Male-focused social dance in Sunda (West Java) has gone by a number of names, among which ketuk tilu, tayuban, tari kursus, and jaipongan are the most common. However these forms relate to a much wider range of important music-dance practices in Southeast Asia, which focus around seductive female singer-dancers, most often called ronggeng. To gong chime accompaniment with soaring notes, they sing while partnering male customers who improvise choreography as the drummer in the gong chime orchestra uses his instrument to accent the man's gestures. The small steps of the woman with her sinuous rotation of wrists (ukel) or hips (goyang) contrasts with the broad stances and more martial-arts derived gestures of the male. The man may playfully try to embrace his partner but she slips away. A flourish of steps leads to the moment when, just before a gong stroke, the partners approach one another and their heads seem almost—but not quite—to touch. As the music concludes, payment will pass to the female for herself and the drummer/orchestra from the pocket of the man. Male display, female acceptance, and supportive drumming/music are the essential elements of the genre. Historically dancer-courtesans were linked with both rice rituals (with the ronggeng representing the rice goddess, Sri) and prostitution. While the genre was widespread in the Malay world, it was especially strong in highland West Java—even in the early colonial period, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (l781–1826) found ronggeng particularly lively here. Given that jaipongan, a modern staged genre inspired by ronggeng traditions, is one of the most prominent art innovations in late twentieth century Sundanese music/dance, and bajidor, an entertainment of the Subang area of West Java, remains very active today, the ronggeng arts continue to be central to Sundanese culture.
Erotic Triangles is an important book with deep insight into Sundanese performance. Henry Spiller is a seasoned ethnomusicologist who came to his topic through his study of gamelan. Mastery of the ensemble means learning drumming, and drumming in West Java is intimately related to following and, at times, leading the dancer, while simultaneously directing the gamelan. Spiller's path to the male dance via the drum shows in the writing, which includes drum syllables and insights direct from the drummers' mouths. He understands the male dancer, too, and empathizes with this amateur performer who approaches the spotlight resisting culturally enforced shame (malu) and sharing macho pride (bangga) to show dancing skill.
In some sense, this book is a long and dense reflection on the male-to-male drummer-to-dancer relationship/rivalry, which Spiller argues is triggered by the presence of a female ronggeng. Spiller sees her primarily as an object of desire situated between the two men. Using gender analysis from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Lacan—and considerations of how myth and performance work structurally from Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Butler, and Bourdieu—Spiller theorizes the two competing males. He gives pride of place to the sonically empowered drummer, seeing the solo male dancer, who appears to spontaneously improvise, to be less free than he thinks. The musical and drumming structure limits the self-presentation choices. Spiller reiterates models of power, which Ben Anderson, Clifford Geertz, and others have made popular: that which moves (dancer) is less than the still center (seated drummer). These two males with the female ronggeng, who evokes the rivalry, form the three sides of Spiller's erotic triangle. This contemporary gender theory analysis sees heteronormative behaviors as forming the subtext of the homosocial form, and argues that, though the ronggeng may appear to be a contrast to the traditional Sundanese female ideal given her sexy presence and husky voice, she is actually conforming to deep gender ideology. He grants the ronggeng some musical freedom, noting that her voice drifts above the gamelan and slides across the musical structure in ways that sometimes escape its strict form. But, as a dancer, she uses a limited movement vocabulary in comparison to her male dance partner. For Spiller, dancing/drumming is about and between men. The beautiful female is the object that provokes and symbolizes their interactions.
As an account of Sundanese social dance from the colonial period to the present, Spiller is reliable and informative, having mined Dutch colonial documents, contemporary Indonesian research on music and dance, and his own long years of field work and participation in Sundanese arts. He also provides materials on related cultures, Java and Malaysia. In the first chapter, Spiller gives background on discourses in Sundanese dance. He argues against the valorization of presentational dance (now known as Sundanese classical dance) at the expense of the social dances he describes here. He sees classical dance as a relatively modern interpolation into Sundanese culture, linked to the rise of largely post-independence developments in art academies. The social dance forms—where the dance event allowed for competition between men for power and influence via their display behavior—are older and more pervasive. Recent promotion of Sundanese classical dance, Spiller implies, is related to post-independence cultural policies promoting “peaks/highpoints of culture” (puncak kebudayaan), which has encouraged Indonesian society toward a professionalization of dance.
In traditional Sundanese performances, by contrast, the important dancer was the male amateur, whether in the low class genre of ketuk tilu—done for harvests, rites of passage, or entertainments in urban centers—or the more aristocratic variant of tayuban—performed in the dance parties of the aristocrats (menak). The tayuban evolved into tari kursus, a genre of the elite that was taught in the early twentieth century at the Dutch-established schools for the young men who would become the colony's administrators.
