Performing Arts of Global Asia Quiz 3 Study Guide:

Butoh (what is it and how did it emerge)

• Definition: Butoh is an anti-traditional Japanese contemporary dance genre characterized by physically demanding, shocking, and metamorphic performances. Dancers typically perform with shaved heads, white-painted bodies, tensed muscles, and highly animated facial expressions.

• Post-WWII Emergence: It emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s from Japan's avant-garde art scene as a radical rebellion against a humiliated postwar society.

• Founders: Founded by Tatsumi Hijikata and Kazuo Ohno. Hijikata originally termed it ankoku butoh ("dance of darkness") to confront hidden societal truths like deformity and insanity.

• Core Characteristics:

  • Rejects the Western modern dance focus on symmetry, rhythm, and kinetic flow in favor of imbalance and entropy.

  • Overcomes personal boundaries of physical endurance to achieve spontaneous learning or spiritual growth (satori).

  • Uses "natural movement" to convey raw, non-verbal emotional content rather than abstract formalism.

The role of “traditional” Indonesian dance in the New Order’s “amnesia” and “remembering project”

• The "Remembering" Project: Under Suharto's authoritarian "New Order" regime, the state forced citizens to collectively memorize a centralized, highly edited narrative of the 1965–66 massacres. This script painted leftists as absolute evil and sacralized the state's rise to power.

• The "Amnesia" Project: Simultaneously, the regime systematically enforced the forgetting of actual historical experiences—specifically erasing the state-sanctioned military mass murders of millions of citizens.

• The Role of Traditional Dance: The regime institutionalized and standardized "traditional" court dances (such as Javanese Bedhaya) to cover up historical violence with a veneer of ancient beauty and national unity.

• Political Manipulation: By showcasing Bedhaya—a ritual dance that centers on a mystical alliance between a Javanese king and a sea goddess—Suharto symbolically framed himself as a natural, time-honored monarch to legitimize his dictatorship internationally and stimulate foreign tourism.

Gerwani women and representations of femininity

• Who They Were: Gerwani (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia) was a progressive, highly active Indonesian women’s movement banned by Suharto's regime following the 1965 political upheaval.

• Demonization via Media: The state weaponized propaganda—specifically through the state-commissioned film Pengkhianatan G30S–PKI—to frame Gerwani members as bloodthirsty, hyper-sexualized, and out-of-control extremists.

• Choreographed Deviance: The film fabricated a narrative where Gerwani women sang the forbidden song "Gendjer-Gendjer" and engaged in wild, unrefined outdoor dances while torturing military generals.

• Subverting the Ideal: This savage depiction was placed in stark opposition to the submissive, domesticated, and refined Javanese ideal of femininity championed by the state's court dances, successfully turning public sentiment against politically active women.

Khmer Rouge

• Definition: The radical communist regime led by Pol Pot that ruled Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979.

• Ideology and Execution: The regime sought to force absolute loyalty to its leaders by banning religious worship, free association, formal schooling, and traditional family structures while implementing policies of mass relocation and constant surveillance.

• Harnessing Culture: Recognizing the visual and emotional power of performance, the regime forbade all pre-revolutionary popular, folk, and classical arts. Instead, they created rigid public displays of state-mandated revolutionary songs and dances to indoctrinate citizens and glorify manual labor.

Genocide

• The Atrocity: The historical event during which the Khmer Rouge regime unleashed unfathomable suffering upon the Cambodian population, resulting in the death of nearly two million people—about a quarter of the nation's population—in less than four years. The victims died from execution, torture, forced hard labor, starvation, and lack of modern medicine.

• Destruction of the Arts: As part of this systematic violence, the regime purposefully targeted professional intellectuals and artists. It is estimated that 80% to 90% of Cambodian classical dance teachers, musicians, and performers perished under the regime.

• Impact on Post-Genocide Legacy: The profound loss left a permanent scar on the cultural lineage, forcing thin numbers of emaciated survivors in the 1980s to rebuild an entire ancient artistic tradition strictly from their collective muscle memory.

Cambodian court/classical dance and history

• Ancient Origins: Linked historically to monarchs and temples, early dance traditions are inscribed on 12th-century Angkorian temple walls.

• Divine Signifier: Dancers historically served as the king's ritual mediators to the gods to secure the land's fertility. In the 19th and 20th centuries, these movements were codified into an official, sacred emblem of Khmer cultural identity.

