Dancers wearing masks often speak of how limited vision establishes a way to separate from vision’s crucial role and to move towards an understanding of what essential “seeing” really is: the innate ability of the body to know of nearby objects without actually seeing them distinctly, what Merleau-Ponty calls the body-subject. Most important to notice from the “inner face” of this Bapang mask from East Java (Fig. 1) is that it is carved to be worn low on the face, so that for the dancer to be able to see in a limited capacity through the narrowly carved and down-turned eye-slits, he or she must tilt the head back while harnessing all the other senses in the process. Any dancer wearing a mask must be willing to forgo this visual limitation for an enhanced embodied experience. Key to this kinesthetic grasping of the surrounding performance space in Indonesia are makeshift built forms, temporary bamboo constructions that not only “house” the performative event, but that cue the visually constrained dancers’ placement in, and movement through a highly interactive, intimate, and potentially transformative sphere.

As a graduate of Cornell University, a professor in the History of Art and Visual Studies, and a former director of SEAP, I have come to think of space and the shaping of social relations in the Southeast Asia Program over the years as a similar makeshift structure, reminiscent of the popular British nursery rhyme, “This is the House that Jack Built.” Both the rhyme and the program are cumulative narratives that do not always divulge the details of their “houses” per say, or even who the cast of characters might be (Jack for one!) who provide the architectural planning. Instead, both reveal over the longue durée how each “house” is indirectly linked to other things and people –-i.e. “the horse, the hound and the horn that belonged to the farmer sowing his corn.” Each sentence in the nursery rhyme (or SEAP’s cumulative history) is an example of a deeply nested relative clause that reveals how everything is intimately interlinked. READ MORE