Abstract
I first came across Laurie Ross’s chapter ‘Performing Piety from the Inside Out: Fashioning Gender and Public Space in a Mask “Tradition” from Java’s Northwest Coast’ while compiling my findings on the many Malay masked performance forms in the Riau Islands and Lampung provinces of Sumatra in late 2013. Ross’s chapter provides a brief but informative overview of the recent history of the specific masked form, topeng Cirebon. In the socio-political context of the Indonesian arts since the time of Indonesia’s first President, Sukarno, she states of the masked dance that ‘its once overt tasawwuf (Sufi) nuances became muted. By removing topeng from its natural milieu’ in the 1970s, ‘a secularized, stripped-down version was created’ and placed ‘under the watchful eye of the authoritarian Suharto regime (Ross 15–16).
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 334-338 |
Number of pages | 5 |
Journal | Australasian Drama Studies |
Issue number | 64 |
Publication status | Published - Apr 2014 |
Keywords
- Performance
- Muslim
- Southeast Asia