Gamelanathon

Last weekend (6-7 July) was the Gamelathon, described as 'a weekend of Indonesian music, dance and puppetry across the Southbank Centre site' in London. This was a pretty huge event, organised by Sophie Ransby, with free performances by performing groups from around the UK and Ireland, along with a ticketed dance piece by Indonesian-Australian choreographer Ade Suharto ('In Lieu') and a major programme by the Southbank Gamelan Players featuring srimpi, small dance pieces and a so-called sendratari titled Topeng Panji Kayungyun. Performances took place in the Clore Ballroom at the Royal Festival Hall, outdoors on a temporary stage erected on the Riverside Terrace, the Front Room at Queen Elizabeth Hall, and in Queen Elizabeth Hall itself.

I was busy with my own performance, Dewi Gegurit, a new wayang golek cepak play which built upon my studies in Cirebon and Indramayu in 2012, which I created in collaboration with Indonesian composer/pianist Marisa Sharon Hartanto. But I  managed to see in full or in part quite a bit of the rest of the festival-- the end of a concert by Gamelan na Gaillimhe from Galway, Ireland; a combined concert of Sekar Enggal and Royal Holloway's own degung ensemble Puloganti (plus some Cianjuran thrown in) under the direction of Simon Cook; a number of pieces by the UCC Gamelan of Cork University (Ireland); the big sendratari and dance concert by the Southbank Gamelan Players with guest artists from ISI Solo; Lila Cita and Lila Bhawa's exciting programme of Balinese gong kebyar and dance; new music and old classics by York University's Gamelan Sekar Pethak and friends; a walkabout show called Ramayna on Stilts; Southbank Centre Intermediate Gamelan Players plus a few dancers; Ade's show In Lieu; and a short wayang kulit play Sakuntala performed by Sri Suparsih (who is also a well known sindhen) with Siswa Sukra and friends.

I didn't get to the puppet making workshops, and sadly missed the gamelan & electronic music concerts (I was really hoping to attend particularly the set with compositions by Charles Matthews, who is off for another year in Java shortly) and also missed a performance given by the Labschool from Cibubur, Jakarta. (Though I did see the kids and their teachers walking around the Southbank dressed in Srikandi t-shirts.)

The whole event had a glorious community feel to it. Musicians floated in and out of each others' sets, with the guest artists from ISI Surakarta dancing, playing music, singing, performing wayang etc in many of the performances. It was delightful to see the same musician playing Sundanese rebab in one set and Javanese gender in another, or Balinese drum followed by Javanese bonang etc.  I was sitting in the audience watching one concert and the musicians faltered on a classical Javanese piece and  a friendly musician commented to me 'I really should have been on stage with them for that' and in the next number she was up there helping out. Casual passerbys and children wet from the Southbank's fountain installation were drawn in, and I drank a Pim's from an outdoor bar while waiting for one of the shows to begin.

The highlights for me were really too numerous to mention. But they definitely included an extraordinarily beautiful Srimpi Ludiramadu which opened the Saturday night Sendratari big concert (with Ni Made Pujawati taking one of the 4 dance parts and remarkably holding her own against 3 very seasoned Javanese dancers), a raucous and fun piece for saxophone and gamelan by the UCC Gamelan (who played so loudly that they reportedly broke a slenthem key!), a fantastically precise and involving one-person barong performance (barong buntut) accompanied by Lila Cita, a very amusing arrangement of The Rite of Spring to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ballet by Sekar Pethak and the beautiful dancing of Wasi Bantolo (the choreographer who led the dancers from ISI Surakarta, pictured above). 

I also of enjoyed Sri Suparsih's wayang performance (above), which retold the classic story of Sakuntala, abandoned pregnant in the forest by a king she has nursed back to health, who travels to see the king after 16 years to make him come through on his promise to admit their child as his own. I was surprised though that she did not inject a more feminist interpretation into the story, and that no programme notes were offered to assist audience members in following the Javanese dialogue.  

My own contribution to the Gamelanathon was a short wayang golek cepak play titled Dewi Gegurit which I created together with the Indonesian composer Marisa Sharon Hartanto, who is studying for an MA in music composition at Royal Holloway. The play tells the story of a newly-divorced Raden Gambuh  (Sir Puppeter) who is in search of a new wife, a woman of culture. At the advice of his grandfather, he travels to the kingdom of Nyugoni to seek the hand of the beautiful princess Dewi Gegurit (Lady Song) who also desires a man of culture. She requests that he find a wayang and after some trials he decides with the help of the clown Lamsijan to become a dalang himself. Unable to locate a gamelan, Lamsijan and friends play the accompanying music on Western instruments. 

