The Dance That Makes You Vanish Quotes

“contemporary Indonesian cultural/historical memory is in fact quite short.14 Thus the New Order discourse of channeling the “ancient” Javanese artistic past—a realm of tradition claimed to have been barely touched by the long ravages of history—of course fails to “remember” that artistic change has consistently followed the diverse cultural, economic, and religious exchange that Java has always engaged in. The exploiting, colonizing Europeans (whose full-to-bursting museums provide much of the contemporary evidence of historical Indonesian contact with outsiders) were relative latecomers to this process, following millennia of local trade with other parts of Asia as well as the entrance of Hinduism from India, bringing with it, among many other things, the Ramayana and Mahabharata epics that continue to figure hugely into what is now referred to as “traditional Indonesian dance.”
― Rachmi Diyah Larasati, The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia

“the narrative journey has stood its ground remarkably well, despite the subsequent fall of its most heroic protagonist from power and from any semblance of grace.”
― Rachmi Diyah Larasati, The Dance That Makes You Vanish: Cultural Reconstruction in Post-Genocide Indonesia