Performance For Everyday, Preserving Culture For Ever
The rest of the world finds it hard to imagine a place where cultural performance is still an integral part of life. Where it is more likely that your neighbour is an actor, singer or dancer than a plumber or teacher.
For this and other reasons, Balinese cultural talent is highly regarded internationally, yet here in Bali many take it for granted.
However the ex-pat and the tourist are unlikely to see the best of Balinese performance groups. Of course they are performing here, all the time, but mostly for village, community and temple events; outside these situations, many of the very best only perform internationally.
Take Gambuh Desa Adat Batuan, a performance group from Batuan. They have attracted international funding to help them preserve the highly regarded Gambuh, first brought here in the 15th century by the Majahpit to help preserve the court culture and etiquette. In a bid to preserve this very complex traditional form – now performed by only four groups on the island – some of its masters combined it with Shakespearean drama in a form called Gambuh Macbeth, which travels regularly overseas. Yet most of us wouldn’t have heard of them.
Desa Batuan has a reputation for producing very strong musical talent.
Balawan and the Batuan Ethnic Fusion, with their international Sony performing and recording contract, presents a fusion of Modern Jazz and the unique percussion of Gamelan. Other than at Ubud’s Warung Opera, owned by Balawan’s brother, it is unlikely to see the group in Bali. Instead they perform at world class events such as Jakarta Jazz and are increasingly popular in Europe.
Batuan’s Tri Pusaka Sakti has been to Ecuador and Columbia in South America already this year, and last month sent 17 musicians to Japan.
Two more powerful artists, combining personal talent with passion for teaching both locally and internationally, are Emiko Saraswati Susilo and her husband I Dewa Putu Berata. They are the Artistic Directors of Çudamani - a gamelan performing group, a foundation and a school, based in Pengosekan, Ubud.
Dewa and colleagues created Çudamani a decade ago; a group of performers who were sick of tour agents deciding if their music was ‘good enough’ for overseas tourists, or trying to change the performances to fit the tour schedule.
Emiko and Dewa have just begun a 10 month stint in San Francisco Bay with Gamelan Sekar Jaya, an independent performance company. They join celebrations of the troupe’s 30th anniversary, directing new works, teaching dance and guiding the company’s planning for the future.
Dewa travelled to the US straight from Tokyo, Japan, where he took four musicians and a dancer to work with Japanese musician Koyano Tetsuro, in a collaboration of shadow puppetry, music and dance.
They both come from families rich with traditions of performance. Dewa, as choreographer, director, musician and dancer, is following the footsteps of his Balinese father and grandfather.
Emiko was born in Hawaii, where her Javanese father Hardja Susilo has taught Javanese gamelan and dance at the University of Hawaii for 45 years. She grew up in California with her Japanese-American mother, Judy Mitoma, Director of World Festival of Sacred Music and UCLA Professor of World Arts and Culture.
Emiko says that Çudamani was the first international performance group invited to conduct a workshop at the world-renowned Juilliard Dance School in New York.
“It was a one-off invitation and very unusual, they don’t usually bring in outside performers. But the session was so successful that it’s led to a regular international series for the school. And we were invited back”, she said.
“Balinese artists perform almost every day. We have commitments to perform as part of everyday life within our community and the Hindu religion, in a variety of temples. In October, Çudamani will perform as well as practise every single day. And our teachers are masters who have all worked at this pace all their lives,” she says.
As well known in Canada, California, Japan, Italy and Greece as in Bali, Çudamani rarely performs outside community commitments on the island. However, they were a highlight of the first BaliSpirit Festival of Yoga, Dance and Music earlier this year, performing five totally different pieces over the four-day event, including two booked-out workshops.
The troupe astonished the festival’s strong international line-up with their versatility, innovative expression and vibrancy, demonstrating a deep understanding of their cultural heritage through sometimes quite flippant and irreverent glimpses.
In one scene, a very fast-paced, energetic gamelan piece, the musicians and their various percussion instruments are used to represent the elements of the archetypical Balinese Hindu ceremony, the cockfight.
