ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the artistic creativity, particularly embodied performance, in relation to time and established practice. Eliot asserts the importance of tradition in creative writing over and above that of the personality of, in this case, the poet, taking up multiple themes that are relevant to author's argument. Scholars of different dance and drama traditions in Indonesia have often compared the performer to a puppet, explaining that what is at issue is the dancer but the danced, rather as poetic work for Eliot involves the 'extinction of personality'. So although to an outsider court performance might exemplify social constraint and the repression of any creative personality, for individuals within the tradition, creativity, liberation and even immanent subversion were central to their understanding of the tradition in which they worked. Although there might appear to be a very big contrast between these forms of creativity, there is also considerable interaction between the three themes in their engagement with tradition.
