Reviewed by: Performing the Arts of Indonesia: Malay Identity and Politics in the Music, Dance, and Theatre of the Riau Islandsed. by Margaret Kartomi Jennifer Goodlander PERFORMING THE ARTS OF INDONESIA: MALAY IDENTITY AND POLITICS IN THE MUSIC, DANCE, AND THEATRE OF THE RIAU ISLANDS. Edited by Margaret Kartomi. Copenhagen: NiAS Press, 2019. 410 pp. Paper, $32.00. During my first visit to Indonesia in 2004, I stayed in Manado, a city in Northern Sulawesi, for a three-month language program. Upon learning I was interested in the arts, my host family and teachers told me to go to Java or Bali, because “that was where the arts were.” Indeed, most books on arts and culture in Indonesia (including my own work) concentrate on those two islands. Performing the Arts of Indonesia instead focuses on the Riau Islands, a region of over 2,000 islands located northeast from the coast of Sumatra and between the Malay peninsulas. This incredibly rich study of music, dance, theatre, and puppetry offers an excellent introduction to the diverse art forms of this area and offers a much-needed argument for the importance of studying Indonesian arts and culture away from the centers of Bali and Java. The Riau archipelago, Kepalauan Riau, often called Kepri, is located south of Singapore in the western half of Indonesia. Most of the population of these many islands (over 2,000) are ethnically Malay, and the book focuses on how performance operates as expressions of “memory-codes” to examine questions of identity and place for ethnic Malays in this part of Indonesia. Organized by geography, each part of the book has several chapters with different foci. Part I gives historical and social context, which complements Part IV’s focus on art and popular culture in the cities. The middle parts offer a comparison between the western and northern parts of archipelago. The book promises to take a broad interdisciplinary approach to the arts in order to examine theatre, visualart, martial arts, puppetry, anddance by selecting “icons of identity” for Kepri-Malays (ikon identitas Malayu Kepri) for each of the province’s five regencies and two cities. The majority of the chapters, however, focus primarily on music, but for theatre scholars this offers an opportunity to better understand the integration and role of music within other genres of performing arts in Indonesia. “Part I: The Riau Archipelago in the Southern Malay World” has five chapters that give an overview of how the arts helped form a distinct Kepri-Malay identity. The first two provide an important overview of the approach and content of the rest of the book. Chapter 1, by the book’s editor, Margaret Kartomi, gives an overview of the book’s approach and findings. In addition to providing essential information about this little-studied area of Indonesia, I appreciate her taxonomical approach to the arts. Her historical overview of how cosmological and historical [End Page 233] conceptions of space overlap and create significance is especially illuminating; this analysis is accompanied by useful figures and photos. For example, the cardinal directions, based on the four seasonal wind directions, play important functions in the architecture of court theatres, textile designs, processions of musicians, and the movements of zapin dance formations. If Kartomi’s chapter provides the theoretical foundations of the book, Leonard Y. Andaya gives greater insight to how the Kepri-Malay are situated both within and the limits therein of the Indonesian nation and the greater Malay peninsula in the second chapter. This history provides an important foundation to understand “that Malay society has a hybrid, mixed quality” (p. 57) identified as kacukan throughout the book. The other three chapters in Part I each have a more limited focus, providing succinct cases to better understand the histories and frameworks described by Kartoni and Andaya. Cynthia Chou describes how the music of orang suku laut (“the people of the sea”—most of the inhabitants of Riau share a maritime outlook) developed by comparing two popular music genres: lagu pop (“pop music”) and musik gereja (“church music”). This contrasts well with Chapter 4 by Margaret Kartomi, which describes the history and functions of nobat (court music). Jenny McCullum describes...
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Mar 5, 2023
Iyán F Ploquin 
Open Access
