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Knowledge in working with the arts
and Asia

Transcripts

Philip Yampolsky, Program Officer for Media, Arts and Culture, The Ford Foundation, Jakarta

Knowledge in Working with the Arts of Asia
(click here for PDF version)

Revitalization and Educational Programs in Traditional Indonesian Arts
(click here for PDF version)

Knowledge in Working with the Arts of Asia

Let me start by circumscribing what I'm going to talk about. My geographical frame
of reference is Southeast Asia, and most of the time what I have in mind when I talk about Southeast Asia is Indonesia, where I have done most of my work. And I will talk mainly about music and performing arts, because those are what I know best, but I believe that what I say applies, after necessary adjustments, to other arts as well, and probably to other parts of Asia also. Now one more preliminary thing: I will speak, over and over, about "“traditional" music. So I will offer a minimal definition of the term as I use it here. In the context of Southeast Asian music, for example, I imagine a continuum, at one end of which is music that shows no obvious foreign influence (foreign here meaning from outside Southeast Asia) in its basic characteristics, such as its idiom, scale, and formal elements. (Any musicologists here, please note that I don't mention instruments as a basic characteristic. South Indian classical music does not become European music simply by being played on a violin.) This would be the "wholly traditional" end of the continuum. At the other end, the 'wholly foreign" end, would be music that displays the basic characteristics of one or more musics from outside Southeast Asia. These could be musics rooted in the European harmonic idiom, such as pop music, country and western, and Christian hymns.Or, in Indonesia at least, they could be musics like dangdut, which mixes elements from Indian, Middle Eastern, and American popular music, but not from Indonesia itself; or they could be the various forms of Islamic religious music that derive from comparable genres in the Middle East. In between these poles on the continuum would be musics in mixed or hybrid idioms, combining elements of both traditional and foreign.

There is still a great deal of traditional music and other traditional performing art
going on in Southeast Asia. In my experience, it is strongest mainly in rural areas and large towns, rather than in large cities, but if you know where to look for it, it is there. But I believe that it in many places it is gravely threatened, by many forces. Loss of ethnic or regional autonomy, nationalization or privatization of an ethnic group's lands, increased ease of travel, the penetration of globalized urban media into the most remote areas, the opposition of world religions to local belief systems - these all work to destabilize and marginalize traditional life and thus traditional arts. We see clear evidence of their impact if we look at the processes of transmission of traditional arts. Even where these arts are still strong, they are now almost entirely in the hands of performers and appreciators who are middle-aged or elderly. And nearly everywhere in Indonesia these carriers of tradition lament that young people are not willing to inherit the art forms - they're not learning to perform, nor even to do the job of audiences, namely to enjoy and respond to performance. Taught by schools, media, and religion that traditional culture is primitive, backward, and heathen, young people do not see their future, do not see their ideas of themselves, in the traditional arts, so they do not invest themselves in them. But without the young to carry them on, the arts cannot survive as living traditions.

Now, how should people and institutions concerned with this problem - governments, educators, arts presenters, artists, scholars, charitable foundations, and the traditionbearers themselves—respond to this situation? There are two common responses. One is to say that "“traditions always change" and therefore to let attrition take its course. My reply to this is yes, traditions have always changed, but from within, not like this. This is a mass extinction, and it results from processes of external domination - political, economic, and ideological. This is not the same thing as people getting bored with the minuet and taking up the waltz.

The other response is to look for ways to "preserve", strengthen, or "develop" traditional arts. And here at last we come to the issue of knowledge, for most current efforts demonstrate, in my view, a crippling lack of knowledge of the nature of traditional performing arts. Typical efforts are: preparing concert and stage performances of traditional arts in urban venues, developing arts shows for tourists, creating new dances or compositions on traditional themes, promoting world music fusions that incorporate the timbres of traditional instruments within the prevailing idioms of Euro-American popular music, or arranging improvisational encounters between musicians of disparate traditions.

