The Pleasures of Parikan in Malang, East Java']Java: An Analysis of Text and Music in the Dance Ngremo Putri

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Malang, analysis of song texts, analysis of the setting of texts to gamelan music, and the work of Deborah Wong (2015, 2019), Alisha Lola Jones (2018), and others, I argue that a powerful physicality of pleasure provided a mechanism for performers to assert and produce east Javaneseness as they taught me to sing a form of poetry called parikan in the course of performing the female-style traditional dance Ngremo Putri. This potent physicality of pleasure motivated performers' cultural work to continue making space for and producing what they perceived as endangered east Javanese traditions.