• Post-Genocide Reconstitution: After 1979, emaciated survivors returned to Phnom Penh to painstakingly piece together their collective, embodied memory to train a new generation.

• The Apsara Figure: Representing celestial dance, the Apsara is an elite, official signifier of Cambodia. Performance requires precise, angular arm joint flexions, a stoic yet gentle facial expression, hyperextended wrists, and slow, unhurried steps.

Hmong dance

• Staged Hmong dance is a relatively new, highly expressive refugee repertoire of embodied memory and knowledge that progressively took shape over the last 50 years within U.S. diaspora communities.

• Hybrid Nature: There is no single, codified historical technique. Instead, it functions as a democratic, multiethnic blend merging traditional Hmong elements with K-pop, American competition dance, Bollywood, and neighboring Southeast Asian styles.

• The Hmong New Year (HNY): The secular HNY serves as the primary ethno-nationalist site where competitive dance groups showcase their labor, using performance to preserve history and track the Hmong refugee trajectory over time.

Appropriation (as discussed by Yang Sao Yia) & its limitations

• Appropriation as Signification: Historically, displaced Hmong refugees utilized "cultural appropriation"—taking usable practices or symbols from surrounding cultures—as an outsourcing strategy to reinvent themselves after being severed from their homeland.

• The Power of Relationality: Author Magnolia Yang Sao Yia argues that framing cross-cultural dance strictly through a rigid binary of "innocence vs. guilt" or "cancel culture" is overly simplistic. Appropriation is actually a complicated landscape of relationships and power dynamics.

• Limitations of the Repertoire:

  • Hmong dance relies heavily on borrowed signifiers (like clothing or music) in a superficial manner to construct a stage spectacle.

  • This was highlighted by the backlash to a 2019 "Cambodian" Hmong performance at the Fresno HNY.

  • Dancers donned traditional garments but executed fast hip-shakes and sharp modern movements, colliding directly with the sacred, slow, and fixed preservation goals of the genocide-surviving Cambodian American diaspora.

Palestinian dabke

• Definition: The dabke is a group-based Levantine folk dance that Palestinians perform in lines or circles using highly synchronized stepping, marching, stomping, and jumping patterns.

• Origins: It originated as an ancient, land-based agricultural practice where communities communally stomped soil for planting or compacted mud roofs for rural homes.

• Diaspora Elements: In the diaspora, it integrates unique Arabic wind and drum music, politicized land lyrics, and cultural artifacts like the kufiyah (checkered scarf) or the Palestinian flag. It serves as a post-spatial tool to intergenerationally pass down history and navigate colonial restrictions of access to the homeland.

Settler colonialism

A calculated project driven by ideologies of dominance that seeks the physical elimination, land dispossession, and systematic cultural erasure of native societies to establish a new settler state.

Zionism

The political movement and ideology establishing and maintaining a sovereign Jewish state on Palestinian land.

Anti-semitism

Prejudice against Jewish people

The text carefully distinguishes anti-Zionism (resistance to the colonial foundations of Israel) from anti-Semitism (prejudice against Jewish people), arguing that conflating the two is a strategy used to censor the Palestinian plight.

Dance as resistance

Across all four readings, dance functions as a critical mechanism of resistance, though its applications differ fundamentally based on power dynamics:

• Palestinian Diaspora (Sumud): Resistance manifests as a revolutionary, steadfast determination to exist and stay connected to the land. Openly celebrating communal joy, storytelling through movement, and sharing digital dance media actively counters the physical and psychological erasure imposed by settler colonialism.

• Subaltern Indonesian Communities: In the wake of state-enforced mass violence, ordinary villagers utilized folk performance to assert local solidarity and political alignment. When the state co-opted these forms, refraining from dancing became a quiet, somatic act of survival against forced national integration.

• Cambodian Classical Masters: Imparting rigorous dance training and secretly massaging fingers into crescent positions during forced labor camps kept ancestral memory alive. Reviving the classical repertoire directly resisted the total societal destruction attempted by the Khmer Rouge.

• Hmong American Refugees: Taking ownership of the term "Hmong Dance" is a self-determining act. Youth use multiethnic movements to claim space, navigate regional marginalization, generate cultural capital, and visually assert a panethnic Southeast Asian refugee identity within the United States.