In the second chapter, Spiller lays out his ideas on drumming and power. At the same time, he provides a quick overview of major Sundanese genres that focus around drumming. This includes information on relatively low class genres such as horse trance dance (kuda lumping) where the drum is seen as inducing and then alleviating trance, and reog, a genre where four drummers engage in drumming and comic banter. He explores the relationship of professional drummers with both the commoner male dancers in ketuk tilu and the aristocratic patron-dancers in tayuban. Spiller correlates the drum with cosmic power that flows from an invisible source and animates the world, taking the position that it is ultimately the drummer who holds the power because, though his instrument is heard everywhere, he is not, like the dancer and ronggeng, the object of visual contemplation. Power is unseen.
The third chapter begins with a Sundanese myth that may link to perceptions of the female. Spiller sees the ronggeng as simultaneously embodying both the goddess and the whore: representing Sri, yet also the economically greedy and demanding female of dubious reputation. Spiller gives information on historical accounts of ronggeng from colonial travelers and details more recent fictional depictions in stories and film. He notes the factors that have made actual ronggeng genres endangered since independence, but argues that this female archetype remains in more modern genres where her replacement may be a singer (sinden) and she may no longer actually dance. The music today, he notes, may be a synthesizer or band, but the female singer-dancer in popular dangdut music or the pop idol, like the hip-grinding megastar Inul, are modern variations on ronggeng.
By not fully addressing the vocal performance (lyrics, music, staging) of the female artist and excluding what might be a counter-example to his analysis of the female dancer as disempowered, which I note below, it may be that Spiller neglects what most viewers consider the center of ronggeng genre, the woman. The female remains the most inscrutable member of Spiller's equation. She is, in his analysis, lacking real subjectivity. I missed her voice.
The next chapter accesses the male dancer. Spiller gives a good understanding of protocols for the performance of a traditional dance event (i.e., how order is established by hierarchy, how one gains status via dancing, class differences in space and time, and performance behaviors). Spiller notes that the male dancer is perceived as free in his improvisation, but Spiller sees this as a myth. The dancers' choices are limited by musical structure, and often the drummer leads.
The book is particularly strong when describing the modern variants Spiller has seen: the popular bajidor in Subang, where male dancer-fans follow their female idols and are only allowed the fleeting egot (where, for a donation, the male dancer holds the hand of the female artist for a short period while she kneels at the edge of the stage on which she performs), or the triping (tripping) of contemporary dangdut, where masses of men seek floating freedom as they move to the groove in front of the stage on which a female singer invites a token male to dance near her as she sings and undulates her way through the evening.
After discussing the three people in his equation, Spiller shows how the structure can collapse. He sees the innovation of tari kursus (“course-taught dance”) as doomed to failure when it tried to clean up the sexually provocative activities—tayuban's gropes and kisses. Tari kursus confined the ronggeng to just singing and set specific choreography for the male aristocrat (hence “course” in the name). Spiller feels this early twentieth century bowdlerization (eliminating the ronggeng as dancer) has resulted in making the tari kursus almost extinct and sees the lack of improvisation as antithetical to the core of social dance, which requires the illusion of freedom for the male dance. While this may have helped its demise, lack of funding flowing in the pockets of the former aristocrats after independence was surely a contributing factor, and global models of power, which brought Western ideas such as “real men don't dance,” cannot have helped. One could also assert that the training that tari kursus provided was not an end in itself, but merely a step toward understanding the possible improvisations.
“By engendering drums as masculine and exoticizing the cathected object of desire (ronggeng) as feminine, male participants dance this gender ideology along with its contradictions into perpetuity” (177). The triangle of drummer being heard, ronggeng being seen, and the dancer moving is dependent on Western theorization, but nonetheless I value the points made. There is no doubt that this is an important book that everyone interested in Indonesian performance should read. It also carries food for thought on wider issues of gender and performance, and has a solid basis in music and dance of the region.
There are some counterpoints that might be addressed in a future extension. Discussion of the ronggeng genres, which used pencak (martial arts) with its more expansive effort-shape choices and the presentational dances in the opening, where the women danced solo, might show more female agency, as would considering links to topeng ceribon mask dance, where the dancer leads and has varied movement choices: Historically some ronggeng learned this art in Cirebon's ronggeng schools in the palaces, then migrated into Sunda. Regarding the dominance of the drummer, he is not usually a troupe leader: a puppet-master, a mask dancer (male or female), a clown, a female singer (sinden)/dancer, or a contemporary choreographer (who may be female) can and does lead in troupes and calls the shots, musically and in other ways. Historical forces might further be interrogated. Ronggeng-derived arts were populist and, in the Sukarno era prior to l965, often had PKI (communist party) connections. Many of these genres and the singing, dancing women involved took a hit in l965 when the PKI fell. Today, too, female-related arts are under attack with the recent “anti-pornography” laws and rising Islamist ideology. Economics, religion, and class as well as patriarchy are forces that impact ronggeng arts. Though this book will not be the last comment on the important topic that Spiller's work broaches, it is a great start to deeper discussion of Sunda's ronggeng-related arts.
