The Playful Revolution: Theatre and Liberation in Asia by Eugène van Erven

Review by: Kathy Foley

Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 134-137
Published by: University of Hawai'i Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1124388 .
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 REVIEWS

Book Reviews

THE PLAYFULREVOLUTION: THEATRE AND LIBERATIONIN ASIA by

Eugene van Erven. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. $39.95 cloth.
$18.95 paper.

Some books should be marked "handle with care." Eugene van Erven's The Play-
ful Revolution is one. As a scholarly insight into theatre in Asia, the work often
proves infuriating-exaggerations, purple prose, and misinformation mingle
with acceptable facts. Scholars will advise their students to do serious cross-check-
ing before taking the material at face value. But if we shift paradigms and con-
sider the book as a travel narrative, its genre and potential usefulness for a theatre
artist/scholar become clear. Written with the righteous passion and rough energy
of the field journal of a beginning researcher, the book has both function and
interest. With careful handling, it can be a useful tool for those interested in polit-
ical and grassroots theatre in certain areas of Asia. One only wishes that a knowl-
edgeable editor could have exerted more control, changing the title and ordering
the material so the better-researched information on the Philippines could be
more clearly demarcated from more nebulous territory. As it is, the book must be
read with a machete-knife mind that can hack through opinion and detail to find
the fruit.
What I found to be the "fruit" was the sixty pages on the work of PETA
(the Philippines Educational Theatre Association) and related Filipino organiza-
tions around 1986. The author had the luck to be in the Philippines at the time
that the Marcos regime was being replaced by the Aquino government. Both his
timing and his preparation were appropriate to produce good reporting on this
leg of his journey. As a lecturer in American studies from the University of
Utrecht with knowledge of Latin America, he was prepared to understand the
history of Spanish and American domination, the impact of contemporary liberal
Catholic theology, and the anticolonial ardor that mix in the islands. The people
that the author interviewed in the Philippines are recognized as theatrical lead-
ers. The heady sense of being a cultural worker in the Philippines in this period

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BOOK REVIEWS 135

comes through even in this secondhand account. The author tells us of the rock
musical Nukleyar(Nuclear) by Al Santos and Joey Ayala which focused on the cor-
ruption surroundingthe building of a Westinghouse nuclear plant in Bataan in a
highly volcanic region. Readers will enjoy the account of the Westinghouse danc-
ers "direct from Three Mile Island" (p. 54). Van Erven also gives interesting
information on many other PETA productions and the round-the-world tour of
its production OathtoFreedom in 1986, which we learn was financed on a wing and
a prayer. Also significant is the information on Juan Tamban,a PETA play that
talks about the interaction of a sociology researcher from a university and a
young boy who swallows lizards to make money. The class differences that sepa-
rate urban but politically committed intellectuals and the poor people that they
champion become clear. Leaving Manila with the author we visit various theatre
workshops at factories and eventually ride with him through the south as he wor-
ries about being kidnapped like the last European visitor to the region, a British
Jesuit who was held by dissidents for twenty-one days: "During the entire trip
from Iligan to Marawi my stomach was in a painful knot and I wished I had spe-
cialized in Renaissance Drama instead. Sining Kambayoka [a company in the
Muslim south] had better be worth it." One realizes that the research is a little
more exciting than a traditional library search. Where the author has good infor-
mants, visits an extended period of time, and reports what he has seen himself,
the book has value.
The introductory chapter, an overview on the interplay of theatre and
educational theory in Latin America as shaped by the work of Paulo Freire and
Augusto Boal, is a good prelude to this discussion of the Philippines. The outline
of Boal's workshop method is informative, and the South America/Philippine
connection he argues makes sense. For centuries ideas and artistic forms have cir-
culated freely from Latin America to the Philippines. It seems reasonable that
this pattern should continue. But as the author then takes off from this better-
known region, armed with a few addresses (often those of artists working in a
Christian theatre network) and limited time, we sense he has moved into terra
incognita. Though his bibliography is extensive, it is hard to feel that he has read
or retained the information as he tries to give us some sense of what is going on in
Korea, Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Pakistan. You appreciate some of van
Erven's information, but you know that you will have to read other experts to
judge how his experience fits into the frameworkof political or grassrootstheatre
in that country.
Here I offer just a few examples of the misinformation that haunts the
Indonesian chapter. Though anticolonial political activism in theatre is often his
topic, he has no knowledge that this is long and strong in Indonesia beginning
with what was probably the first scripted play, Bebasari,in 1926. Instead, he tells
us, "modern Indonesia theater can thereforebe safely assumed to have started in
or about 1950" (p. 184). He states that Rendra, Arifin C. Noer, Putu Wijaya,
Ikranagara, and Riantiarno left political drama in the 1970s (p. 186). The
remark seems odd in that almost every production of modern drama I have seen
from the late 1970s to the present has focused on issues of government corrup-
tion, exploitation of the people, and catering to the West. How far did the author

