Aesthetic of Restraint in Tumultuous Times

In The Aesthetic of Restraint in Tumultuous Times, Ward Keeler analyzes changes in performance practice in Java, Bali, and Burma over the past fifty years. Puppetry, dance, and drama used to include a meditative dramatic aesthetic rooted in control and attention to social hierarchy. These performances have now become raucous, featuring broad humor and kinetic dancing and music, resembling television variety shows, with little narrative coherence and little trace of the aesthetic of restraint.Keeler connects this change to the rise of a neoliberal market ideology. In the past, hierarchical arrangements presumed long-term relationships of exchange. People gladly subordinated themselves, offering up labor and deference, to those more powerful than themselves, expecting to receive in return material and affective support. The newly pervasive ideology of the free market, however, releases the powerful from their obligations to the structurally weak, undermining hierarchy's persuasiveness. As Keeler's sharp and elegiac account demonstrates, performing arts genres formerly predicated on the logic of hierarchical arrangements have shifted to reflect these dominant economic and cultural changes.