In early February 2004, at the invitation of some of my Balinese friends, I attended a pasar gathering in Utrecht where my friends were going to be performing a classical Balinese dance accompanied by I Komang Suaka, a multidisciplinary Balinese artist of whom I had heard before. Suaka is a painter, an installation artist, and the leader of pop band ‘Burning Seed’, which was also scheduled to perform that day. I arrived at the venue accompanied by my friends in the early afternoon to give the dancers enough time to have a quick rehearsal on the new stage as well as apply make-up and put on their dancing costumes. The venue consisted of a room with a stage and around 250 seats and a large hall in which numerous food stalls were set up next to stalls for tourist agents offering trips to Bali and Indonesia, sellers of batik and other clothing items imported from Indonesia, and sellers of Indonesian and Balinese arts and crafts. There was also a large stall selling books, including novels about Indies people in the Dutch East Indies and diaspora, academic books written by historians and anthropologists, and various publications concerned with Indies identity politics in the twenty-first century written by artists, archivists, novelists, and cultural critics. Next to the books were numerous DVDs with documentaries and feature films about Indies people as well as documentaries about contemporary Indonesia made by Indies filmmakers. These were accompanied by numerous Indo-rock music CDs produced in the Netherlands but also those imported from Indonesia, mainly belonging to the dangdut genre of music.

Suaka and four members of his band ‘Burning Seed’ arrived after us, all already dressed in trousers made of Balinese white-checkered poleng fabric, ready for their performance. This fabric plays an important role in Balinese-Hindu ceremonial life. Meeting them, I found out that two members identified themselves as Indies and one as Filipino. While they were familiar with Indo-rock and dangdut, those were not their preferred genres of music; instead, they performed reggae tunes, including songs by Bob Marley. Suaka, who was eager to inform me how much he enjoyed classical Balinese dancing, spoke of how he had learnt it from his late grandmother, a famous dancer in her time.