Although gambling is illegal in Indonesia, the cockfight is permitted in Bali when it is part of Hindu ceremonies that require “sacrifice” in the form of bloodletting or even the taking of a life.
In Cudamani’s spirited performance, groups of percussionists with cock feathers around their wrists beat out the time, becoming the various actors in the cockfight scene, from the gamblers, the bet collector and those who challenge the result, to the fighting cocks themselves. For anyone who has seen a real cockfight, it is almost more real than the event itself. It is competitive, fast-paced, hilariously funny, and musically brilliant.
Susilo says Cudamani is committed to keeping Bali’s rich traditions alive. Ironically, as with the cockfight piece they often break with formal tradition to make that happen.
Balinese performances are very formal, set pieces. Music is not written down and yet musical pieces have been performed for hundreds of years.
“Çudamani respects that, of course, but we want to show the context of these formal pieces to the rest of the world. Sometimes we have to change the way we do things, to help preserve what we treasure,” she said.
Çudamani’s “Odalan Bali” toured Japan, Canada and the US in 2007 to sell-out audiences. The performance is inspired by the village life and Hindu ceremonies that are the foundation of Bali. The audience sees the bustle of a village awakening, the men preparing traditional food, the women weaving offerings from bamboo, and the priest blessing the barong (the benevolent Balinese ‘dragon’) costume, before and after two young men climb inside the costume and perform the dance.
Çudamani take the audience “backstage”, and help the audience realise that for a Balinese performer, backstage is everyday life.
For these two Çudamani directors, international travel and performance are essential to keep Balinese culture alive. The pair travels as much as they can. They studied in Cambodia, where 90% of the country’s dancers were killed during the Pol Pot era.
“How do you recreate your cultural heritage out of such devastation and chaos? Somehow that country is preserving a deep and very specific tradition of dance and music. We can learn from that.”
In Malaysia they studied the opposite situation – the thriving performance education offered within a very supportive, active, healthy government institution.
“It is very important that our performers have an artistic challenge. International work challenges us to work to our highest level of artistic execution. We perform in venues that are super high quality, super high class.
“When Çudamani travels, our teachers and performers learn about the rest of the world, by meeting different audiences, working in inner city schools, watching technical people and seeing how arts are managed.
“In the US we heard symphony orchestras and we saw “Stomp”. We watched a two-hour Cambodian performance at University of Michigan and then did a workshop with them. It all inspired us,” she said.
Emiko said Çudamani digs deep into the travel budget to soak up the culture of other places, through museums and performances.
“Those things really do affect the way our group performs there. They love and respect what they see. But it also hits them that Balinese gamelan is a world class form of music.
“As we prepare before each tour, our level of performance goes up. On tour, within 4-5 weeks our skill levels go up again, markedly,” she said.
And it works two ways. 2008 was the second year that UCLA helped Çudamani organize and execute a live-in Summer School Program in Ubud.
“The students who visit us have a unique opportunity to meet musicians and dancers who perform almost continuously, instead of when they can find a ‘gig’. The musicians, professors of musicology, professional performing artists who join us are always astonished by this, and by our every day access to masters with a vast depth of knowledge and skills.”
Californian musician Lynda Paul said the three weeks had an enormous impact on her, professionally.
“I now understand what it means to have a ensemble of musicians who actually work together, play together, collaborate, and live that spirit through their music-making. The West has lost that,” she said.
Emiko says the UCLA school is another way to compensate Çudamani’s best teachers.
“Tourism here revolves around Balinese people almost always in a “service” role. Many Balinese see themselves only in the service of some wealthy tourist; as an Indonesian American I don’t want to limit them to that. They may be very good at serving but they are also great teachers, talented. These extremely highly qualified visitors treat our teachers with enormous respect.
And for Emiko Saraswati Susilo, the whole purpose of travelling internationally and welcoming students to Bali is to get better at learning, performing and passing on the skills of a rich and treasured cultural heritage.