I'm not attacking any of these activities, all of which bring pleasure to their intended audiences and give opportunities and exposure to artists. But none of them is likely to strengthen the traditional arts, for these activities and the traditional practice are premised on quite different relations to the arts themselves. Concerts, tourist shows, and the like are aimed at audiences who stand outside the tradition, whereas the traditional arts originate and thrive only inside the tradition, only among audiences who understand the full resonance of the artistic gesture within the culture it springs from.

Traditional arts are rooted in communities: sometimes in large communities the size of ethnic or linguistic groups, but often in much smaller ones - regions, districts, valleys, villages. By "rooted"I mean that they are performed using the local language; their repertoires include stories or songs or music referring to the experiences, practices, history, and perhaps individual inhabitants of the communities; their aesthetic is local; and the performers themselves come from or are known to the community. If we are speaking of a grand classical tradition, nurtured and elaborated in the courts of Java or Moghul India or China, then the ties to local communities may have become attenuated, but even those classical traditions typically exist within a complex of local traditions sharing many elements with the classical forms.

It is the understanding of the language, the references, the history, the symbols, and the emotions packed into traditional art that I am calling the insider relation to the art. There is nothing wrong with its opposite, the outsider relation. By definition, we are all outsiders to any tradition other than ones we grew up with or have studied intensively, and if we were to invalidate the outsider relation there would be no point in learning anything about other people’s arts. But what must be recognized is that the outsider's relation to an art is inevitably different from and shallower than the insider's relation. Precisely because the outsider doesn't know the language, one cannot ask him or her, tourist or concert-goer, to sit through an all-night performance, or one where the interest is all in the details of the story or the beauty of the poetry, or in the delicate shadings and nuances of instrumental embellishment. The outsider audience typically wants variety, contrast, climax, virtuosity, spectacle, handsome costumes, good-looking dancers, showmanship—and this is what the designers of programs for outsiders, be they tourist shows or concert tours by a Javanese classical music-and-dance troupe, seek to provide.

But, as I said earlier, the people now holding the insider relation to the traditional arts are the middle-aged and elderly. They are inevitably a dwindling group, and if the young people reject those arts, then where will the new performers and new audiences come from? The insider relation to the traditional arts is truly threatened. We can foresee a time when that mode of knowing the arts will be lost, and the only relation to them will be the outsider relation. Even the performers will be outsiders, learning the arts in conservatories, in codified and standardized versions, without the flexible constraints that ongoing tradition counterposes to creative and virtuosic impulses. The outsider relation favors the showier and flashier outward features of art, so what is left will sparkle, for sure; but without the insider's knowledge of the nuances, the resonances, the boundaries, the inner art of the art, the sparkling surface will be hollow inside.

What I want to propose here is that people concerned with Asian traditional arts—their presentation for audiences, but also their very survival—must concern
themselves with nourishing those arts in their home communities and environments. This does not involve knowledge-gathering so much as it involves the protecting and nurturing of a mode of knowledge, and one that very likely we ourselves do not have access to. We must look for ways to restore respect for the traditional arts within their own communities, particularly among young people. And in dealing with outsider audiences, I believe we should try to raise their respect, as well, for the complexity of these arts. Audiences should know that they are not getting the full experience of an all-night shadow play when they see a one-hour condensation; they should know that a Beijing opera performance is not simply a string of acrobatic marvels. (I want to say that just yesterday I was in Uluru and admired the unapologetic stance of its guardians. They declare that the relationship of the traditional owners to the land is too complex and too private to be explained to the visitor; visitors must recognize that there are some things they cannot know.) I have seen in Indonesia how the expectations of the outsider audience and the success of some artists in satisfying those expectations then exerts pressure on other artists, and the outsider expectations become the standard that is applied to performers even in local, community contexts. Audiences and performers alike must be reminded that the modes of knowing are different, and, ultimately, though it is harder to achieve, the insider mode is richer and deeper.