The play is of course allegorical, and in some ways follows up my earlier solo performance A Dalang in Search of Wayang (in which I quest in the mythical world of wayang for an answer to the dilemma of how I can be a dalang without a gamelan or a Javanese audience or sponsoring communities) and Lokananta, which concerns the origin and development of gamelan and was performed in York University with more than 200 accompanying musicians in 2012. 

The play used figures from Indramayu left in the UK by Ki Akmadi after his AMC-sponsored tour of 2005, and featured an ensemble of piano, voice, flute, drums and doublebass all performed by RHUL music students.

Dewi Gegurit generally seemed to be well received. One friend commented on Facebook about its 'Fantastic score [played] by some very gifted RHUL musicians that made western instruments sound pretty Sundanese', another friend said how pleased he was that both the contemporary and the traditional found their balance in the piece, both in terms of drama and music. An older woman, the mother of another gamelan composer involved in the event apparently, seemed less pleased however- she said she was not convinced by the pop songs we included (particularly in the clown scene) though, rather strangely, she said she was sure that this was not my worst performance. Another friend, a puppeteer who happened to be passing through the Southbank, said he would have preferred more movement during the dialogue.Probably the nicest written comment I received was from a former student who said it was 'a lively performance [with an] amazing singer and full of joy.' Another friend, commenting on one of the Facebook pictures I posted, also said the image 'captured the joy of the moment'.

If I did indeed succeed in maintaining the Gamelanathon's overall mood of joy, I think I probably did a pretty good job for my first wayang golek cepak performance in the UK. Hopefully there will be more to come.

Gamelan Composers' Forum

Yesterday (14 April 2013) I a attended the Gamelan Composers' Forum at the spacious G2 lecture room of SOAS in London. The event was organised by Aris Daryono, a London-based musician and composer from Indonesia who plays with the Southbank Gamelan Players, with sponsorship from both SOAS and the Indonesian Embassy. The ambassador and his staff were present during the first half of the day and provided food for participants.

Five composers were represented in the event by five compositions, and after each piece. Composers introduced their works and after each piece was played there was ample time for moderated discussion.

The event opened with Robert Campion's Studies for Solo Gender Barung (2007), a very fine etude which explored the possibilities of the instrument. The composer explained that he wanted to write a piece that was comfortable for the hands, idiomatic for the instrument and developing techniques for both players and also composers wishing to write for the instrument. He has written half a dozen etudes for gender, which he says is the instrument in the gamelan most suited for solo playing. One is so hard that he has not mastered it himself and has never performed it in public.

Japanese composer Makoto Nomura from Japan was present via a Skype link and his piece No Notes VI, written on 14 March 2013 on board a train from Kyoto to Tokyo and dedicated to Aris, was played live by four gamelan players in London. (See picture above.) This piece for gamelan instruments and voice had only time signatures, no notes or words. The musicians talked about how it challenged them to think metrically while improvising.

Rasa 2 was a new composition by Aris Daryono which developed ideas that Aris had deployed in an earlier collaboration with Charles Matthews for live gamelan and computer. The peice was scored for flute, oboe, clarinet and cello and 2 gender players (who played in both slendro and pelog). The Western instrumentalists were asked to tune their instruments to the gamelan, so B flat was shaped to become a 6 on the gamelan scale (fairly close), while there was some distance between C and 1. The oboe and clarinet players played into kenong pots to create resonance and an off stage effect. (The clarinet ended up sounding something like an oboe on some notes.) The clarinetist reported that the piece changed his conception of being at home. Home was for him in this piece the moments when his notes accorded to gamelan pitches. The cellist added that it felt satisfying to come together after dissonance. She said furthermore that she didn't feel a clash between Western vs. non-Western instruments. Instead there was a feeling of commonality and shared interest in new music and composition.

