Competing against 'tradition' in the Sundanese performing arts

Since the 1960s, competitions have increasingly become a major avenue for the promotion and marketing of Sundanese culture in West Java, Indonesia, as well as for building support for the arts among young people. The chance to participate in a competition is one of the forces that drives new interest in th Sundanese performing arts. At the same time, the problems of standardization and of covert battles over artistic authority within each genre lead to concerns that the arts of the future may be attractive but empty imitations of their (reputedly more 'authentic' and 'traditional') twentieth-century counterparts. As the notions of what may constitute 'tradition' shift along the lines of nationalist discourse, so competitions follow suit in bending local ideology to conform to national images of past and present.