Performing songs and staging theatre performances: working through the trauma of the 1965/66 Indonesian mass killings

In the aftermath of an attempted military coup in Jakarta on the night of 30 September 1965, more than half a million people were killed in widespread army-orchestrated massacres while a further million communists, communist sympathisers, and supporters of left-wing causes were sent to prisons and detained under testing circumstances and, at times, tortured.1 Survivors, their descendants, and family members and descendants of those who perished suffered decades of social marginalization, discrimination, and harassment as ‘marked’ individuals. In the meantime, Suharto, who took power after the 1965/66 massacres and established a military dictatorship, continuously vilified the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai….