Politics, Performance, the Contemporary and Southeast Asia

Abstract

Performance and politics, ‘whatever connection they do or do not have with each other,’ as Joe Kelleher describes in Theatre and Politics (2009), in Southeast Asia both as a region and its constituent countries is the concern of this chapter. The introduction expounds on the efficacies of performance’s intervention in politics and politics’ persecution of theatre and performance in Southeast Asia, whose own imagined state is also interrogated. It considers carefully the concepts of politics and political theatre in the Southeast Asian imaginary, and posits an understanding of the contemporary condition as local social environments and global political climates frame it. In addition to providing a summary of the consequent chapters, the authors interrogate the book’s own politics of representation.