scholars and scribes, and theatrical performances.1 Of these, theatre has unquestionably been the most important in reaching the largely illiterate populations of the countryside and the cities. Priests, monks, and religious teachers have played their role in propagating religious ideas to large numbers of people but their work has often centered at court or in urban communities. The influence of the scholars and scribes has always been limited to the very small group of elite who could read and write. The use of theatre to educate and instruct an audience is not unique to Southeast Asia. Greek citizens were educated en masse at communally sponsored tragic festivals. Horace said Roman drama should "entertain and instruct." Through Morality and Mystery plays in the Middle Ages, pagans were instructed in Christian doctrine and practicing Christians were sustained in their beliefs. In modern times playwrights from Ibsen to Shaw to Brecht, Miller, and Genet have used the stage as a pulpit. Groups of all kinds, from the Nazis and the Communists to Moral Rearmament, have used theatre as well. What is notable about the theatre in Southeast Asia, as compared with Europe or America, is the degree to which it is involved in the educative process. It is not an exaggeration to say that, had the theatre not existed as a powerful channel for communicating to large groups of people, Southeast Asian civilization would not be what it is today. Through the medium of theatre performances, the complex religious, metaphysical, social, and intellectual values of the ruling elite were disseminated to the most unsophisticated villagers in the most remote areas.

The Khmer kings of Cambodia and the Brahmanic priestly class used theatre performances as a part of the ritual worship of the god-king. . . . The kings of Java, Bali, Sunda, Sumatra, and Malaya encouraged and sponsored recitations and performances of local versions of the same epics.

Drama was the main medium through which Javanese, Sudanese, and Balinese religious and philosophic systems were taught to the people.

On the Malay Peninsula, Islamic teachings penetrated . . . drama . . . deeply. . . .

In Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia, Buddhist . . . stories have been widely performed for several centuries.

To a certain extent Catholic missionaries utilized the appeal of theatre to gain converts to Christianity in the Philippines. Their aims were similar to those of the Moslem missionaries in Indonesia and Buddhist missionaries on the mainland of Southeast Asia. Their methods were not much different.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when European countries and the United States had colonized most of Southeast Asia, local nationalists sometimes tried to use theatre performances as a means of arousing the people against foreign rule. Troupes performing at court ... were seldom involved, for their repertories consisted of classic plays and their livelihood depended upon court favor. Most anticolonial, pronationalistic plays were staged by troupes in the popular tradition. . . . Colonial authorities watched closely for any hint of opposition in theatre performances so that criticism was usually indirect or phrased as doubleentendre language which European officials would have a hard time unraveling. . . . However, theatre was not an important weapon of nationalist leaders in their campaigns of harassment and agitation against colonial rule in pre-World War II days. The small nationalist movements were not prepared to use theatre as a propaganda medium in any major way. It would have been difficult to mount a concerted theatrical effort in the face of stern government controls. And, in any case, the nationalist leaders had little time to think of theatre; often it was all they could do to stay alive and out of prison, to say nothing of staging plays.

The largest concerted effort in modern times to utilize theatre as a propaganda medium in Southeast Asia was that of the Japanese occupation forces during World War II. Between 1940 and 1945 the Japanese gained control of every government in Southeast Asia. Through both civil and military channels, Japanese authorities pressed theatre into service to help explain the aims of their Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Western countries were vilified through the drama, and Asian nations glorified. The Japanese clearly recognized the communication potential of the theatre and assigned considerable sums of money and numbers of personnel to the task.

Few governments in Southeast Asia today attempt to use theatre as a medium of communication in Southeast Asia. In the Philippines, in Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia, governments rarely educate, inform, or indoctrinate people through dramatic performances. Only in Indonesia and in Vietnam is government propaganda regularly disseminated via the stage.2 Civil ministries and the armed forces in both these countries organize and operate propaganda theatre troupes, and their efforts to harness the communication potential of theatre for national purposes are extremely interesting.

The largest theatre-as-propaganda program within the Indonesian government is administered by the Ministry of Information through its network of offices beginning on the national and provincial level, extending through regional, district, and city levels, and reaching down as far as the sub-district and the village. Most of the government's theatre efforts

are concentrated on the island of Java, where theatre traditions are strong and where more than half the population of the country lives. In its theatre program the Ministry has adopted an indirect and a direct approach. In its indirect approach the Ministry works through existing professional troupes. . . . Low-level Ministry of Information officials pass along propaganda material to professional troupes, hoping they will put the material in their plays. Materials usually are prepared at the provincial level by officials of the People's Information Section. They may be merely statements of government policy or they may be play scripts and scenarios which incorporate the desired propaganda themes. Up through the 1950's a good deal of effort went into the indirect approach. Many troupes were regularly contacted by information officials. . . . Efforts to work through professional troops have fallen off in recent years.

