Maintaining the Representation of Female Power through Beskalan Putri
This chapter examines some of the ways in which artists have maintained cultural space for the representation of female power through Beskalan Putri as they have adapted, taught, remembered, learned, performed, and talked about this dance. It focuses on representations of female power through Beskalan Putri because, building on the senses of history explored in the previous chapter, this dance and the femaleness performers associated with it were critical to their senses of Malangan tradition. This analysis thus further illustrates the selection of tradition and the construction of gender as mutually constitutive cultural processes. Considering artists' concerns with preservation as well as the impact of social, political, and cultural climates on the ways artists represented female power through this dance, this chapter argues that artists represented female power strategically—that is, in a “safe” way in times following trauma.