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Steady changes in Bali's social, cultural, and political landscapes impact the status of the traditional performing arts, and globalization's potentially stifling effect on the Balinese arts remains a concern. This article examines how today's teachers of the operatic dance-drama arja modify traditional pedagogical models as they work with young performers in the context of globalization and change. It considers some of the implications of these technology-based adaptations, explores the teachers' ideological motivations, and argues that training teenagers to perform this challenging genre is an effective tactic for reinforcing their sense of Balinese identity.

Featuring a nearly seamless relationship between music, dance, and theater, the operatic dance-drama arja has long been a popular form of entertainment for local audiences in Bali. Arja unites poetic song (tembang) and instrumental music (traditionally gamelan gaguntangan) with danced depictions of stock characters in a storytelling process that unfolds over the course of several hours. Often performed at village celebrations, temple ceremonies, and cultural festivals, arja performances follow a formulaic structure and draw on a variety of story types, including Balinese legends, historical narratives, and modern dramatic tales. While audience interest in traditional performance genres like arja has fluctuated

This chapter studies the recent resurgence of children's arja theater troupes in Bali (arja anak-anak, arja remaja). It extends our analysis to encompass the pedagogical landscape of arja remaja, revealing an embodied process that is marked by both intimacy and initiative, throughout which revered female performers sculpt and prod the young voices and bodies of their aspiring student artists. The chapter then emphasizes that the embodiment of gender in these ensembles has the “potential to disrupt the...endurance of conventional gender ideals as iterated and reinforced by Indonesian national and Balinese local ideologies.” Such ideologies have traditionally sustained male authority while muting female voices in the public sphere. The chapter argues that arja's pedagogical process works against this dynamic by privileging female voices and exposing students to a wide range of “possible expressions of the feminine [while facilitating] the safe exploration of these roles.” This affords young Balinese women the opportunity to experiment with alternate relationships between voice, body, and social space.

Set between these two offerings, Zakir Hossain Raju's insightful piece on the treatment and reception of Islamic doctrine within Bangladeshi and Malaysian art cinema (Ch. 3) gives the reader a taste of the powerful potential of comparative analysis: while his pairing of Malaysia with Bangladesh seems slightly out of place given the volume's focus on Malaysia and Indonesia, his engaging analysis reveals how these two \"nationally defined but transnational/regional cultural institutions interact with Islam and Muslim identity in nation-spaces where Muslims are the majority (46). R. Anderson Sutton's overview of Indonesia's commercial recording industry and subsequent case study of Yogyakarta's largest music and media outlet (Ch. 5) surveys the range of commercially available audio and video recordings to explore the possible existence of a distmet \"Indonesian Muslim sound. Shifting to virtual sites, Muhamad Ali evaluates how online spaces like blogs, message boards and social media provide unique opportunities for self-identifying \"liberal Muslims'' to engage in open discourse related to Islam, to shape their individual and group identities, and to create more complex webs of affiliation than is possible in traditional modes of interaction (Ch. 6) . Asserting that influential elements of Middle Eastern, Malay and Western popular culture are all active players in the development of this genre of Islamic popular music, Barendregt's work on nasyid persuasively balances debates about youth culture, consumption, political influence, the role of female participants within the genre and tensions between pop music and religion.

Rather than merely conceding the common notion that potency resides exclusively in the male domain, Weiss seeks to revise the discourse on potency and show, through a review of historical documents, how Javanese women were active, potent players in Java's courtly past. By having explored shifts in gender construction and revealed aesthetic continuities that reach from the twelfth century to the twentieth, she hopes to better relate the lived experience of female gender players to significant historical trends and cultural shifts. [...] perhaps most important for journal's readership, is Weiss's contribution to the discourse on gender in Javanese historical and cultural contexts.

With this political context as a backdrop, Baulch reveals how significant changes in media production linked rock music consumption to ideologies of consumerism and commercialism, contributing to distinct modes of identity formation in two groups of young Balinese men--underground music enthusiasts who eschewed these ideals and the trendy \"ABG\" (newly grown children) of a rising middle and upper class. [...]Baulch evaluates a series of post-1996 shifts that birthed a proliferation of underground concerts and subgenres, paying particular attention to black metal identity. [...]Baulch exercises extreme care in her ethnography, particularly in her characterizations of groups and group identities.

Collier Malone reviews Power Plays: Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java by Andrew N. Weintraub.