<Special Feature “The Encounter with Religious Others through Music and Musician in the Islamic World”>Performing Arts in Procession as a Contact Zone for Muslim and Hindu Balinese

Abstract

Performing arts in processions can create unique contact zones where the Muslim Balinese (the religious minority on the island) and Hindu Balinese (the majority) encounter one another in terms of sound and body movements. Describing and examining three examples of different contexts and backgrounds (a procession primarily for Muslims, a Hindu cremation to which Muslim performers were invited, and an anniversary parade for a city in which both Hindus and Muslims equivalently participated), I highlight several factors of the processions that enabled the Muslim and Hindu participants to experience each other's cultural forms and try to collaborate: an open and public performance space, an occasional occupation of the space by sonic and visible excess, a linear structure which facilitates the integration of diverse participants, the similarities between Muslim and Hindu processional music, the holism of procession, and the fact that all participants only partially control the whole event. Although the minority-majority relationship, echoing the historical subject-ruler connections, still affected the asymmetrical distribution of power and agency in framing these encounters, musicking together in processions efficiently could provide theatrical spaces, where they were intuitively pushed forward to surpass the ordinary border to establish contact with each other, shared the temporal coalescence in multi-sensory ways, and cooperatively worked out the ideal portrait of the inclusive community.