Cross-Dressing Across Cultures: Genre and Gender in the Dances of Didik Nini Thowok

Abstract

This paper focuses on two cross-cultural projects involving Didik Nini Thowok, is a cross-gendered and cross-cultural cosmopolitan who is the most popular and successful professional dancer and comedian in Indonesia. Ethnographic accounts of these project and dialogues with some of their performers lead to wider discussions about creative innovation, collaboration, the location of culture in performance, the performance of gender, and the politics of representation.

First I analyse the process of transantional collaboration in the creation of Bedhaya Hagoromo (2001), a performance for male cross-dressed dancers which combined the Javanese bedhaya dance with elements from Japanese Noh drama. This collaboration allows an assessment of interculturalism, with its implied relations of cultural domination, and multiculturalism, with its recognition of dialogues between cultural performance practices. Both frameworks reify performance elements as the property of a particular culture; what matters for the performers is the creative collaborative process.

Cross-gendered performances also put cultural boundaries to the test while elucidating issues such as aesthetics, appreciation, audiences, play and creative innovation. I analyse performances from an international dance tour of four Asian dancers in which Didik represented Indonesia, 'In Gesture and in Glance. The Female Role Player in Asian Dance and Theatre' (2003) to redress the neglect of theatrical performance in academic accounts of gender cultures and gender reversals. I consider whether this tour reifies cross-dressing as Asian-ness, and whether it assert or subvert stereotypes of 'Asian theatre' by re-examining Asian female impersonation in relation to western drag in terms of theatrical skill and the production of an 'unnatural body' . The Chinese performance in the tour was by a star of yueju opera, normally performed by women, who performed dressed as a man to represent a female cross-dressed performer who represents a man. Concepts such as gender 'doubling' and 'indeterminacy' and neglected forms of female-to-male cross-dressing are being used by Asian scholars to challenge the conventions for the performance of gender roles in everyday life. Didik however uses the concepts 'mystical gender' and 'tranceformation' to situate his own performance practice in relation to academic discourses on cross-gender which are strictly associated with theatrical performance.

Keywords: cross-gender, cross-culture, performance, creativity, Indonesia, dance, Didik Nini