Masculinity Under the Mask: An Experimental Film on Gender in Topèng Dhâlâng Sumenep

Abstract

Topèng Dhâlâng is a Madurese masked dance-drama, still living in Sumenep Regency, in which every role, including all female characters, is performed by men while the dalang alone voices the dialogue. Existing scholarship on the form has concentrated on documentation, iconography and function, and has left the gendered labour of the performing body largely unexamined. This article reports a practice-as-research project that translated that phenomenon into TOPONG, an experimental film. The study asks how Madurese male bodies produce a convincing femininity onstage within a culture widely identified with an assertive ideal of manhood, and how that lived experience can be rendered as cinema rather than merely documented as spectacle. Fieldwork was carried out in Dusun Semaan, Dasuk District, Sumenep, through visual ethnography: participant observation of rehearsals, backstage preparation and performances, in-depth interviews with the dalang, dancers, musicians and mask keeper, audiovisual recording, and a reflexive journal. The material was interpreted through Judith Butler's account of gender as performative, and was then translated through a seven-stage creation model running from visual ethnography to artistic reflection. The study finds that the femininity of Topèng Dhâlâng is not disguise but a learned corporeal competence transmitted through repetition, one that coexists with rather than replaces the performers' masculinity; that the mask operates as a threshold rather than a covering, altering how the body senses as well as how it is seen; and that the acts of putting on and removing the mask carry as much meaning as the staged performance. TOPONG demonstrates that experimental film grounded in ethnographic experience produces knowledge about tradition that descriptive documentation cannot reach.