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136 BOOK REVIEWS

seek for information? He cannot have spent long in Jakarta. Van Erven is
astounded that thousands of people attend poetry readings-yet those who know
Indonesia understand there is a long and popular tradition of solo reading that
has thrived for at least the last thirty years. Much of his information seems to be
drawn from interviews with Westerners who live in Yogya. In the Indonesian
material, the author only holds firm when he gets into his field report and strict
repetition of what his informants say about their own work. Much of his discus-
sion focuses on Christian-fundedcompanies around Yogykarta. In an area that is
99 percent Muslim, the selection of these groups as the important ones doing
grassrootstheatre seems odd to say the least.
There is a problem, too, with the definition of terms. The author has
created the term "theatre of liberation," which is related to Boal's "theatre of the
oppressed" production process. Boal saw this theatre as having two variants: pro-
fessional theatre, which takes the results of grassroots work and refines it into
well-honed theatre performances, and grassroots workshops that allow the
oppressed (workersand peasants) to articulateand begin to change their own pre-
dicament. Van Erven, rather than adopting a term already in use (theatre for
social change, theatre of the oppressed), coins this new term "theatre of libera-
tion" but never clearly defines it. The concept expands and contracts to include
professional theatre experiments like those of PETA, then grassrootscommunity
theatre around political issues, then nonprofessional theatre focused on pure
community building, and eventually a children's puppet group in Thailand. By
the end of the book I felt that "theatre of liberation" was simply an arbitrary
name for theatre the author liked. This is theatre that is more or less political in
orientation and often played by, for, or about the poor. Inclusion is not always
based on who is doing the prime work around these issues but, rather, those
whose names the author's network of acquaintances yielded up. As it stands the
text is a miscellany, a scrapbook, where good material and misinformation are
intermixed.
Ultimately this is a book of personal opinion and discovery, a travel nar-
ration that takes theatre as its focal point. The author is a postmodernist intent on
letting us know that what we will see will be through his eyes. But one wonders
about the eyes when he tells us that the significant theatre of social development
in Islamic or Hindu or Shamanist/Buddhist regions like India, Indonesia, or
Korea comes from Catholic sources. Is the theatre of liberation merely Christian
activism through theatre in Asia? While the author wishes to speak about all sig-
nificant theatre for social change, he ends up talking primarily about a Christian
network: in Muslim Mindanao we find that the theatre of liberation's source
"must be sought in the progressive circles of the Catholic Church" (p. 80). In
Korea we hear much about the involvement of clergy (p. 95). One seriously ques-
tions how carefully the author has checked into theatre for social change when he
states that "progessive sociopolitical orientation is still hardly noticeable in Hin-
duism and Islam" and avers that "whatever religious liberation activities exist
are channeled primarily through various pockets of Catholicism that are spread
throughout the region" (p. 110). One sees many mentions of Goethe Institutes,
funding from foreign subsidies, and citations of leaders who have studied abroad

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BOOK REVIEWS 137

at NYU or Leeds. This is not to say that these phenomena are bad nor that the
author completely ignores the implications of foreign influence, but it would be
nice if the author had taken the time to analyze the fundamental meaning of such
phenomena. At the opening of the book the author acknowledges that he may be
charged with Eurocentrismand says that some may fault him for not being tied to
any particular dogma. But, he continues, this was a book which "I could simply
not nothave written." One can only hope that the author goes on to fill the many
cultural, linguistic, and intellectual holes that mar this sometimes gripping travel
story. Perhaps, at some later point, he will be able to write a book which is really
about theatre and liberation in Asia.

KATHY FOLEY
University
of California,
SantaCruz

MASKS OF BALI: SPIRITS OF AN ANCIENT DRAMA by Judy Slattum.

Photographs by Paul Schraub; preface by Hildred Geertz. San Francisco:
Chronicle Books, 1993. $18.95.

Recently a friend lamented that there was no book available on Balinese masks.
Now there is one, and it is handsomely produced with over seventy gorgeous
color plates. Most of the masks are of a high order of craftsmanshipand expres-
siveness. Paul Schraub has photographed these masks isolated against neutral
black and white backgrounds, and there are sufficient photographs of masks in
performance(not captioned but usually clear in context) for the reader to appre-
ciate how the faces acquire a body in performance. For more ample documenta-
tion of the performancesthemselves, Spies and DeZoete's DanceandDramain Bali
and Bandem and DeBoer's FromKaja to Kelod:BalineseDancein Transition remain
the most important general sources.
Slattum's text is written for a general audience and manages well to
incorporate sufficient Balinese terms without becoming opaque to a stranger in
Baliology. Treated in four sections-covering the chronicle plays of topeng,the
Ramayanaperformancesof wayangwong,the chthonic Calonarang masks depicting
Rangda and the witches that serve her, and the (equally chthonic) Barongmasks
that hide the human form while drawing upon imagery from the animal world
and mythology-the text incorporates brief histories and descriptions of the cor-
responding theatrical and ritual forms before describing the masks. (The last two
categories of Calonarang and Barongmasks inevitably leak together, given the per-
formative traditions that have joined them.) Particularly useful to those with
some background in Balinese culture are the notes on carving and ceremonial
practices associated with the various masks. The categories of halus(refined) and
keras(rough and strong) that are frequently used by maskmakers, dancers, and
audiences as categories are introduced, though the term kasar(crude, demonic,
vulgar) is missing; while the dyad halus/keras
is certainly used, the continuum sug-
gested by all three terms could be more useful in discussing the typology of the

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