appeared even more concerned with the thousands of forms existing mainly in rural areas and their tens of millions of practitioners. Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 36] === 56  What Is Left The Cultural Repercussions of Regime Because of the highly stratified, bureaucratic organization of Indo nesian society—one of the many dubious inheritances from Dutch colonialism—the central government could reach out its spindly arms to minute corners of the archipelago and reshape the choreography, conceptualization, and public practice of rural traditions in ways that at times seemed truly incredible (or, depending on your position, incredibly terrifying). The method of control relied on the general co-optation of citizens and the strategic placement of agents at the local level: a “neighborhood watch” system presided over by the hierarchy of village officials representing the far end of a chain of command leading straight to Jakarta. In this way, the state was able to keep tabs on the myriad rural “folk” artists who often practiced and performed after returning from work in the fields. Under the New Order’s Big Brother–like system, which kept close watch on citizens but largely ignored the mistreatment of civilians by middle-and low-level officials, innumerable injustices and human rights abuses occurred with great regularity throughout the country (this, perhaps, was the way a majority of Indonesians experienced the government’s much touted “unity in diversity”). Accordingly, the region in which I grew up, in a village in East Java not far from the city of Malang, was no different: In December 1965, there was an evening of celebration commemorating the inauguration of a village leader named Suyitno. Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Suyitno was a dancer and singer for a Kethoprak ( Javanese folk theater) group. His family celebrated with the whole village, presenting many performances and enjoying festive food for the special occasion. His daughter and many other family members performed certain dances: Tanduk Majeng (a dance from the nearby island of Madura), “Gendjer-Gendjer” (the previously mentioned song and dance from the Banyuwangi region), and Adon Adon Sumping. These dances are mostly new creations based on traditional Javanese dance styles. Culturally Madurese (from the island of Madura) or Osing (an ethnic group from the Banyuwangi region of East Java), they are performed together with gamelan music played in the Slendro scale. That evening, accompanied by other family members and villagers, Suyitno’s daughter also sang a song Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 37] === What Is Left  57 entitled “Berdikari” (meaning “standing on your own feet”), which had been promoted by the first president, Sukarno. Not long after the celebration, Suyitno, the new village leader, was suddenly arrested by the military and taken to an unknown place.34 Pak Suyitno was never returned to his family. After his arrest, his daughter and the dancers and other performers from that night, including those who had only helped prepare the food and other festivities, were all questioned by the Army; because such activities are usually delegated to women, those questioned were mostly female. On the day of the interrogations, many other villagers came home to find family members missing and were given no explanation for their disappearance. Several of those who were not taken—particularly those villagers who had attended the celebration—had their identity cards recalled by a government officer. The only explanation they were given was that they had been reported as PKI members, and they henceforth would lose the right to vote. After the event, none of the participants, or the interviewees, ever danced or performed publicly again. Instead, every week, for more than thirty years, they reported to the local district military office (Korem). The many forms of repression, including the economically and socially deadly practice of stamping the identity cards (KTP) of the New Order’s former prisoners with “ET” for ekstapol or ex–political prisoner (if they even were issued a KTP), continued up until the very end of Suharto’s presidency. The stamp thus ensured a “life sentence,” even for those released after ten or fifteen years.35 Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. In this context, despite the state’s somewhat arbitrary system for classifying those associated with the Communist Party as more or less dangerous, in the everyday context of society, there was generally little sense of different degrees of guilt or involvement; everyone involved was often considered equally culpable, no matter how minor their participation or tenuous their link to the party. It may be due to fear of indiscriminate retribution that many survivors and witnesses to the events of the massacres still remain mute, both nationally and internationally, leaving the reproduction and distribution of knowledge about the events to the totalizing mechanism of the New Order regime. Like the scores of vanished spouses, parents, and relatives, then, huge numbers of villagers’ dances and songs Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 38] === 58  What Is Left for community and family gatherings vanished, just as the corporeal memories of their movements and sounds were muted through the enforcement of new laws, carried out nationwide by officials and fearful or vigilant civilians alike. Yet a few dance forms from villages such as that of Pak Suyitno were kept, having been deemed a valuable national heritage by the state, and were later performed in different settings, such as the celebration of Independence Day and other official commemorative holidays. Because such practices were in effect taken apart and “cleaned,” reconstructed, and given to new, state-a ligned bodies to practice before they were paraded out for state functions, however, the dancers who once performed in the village remained unwanted. As “sub alterns,” many of them still do not yet feel safe to speak out because every year, while certain things change, state policy on national history and performing arts remains unbendingly the same. For these women, and for other dancers and former students in the national education system such as myself, the passing of national time, following the flow of years, might be said to run backward even as it races toward the future, returning each year to the same point that officially marks the “birth of the nation” under Suharto. This point serves as the anchor for a way of seeing and remembering—the national perspective—and for the policies and cultural “unity” that continually guide our behavior and expression. Each year we are all collectively pulled back to that time— October 1, 1965, the zero hour—through the medium of cinema, Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. with eyes on the screen, and memories set to “record” for the obligatory school report the following day. We are forcibly reminded of the acts of those who are said to have threatened the entire nation, of the communists and the violent, dancing “wild women” of Gerwani. We are reminded of the unalterable importance of these acts, of Suharto’s response, and of our duty as citizens to keep this history, and the perspective that allows us to visualize it, deeply embedded within ourselves. We, like the nation as defined by the state, must in some senses never change, learn, or grow, but rather we always return to the same point, that of “our” birth, the zero hour. In some ways, then, we are not simply an “amnesia” project, because every child is forced to remember the narrative that the state has Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 39] === What Is Left  59 reconstructed: all of us Indonesian children must remember, and we are forbidden to forget. This is also a “remembering” project, then, based on national memories that have reconstructed the identities of all those who were left standing after the bloody rise of the state, telling us who is illicit and who is hero. In the words of Benedict Anderson, from “remorselessly accumulating cemeteries... the nation’s biography snatches... exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and holocausts. But, to serve the narrative purpose, these violent deaths must be remembered/ forgotten as ‘our own.’”36 In Indonesia, we know we remember the dancer on screen, who always appears precisely on cue surrounded by violence and murder; and we know we must not remember, or speak of, the other things that we remember, and thus we carry them on in “silence,” and yet our controlled movements are ever so slightly swayed by their weight within our bodies. Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08. === [PDF page 40] === Copyright © 2013. University of Minnesota Press. All rights reserved. Larasati, Rachmi Diyah. The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=30391 Created from ucalgary-ebooks on 2026-10-14 03:58:08.