After the lunch break, the event resumed with two further pieces.  Jonas Bisquert, a composer originally from Spain but now living in Holland, directed a performance of his piece Su Ilanto (His Weeping, in Spanish), which was inspired by the crying of his newborn baby and was originally written for a Spanish percussion ensemble. The piece used thimbles on fingers striking kenong to replace cymbals, included Spanish style clapping, pair of dueling bonang players who invade each others space substituted for the alternating cellos of Basque music, and had an evolving texture like Javanese gamelan and many theatrical gestures.

The event wound up with a performance of Philip Corner's Dua Uni (2=1) a conceptual piece in his gamelan series. Corner is an American retired professor, a co-founder of the New York ensemble Gamelan Son of Lion who has been living in Italy since 1992. The piece consisted of one high and very loud and sharply played note followed by a low and long and very soft note played ad infinitum. The piece could be played by any single instrument or arrangement of instruments, and was scored on this occasion by Corner in what he called a baroque arrangement for two ensembles of players - 4 gamelan musicians (each of whom played a gong/kempul and an instrument of the saron family) and cello, English horn, flute and clarinet. The gamelan player played first, then the Western instruments building into a tutti and then rejoined by the gamelan instruments. Though very simple in design, it was very effective and challenging in performance.

Corner reported that the piece was a distillation of an idea that had long fascinated him in gamelan - the colotomic structure where low instruments play slowly and high instruments play quick elaborating parts over this. He said that this is found in many music cultures in the world. He hadn't realised that his piece was gamelan inspired until after it had been performed. Only then did he include it in his gamelan series. (His more overt inspiration was the work of Olivier Messiaen and Messiaen's ideas about disjuncture.)

Nick Gray, a SOAS lecturer and composer who hosted the event, reported that there were plans for the event to be an annual gathering. All the gamelan pieces included in this year's event were Javanese, but Balinese Gamelan musicians and composers present said they hoped that the event would be opened up to Balinese, Sundanese etc gamelan composers as well.

Indonesia Kontemporer 2012

Yesterday (13 October) was the second edition of Indonesia Kontemporer, a festival of contemporary Indonesian arts and culture held again at SOAS. At the first edition a year ago, I was an active participant, performing A Dalang in Search of Wayang. This time round I was a spectator, albeit an interested one. There was a fuller programme than last year, and it seems more people in attendance too, and I managed to attend a fair sampling of the events, though I didn't get to see any of the films on offer (curated by SOAS lecturer Ben Murtagh).

I started out by dropping by a small display of UK-based Indonesian artists, mostly students or ex-students. A number of the artists referenced Indonesian traditional arts in various ways. One of them, Arati Sirman, who studied fine art at Central Saints Martins and art business at Sotheby's, showed a series of works based in part on the illustrations of Hardjowirogo's famous wayang dictionary, Sejarah Wayang Purwa. (See above.)

I attended an artist talk by an English community artist named Helen Marshall about an upcoming Arts Council funded project called Tobong, conducted in collaboration with a Javanese photographer named Risang Yuwono who she met while travelling in Sulawesi. Marshall, who described herself in the talk as a contemporary artist who works in socially engaging modes, went off on motor bike with Yuwono and spent a day visiting an itinerant kethoprak troupe performing on the outskirts of Yogyakarta. This offered a glimpse of their off-stage life, living in the Tobong that is both stage and temporary home. She has research and development money from the Arts Council England to return to Indonesia and stage with Yuwono a series of kethoprak-related events in Yogyakarta in November and December of this year. Among these is to produce 'tableau vivant' -- posing the actors in the same figurations as photographs of them.

Marshall doesn't speak Indonesian or Javanese (a video she showed to us had one of the kethoprak actors say on camera that she should be told to learn Indonesian) and has some rather romantic ideas about the life of these artists and the theatre they perform. And she unfortunately talks about this as a 'collaboration' with the kethoprak performers while saying at the same time that she could never explain her intentions to them. But at least the actors will be paid - she has budgeted in 'modelling fees' for their work. And she also hopes to bring Yuwono to the UK - which would be a good opportunity for him, I suppose.

I next went to a performance of a PPI student group playing songs from around Indonesia. The lead female vocalist was fairly talented, but the accompanying musicians were a mixed lot as one might imagine. The group showed slides taken off the web while they played. A strange moment for me was seeing one of my own performances (the York wayang I did last April) during a slide show of images from the cultural attache's website.

