The Dance That Makes You Vanish

Indonesian court dance, a purportedly pure and untouched tradition, is famed throughout the world for its sublime calm and stillness. Yet this unyieldingly peaceful surface conceals a time of political repression and mass killing. Between 1965 and 1966, some one million Indonesiansincluding a large percentage of the countrys musicians, artists, and dancerswere killed, arrested, or disappeared as Suharto established a virtual dictatorship that ruled for the next thirty years. In The Dance That Makes You Vanish, an examination of the relationship between female dancers and the Indonesian state since 1965, Rachmi Diyah Larasati elucidates the Suharto regimes dual-edged strategy: persecuting and killing performers perceived as communist or left leaning while simultaneously producing and deploying replicasnew bodies trained to standardize and unify the unruly movements and voices of those vanishedas idealized representatives of Indonesias cultural elegance and composure in bowing to autocratic rule. Analyzing this history, Larasati shows how the Suharto regimes obsessive attempts to control and harness Indonesian dance for its own political ends have functioned as both smoke screen and smoke signal, inadvertently drawing attention to the site of state violence and criminality by constantly pointing out the perfection of the mask that covers it. Reflecting on her own experiences as an Indonesian national troupe dancer from a family of persecuted female dancers and activists, Larasati brings to life a powerful, multifaceted investigation of the pervasive use of culture as a vehicle for state repression and the global mass-marketing of national identity.