Specifically, I suggest that what we need are three types of activities, all of which require that we first acquire the knowledge and understanding necessary to carry them out:

Revitalization programs to strengthen traditional arts at their source by:

• encouraging and facilitating young performers to study traditional arts of
  their own communities with experienced performers (e.g. by apprenticeships)
• attracting new, younger audiences to these arts
• developing social or economic frameworks to sustain traditional arts in the
  future

Educational programs

• to raise respect for traditional arts (and traditional cultures in general) among
  the inheritors of those arts
• to increase appreciation of outside audiences (school children, concertgoers,
  etc.) for the subtleties and complexities of those arts

Research and documentation resulting in documentary films and videos, scholarly and popular publications, CD-ROMS, etc. etc., that

• recognize and elucidate the meaning of traditional arts to insider audiences
• respect the communal dimension of traditional arts and the local (insider) aesthetic
• are accessible to the insider community, so that local artists and audiences can
  • learn from the documentation
  • critique it, where appropriate.

Revitalization and Educational Programs in Traditional Indonesian Arts

REVITALIZATION

Currently, the Arts and Culture Program of the Jakarta Office supports projects to "revitalize" a traditional Indonesian art-form (or, in some cases, a repertoire within an art-form) if the art in question meets a four-part test:

• it is threatened with a break in transmission across generations
  
• there are still some performers who have mastered the art and are willing to teach it
  
• there are some younger people who want to study it
  
• "sustainability" - there is some economic or social demand for the art within the community, such that after Foundation funding ends the art will be able to sustain itself.

In our thinking, revitalization work must be aimed at the traditional community. That is, getting a group in shape to perform on a tour or at a festival would not qualify.

The Jakarta office has supported many revitalization projects over the past decades (though the four criteria above were formulated only recently, and some of the earlier projects do not exactly fit them), but support has been unsystematic. In the next year or eighteen months, we plan to mount a retrospective survey and evaluation to see which projects worked or didn’t work, and why. The results of this evaluation will be discussed in one or more seminars, and we expect eventually to produce a book reporting our conclusions and proposing methods for revitalization work.

ARTS APPRECIATION CURRICULUM FOR PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Arts teaching in Indonesian schools has for decades been focused on the European and American arts, and, moreover, on the technical performance of the arts, even though teachers are ill-equipped to teach performance or execution, and the time available in the curriculum (at present, two forty-minute periods a week) is not sufficient for anyone to learn the practice of any art.

The Jakarta office of the Ford Foundation is supporting a large-scale project to devise a wholly new arts curriculum, focused on arts appreciation rather than practice, and on Indonesian arts rather than "Western" arts. Ford's partners are preparing textbooks and audio-visual materials for a twelve-year arts course, running from first grade to the end of high school.

The proposed course is organized around "topics" - three topics per school year, thirty-six in all. Some examples of topics are: masked dance, domestic architecture, ceramics, textiles, stringed instruments, sung poetry.

The textbooks and instructional materials have the same structure for every topic: they demonstrate that the topic in question:

• is found in many different forms within Indonesia
• has specific technical features
• is evaluated by practitioners and audiences according to various aesthetic criteria
• has a social as well as an artistic dimension
• has counterparts in other parts of the world outside Indonesia

The curriculum aims to be multicultural and inclusive, treating all the arts in Indonesia as the inheritance of all Indonesians. Topics are constructed to range across the entire spectrum of the Indonesian arts - traditional and contemporary, urban and rural, court and village, classical and popular - and to cover as wide a geographical range within Indonesia as possible.

The curriculum is not intended to constitute a student’s total involvement with art. The designers of the curriculum believe that students need practical instruction in arts of their choosing (probably best provided as extra-curricular study), and they need exposure to the arts of their own community or locality. But, as Indonesians, they also need a basic awareness of the range and variety of arts throughout Indonesia, and that is what this curriculum seeks to provide. The fundamental aim of the curriculum, even deeper than the aim of introducing children to the range of Indonesian arts, is to inculcate respect for Indonesia's cultural diversity.

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