ABSTRACT
What is the politics of theatre in the age of loudness? In the Indonesian context, the question arrived following the shift of the political regime in 1998. This chapter discusses how Indonesian performance practices redefine and relocate their politics in the 21st-century political landscape or what I picture as the site of ‘loudness war’. I take a closer look at the amplification of public responses to two cultural events, the performance of Teater Garasi’s Goyang Penasaran and Irshad Manji’s book launch, which took place in the same venue within two weeks from one another, as a marker of loudness war dramaturgy in Indonesia. Against loudness, I wish to continue to think of theatre as a space of political dramaturgy of reduction and silenced screams.
