ABSTRACT
This paper will examine two contrasting performance phenomena from the province of Yogyakarta (Java), in order to elicit certain trends in current cultural policies in Indonesia. Golék Ménak dance drama is the newest genre to be classed and patronized as palace culture. Tayuban, the so-called ‘dancing party’, belongs to the sphere of the small-scale community patronage which the Indonesian imagination is coming to associate with disappearing life-styles. It is not the history or the structure of the forms themselves which will concern us here, but their patronage and its effect on the performers who participate in these two different kinds of event which represent two contrasting spheres in the process of socio-cultural reconstruction.