While I was at the talk and concert, my daughter Hannah attended an Indonesian language workshop  and I stopped by a couple of times to see how she was doing. A group of adults sat around a circle and were asked various questions by a young man from Jember about their experiences of going to Indonesia and the differences between life in Indonesia and the UK. He encouraged the workshop participants to go to the Indonesian language classes run on Saturday afternoons in the embassy - and there is free Indonesia food too, he said.

I rounded out the day with two Balinese shows on the stage of the Brunei Lecture Theatre. Segara Madu, a gender wayang group run by SOAS lecturer Nick Gray, performed a number of pieces out of the wayang repertoire and a new composition in Balinese style. I was pretty amazed by the huge number of people in attendance.

This was followed by the festival's highlight, a concert of the London-based Balinese gamelan group Lilia Cita and their sister group, the Balinese dance troupe Lila Bhawa, directed by Made Pujawati. Among the items on offer were Jocasta, a new dance drama based on the Oedipus story (pictured above). The audience, very full, applauded all the pieces enthusiastically.

Throughout the festival I was playing around with my new toys - an iPad provided by my department and my new smart phone - and uploading images to Facebook while the event was going on. I tried as well to upload a video of Jocasta, but the file was too large and only just this morning was able to get it into Dropbox. I did think it was rather cool though that I was able to be (in a sense) a live reporter on the spot, putting my status as 'At Indonesia Kontemporer 2012' and posting images and getting responses (including two 'likes' from family members of one of the artists) as I was watching performances. So while much of the cultural materials at the festival felt familiar, this mediation offered a new experience for me.

Gamelan, ketoprak, arak-arakan, wayang potehi and teater kontemporer - all in one day!

As I write this in the lobby of the Inna Garuda hotel I am listening to the sounds of the hotel's gamelan - tonight made up of kendang, gender, sletnthem, siter, gambang, bonang, gong and 2 pesindhen - a much richer sound than previous nights.

What a pleasure it is to be in Yogyakarta. Both Sekaten and Imlek have been in full swing the last couple of days- with many other performances going on as well.

Yesterday, there was a major arak-arakan procession down Malioboro - for Chinese New Year. There were the expected barong sai and liong, but also dozens of other groups - ranging from an Islamic ibu-ibu group from Malioboro, a Balinese processional gamelan, a group of drag queens (banci) camping it up with sexy poses, a small gong-chime group representing Nusa Tenggara Barat, a replica of the kraton's military band, a drum band from a telephone company, a group chanting Javanese poetry, tv mascots and on and on. The line of spectators was only one or two deep, and the liong passed so close they almost touched us. I've been teaching about Chinese New Year celebrations in London to RHUL first year students the last years. There are certainly parallels in the way that London and Yogya's Chinese communities use New Year to display and affirm their commitment to multiculturalism. But the Yogya event had a joy and vitality I haven't witnessed in London. Hannah was thrilled by the event.

In the evening, I went (by myself) for the first time to Teater Garasi - an experimental theatre located amidst rice fields on the road out of town to Parangkritis. The piece was solo performance art titled 'Tubuh Sepatu Kulit' (Body Leather Shoe) by Tony Broer, earlier associated with the Bandung avant garde theatre group Teater Payung Hitam and now studying in Yogya. This was a close encounter with the butoh type - an anti-war piece that involved the performer (dressed in bandages, wearing a kebaya, with white body makeup and long beard and white hair) removing shoes of audience members against projected film and images of war. The image of a rippling American flag was projected - and the performer saluted it in a kind of seig heil as the flag slowly faded out and an image of the Israeli flag faded in.

In a brief after-show discussion Broer confirmed the piece was about Gaza. If you felt uncomfortable about losing your shoes, imagine how much worse the pain of the Palestinians is.

The piece was naive politically, strong theatrically and uncomfortable to watch for me - but clearly engaging for the spectators.

Interestingly the audience was drawn largely from subscribers to Garasi's facebook site. Some 90 or more spectators said on facebook they would be attending the show - perhaps half of the total number attending.

Afterwards, I caught the end of a Chinese themed ketoprak with Nini Didik Thowok and a charming 90 minute wayang po te hi show - by the group Fu Ho An from Jombang - at the Imlek celebrations right off Malioboro.

And there were many other things going on - ranging from traditional dance at the alun-alun to popular Javanese language theatre sponsored by the radio station 99.4 FM that I didn't even have a chance to get a glimpse of !