Dance, Dancer, and De-Politicisation in Indonesian Literature and Film

This papers aims to reveal the politicisation and depoliticisation of Ronggeng, a Javanese dance, in an Indonesian novel entitled The Dancer (1982), written by Ahmad Tohari during the military era, and its post-military film adaptation with the same title (2011). The novel critically treats Ronggeng as a traditional, unIslamic,
and apolitical dance while at the same time disapproves of the efforts of the Indonesian Communist Party to modernise, secularise, and politicise it. It offers its own distinctive ideals of the dance, which can be traced from the author�s backgrounds as well as the socio-political contexts in the 1980s. Reflecting the fast-changing, complex situations in the new era, the film concurrently reinforces and subverts the depoliticised ideals of Ronggeng in the novel.