A dance with history

Rasinah’s story, like her career as a masked dancer, was complex and larger than life

Laurie Margot Ross

Mimi Ras, as Rasinah was affectionately known, was the eldest dalang topeng (masked dancer) of her generation when she died on 7 August 2010 at the age of around eighty.As practised along Java’s northwest coast, the masked dance, topeng, is a mystical Islamic form in which a female or male dalang wears a series of masks that portray male characters, each representing a metamorphosis in the life cycle and consciousness. Many practitioners were wet-rice farmers or other day labourers, who performed itinerant dance during the rainy season until itinerancy was banned in late 1965. Rasinah began studying Topeng Indramayu with her father, Lastra, at age five. By age seven, she was accompanying him as an itinerant dancer. She also studied gamelan, including kendang (drums). Although gamelan is usually a male activity in Java, most female dalang are highly competent musicians.

Difficult times

Rasinah’s family lived in Pamayahan village in the sub-district Lohbener, Indramayu, along Java’s northwest coast during the Japanese occupation (1942-45). She often revisited the fateful day in 1943, when a military officer stopped her on the street and asked how her father earned a living. ‘He is a puppeteer’, she replied proudly. Shortly after, military officers followed her home, rounded up the family’s heirloom masks and puppets, and destroyed all but one of them as her family looked on.

The occupiers banned all art forms linked to their Dutch predecessors, while promoting those that emphasised Asian solidarity through their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. They achieved this chiefly through propagandistic films, dramas and a performed art similar to wayang beber called kamishibai, which tells a story through scrolled pictures. Topeng was one of the few unrestricted indigenous art forms. Performances were not aimed solely at winning over the local people during the occupation. Entertainment was often brought to Indramayu military bases to boost homesick officers’ morale: local children were recruited to perform Japanese stories (in Japanese), wayang storylines about Asian solidarity were incorporated, and female dalang doubled there as improvisational dancers.

The Japanese occupation took a toll on Rasinah’s family. Rasinah remembered the corpses in the rice fields and lakes surrounding her village. Death permeated the air and contaminated the local food and water supply. Villagers steered clear of locally grown rice and farmed fish. Rasinah’s family was starving. Her parents reluctantly sent their twelve-year old daughter off to the Cupanagara area of Subang, around 60km southwest of her village, to perform in exchange for rice, which she carried back to her family. Lastra did not live to see Independence and Rasinah’s mother, Sarminah, was assaulted by Japanese soldiers. According to Rasinah, her mother, an improvisational dancer, suffered an emotional breakdown almost immediately after the Japanese withdrew from Java. She never recovered. At around the same time, Rasinah mysteriously lost her vision in one eye. Rasinah had not learned all five characters in the topeng pantheon before her father’s death. Despite these severe setbacks, the young dancer was remarkably resilient.

A long career

Prior to 1965, those female dalang prized for their beauty and skill were often courted by wealthy men; however, there were strings attached to financial security and they typically forfeited their careers for the duration of the marriage. Rasinah was married twice. She first married a civil servant, Tamar, at age sixteen. She had two children with Tamar, both of whom died. Her second husband, Amat, a drummer from neighbouring Pekandangan, taught her the remaining topeng dances. Rasinah became pregnant twice, and carried one pregnancy to term. Her daughter, Wachi, now in her forties, once performed as a clown and assisted her mother when teaching topeng.

A second pivotal period in Rasinah’s career and that of her contemporaries began in 1965 with Suharto’s rise to power. Dalang were routinely accused of membership in Indonesia’s communist party or the socialist arts organisation, Lekra, and banned from performing. One of Rasinah’s siblings, Murita, a very good dalang topeng, puppeteer and clown, died in the 1960s. She refused to elaborate on the circumstances surrounding his death. Although Rasinah herself was spared accusations, she wisely turned her attention to choreographing less scrutinised dances. One year after Amat died in 1973, Rasinah sold her masks at a time when other dalang were beginning to perform again. Like her other important decisions in her life, this one was pragmatic. Masks are secured on the face by biting into a leather tab hammered inside it with the front teeth. She had lost hers.

Rasinah also taught dance at the local elementary school during the lean New Order years and continued even in her heyday. One of her contemporary dance students, Wangi, came from a topeng family who lived close by and, today, is a leading dalang topeng. Like Rasinah, Wangi has enjoyed an eclectic career that, in addition to topeng, includes playing the queen of China in Robert Wilson’s I La Galigo (based on the Sureq Galigo epic about six generations of Bugis wayfarers) in 2004-05. Rasinah recommended Wangi for the role. Rasinah was sensitive to her Chinese Christian students’ needs as well, choreographing Tari Maria (The Dance of Maria) with them in mind.Many dalang are concerned about the rise of contemporary music, which eclipsed topeng in popularity at life-cycle events over the past few generations. The sensuous movements of contemporary female singer-dancers do not sit well with traditional artists. Rasinah, however, had a flair for having fun and embraced both traditional and new art forms. When topeng scholars Toto Amsar Suanda and Endo Suanda first approached Rasinah about reviving her topeng career in the early 1990s, she balked. ‘I have no teeth’, she replied. They believed in her talent and persisted, providing funds to create a studio and rebuild her career. She purchased a set of dentures with the money instead. Now able to hold the masks in place, she became one of the most sought after dalang of the twentieth century. Stories abound about how spectators assumed that the agile movements of the petite dancer could only be a young boy and their subsequent surprise discovering an elderly woman behind the mask.

Rasinah eventually built the beautiful dance space for which the funds were intended. In the open air wood-frame studio with tile floors attached to her family home in Pekandangan, she held rehearsals and taught private and group lessons.

Rasinah performed in Japan, Canada and the UK and was the subject of the documentary, ‘Rasinah: The Enchanted Mask’, directed by Rhoda Grauer. She was under contract to perform again in Canada in 2006 but suffered a debilitating stroke that paralysed the left side of her body in 2005. Her granddaughter, Aerli, was sent in her place, marking the young dancer’s first trip abroad. Rasinah, who had lovingly supported her family for the past decade, faced mounting medical bills and a return to the poverty of her pre-topeng years.

When Rasinah’s health took another serious turn in early 2008, she formally passed the torch to Aerli, unaware that she was to have one final comeback. Her life came full circle when she made the approximately eighteen-hour roundtrip journey from Indramayu to Jakarta to perform at Bentara Budaya from her wheelchair to a mesmerised audience. She died just a few days later. Rasinah will be remembered for her rise from obscurity late in her career to become one of the most enduring dalang topeng of her age. But for those who knew her, her way of moving and being was an elegant synthesis of her past.