The Ministry's direct approach is to set up and run its own propaganda theatre troupes. Professional performers are hired as officials of the Ministry of Information. Their full-time job is to write, direct, or perform propaganda plays. The Ministry of Information got into the theatre business during the years of the Revolution (1945-1949), when Indonesia's struggling nationalist government sought ways of rallying the people's support. Conventional mass media-radio, motion pictures, the press-were in the hands of the Dutch. Nothing was more natural than to turn to... shadow drama, the traditional mode of cultural expression of the Javanese, as a means of telling the people about government policy. ... Puppets were flat leather cutouts. . . . But they represented contemporary figures-Soekarno, Nehru, soldiers, Dutchmen, peasants-and they were cut and painted in realistic fashion. The puppets told stories of "national leaders and guerrilla soldiers in their struggle to obtain independence for their country." 3. ... The Dutch controlled the cities, but it was easy for student-guerrillas to tote a dozen leather puppets, a small screen, and a lamp along backcountry trails. In villages along the route of their march the soldiers performed rousing stories of the fight against the Dutch. Plays were short, for the guerrillas often had little time; they were simple, so unsophisticated peasants could understand them. It is difficult to estimate how many troupes were operating during the Revolution. The Dutch thought. . . [these plays] effective enough to take the trouble, during the Second Military Action of 1948, to search for, confiscate, and destroy several hundred . . . puppets. When the Revolution ended in 1949 the main reason for [the plays] . . . ended as well. People began to see and to care that the puppets were crude and the stories blatant, and no audience would pay to have . . . [these plays] performed. [They were] kept alive only through performances sponsored and paid for by the Ministry of Information.

As the deficiencies of wayang suluh became more apparent, a new form of... [drama] was created which, it was hoped, would retain the mystic appeal and artistic excellence of traditional . . . [shadow play] while conveying a modern social and political message. This remarkable crea

tion was called wayang Pantja Sila. It was conceived by Mr. Harsono Hadisoeseno, puppeteer and leader of a government information unit.. According to Javanese mystic thought there are 144 human passions and characteristics. Puppet figures visually represent all these traits in traditional... [theatre]. It was not difficult, therefore, to select appropriate puppet figures to symbolize all the modern concepts of wayang Pantja Sila. Just as the puppets of . . . five... brothers [in a traditional epic] symbolized the five principles of the Pantja Sila, other traditionally "good" puppet figures symbolized Miss Freedom, Health Services, Education, Agriculture, and so on, while traditional demon puppet figures symbolized evils such as Plant Disease, Devaluation, Inflation, and Loss of Moral Standards, as well as the competing ideologies of Feudalism, Marxism, Individualism, Intellectualism, and others.

Wayang Pantja Sila was created by the Ministry of Information for its own performers, but it was hoped that audiences would take to the new form and that professional dalang would begin to perform it. This did not happen. Like... [its predecessor] and a dozen... [drama] forms created by Javanese princes in past centuries to glorify themselves, wayang Pantja Sila never caught on with the public. Likely its elaborate symbolism was too complex for villagers to understand (though in theory its symbolism was the strongest point in its favor). Perhaps professional... [puppeteers] shied away from it because it was so closely tied to government sponsorship. Government support for wayang Pantja Sila has declined drastically in recent years. Its mild, democratically inclined message is out of date.

Concurrent with its efforts to develop ... [these theatre forms] as communication media, the Ministry of Information has hired troupes of various standard genres to tell the government's story. ... [Paper-scroll play] was experimented with, largely because it was simple and inexpensive to perform. A puppeteer to tell the story, some pictures painted on paper, and perhaps an assistant or two were all that was needed. Troupes of... comedians were sent touring though Central and East Java. Dagelan are the clown roles in Ludruk and Ketoprak; a dagelan troupe is made. up of four or five performers, all of whom play comic roles. These troupes proved extremely successful with village audiences.

In addition to the Ministry of Information in Indonesia, the armed services also operate a few theatre troupes. The army especially is in a powerful position within the government. Its budget is by far the largest of any branch of the government. . . . Each major command of the army has a Morale Unit (URRIL) whose assignment is to entertain troops in the command. Soldiers assigned to a URRIL unit are performers of one kind or another, and each unit maintains several more or less separate

groups of performers. . "patriotic or fight" plays ... as appropriate for their military audience. The primary function of military theatre troups is to entertain. Their secondary function is to inform. . . . Similar morale units are found in all the armed services. Army, navy, and air force headquarters in Djakarta also sometimes send out professional troupes for one- to two-month tours of military posts on the outer islands.

URRIL officers say they usually choose

**

[Specific coverage of the theatre as a communication medium in other Southeast Asian countries has been omitted from this article.]

NOTES

1 Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Civilization (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 98, quoting Milton Singer regarding India. The same can be said of Southeast Asia.

2. The Burmese government may also be using theatre for propaganda purposes. Lack of reliable information on Burma at the moment makes it impossible to say for certain.

3. Indonesian Embassy, Washington, D. C., The Arts of Indonesia, mimeograph, n.d., p. 12.

ORGANIZATION AND OPERATION OF US-SUPPORTED
CULTURE-DRAMA TEAMS*

BY THE JUSPAO PLANNING OFFICE

By establishing closer identification with the local population and clothing messages and appeals in traditional culture form, culture drama teams provide a congenial setting for the presentation of political communication. Under these conditions, the target population is more likely to be attentive to the messages and appeals.

INTRODUCTION

Culture-drama entertainment in rural hamlets is a traditional expression of culture in Vietnam. Roaming culture-drama teams began to operate in the days of Chinese domination and this tradition has continued through modern times. Because of the widespread familiarity of the peasant with the culture-drama and his wide acceptance of this traditional culture form, the Communists seized upon the concept and developed it into a PSYOP weapon. The Communist forces in Vietnam presently use culture-drama to bolster the morale of both combatants and noncombatants, to instill attitudes favorable to their cause, and to sustain their attack on the political, military, social, and economic objectives of the Government of Vietnam.

During recent years the Government of Vietnam, with support from United States organizations, has employed culture-drama teams to assist in accomplishment of its objectives. These teams have had varying de

*Excerpts from "Organization and Operation of U.S.-Supported Culture-Drama Teams," JUSPAO Field Memorandum Number 57 (Saigon: JUSPAO Planning Office, August 21, 1968), pp. 1-8.