British Gamelan Trail

Yesterday I examined a SOAS PhD thesis on Balinese gamelan theory by Kate Wakeling - who plays with the London gamelan Lila Cita, and has also studied Balinese dance for a number of years. A really well written piece of work, with much of substance, particularly in relation to new compositions and their theorization.

Kate's supervisor is Mark Hobart, a SOAS professor of media studies and a close colleague of mine. After the examination, I sat in on a meeting Mark held with my co-examiner Neil Sorrell, arts producer Hi Ching and Balinese dancer Ni Made Pujawati (Mark's wife). Hi Ching, Ni Made and Aris Daryono (a Javanese musician who plays with the Southbank Gamelan Players) are developing a project for heritage funding called the British Gamelan Trail. If the bid is successful, this will take Aris and Puja around the country (with a particular focus on the London area) talking to people about how gamelan has been embedded in communities. The idea is to develop a general history of gamelan in Britain, with a focus on 6 groups in particular. Documentation will be included in an exhbit on Balinese dance and storytelling planned for the Horniman Museum in 2011-2012.

At this meeting, Neil offered a synoptic overview of gamelan. Neil's own studies go back to 1971 - when he attended one of Bob Brown's summer sessions in Bali. He believes the first gamelan ensemble in residence was at Dartington in 1974- a set of instruments borrowed from Europe. The Durham Oriental Music Festival sparked the interest of the Indonesian embassy to purchase a set of instruments, which was played by the group to become known as the English Gamelan Orchestra (which later morphed into the Southbank Gamelan Plyaers). Neil was able to use the EGO's existence to convince York to purchase a set of instruments for £6000 in 1980. This was the first set of instruments purchased by a university. The Cambridge University gamelan, a gift from an Indonesian cabinet minister who had a child studying at Cambridge, followed a year or two later.

We also spoke about other ensembles - Cragg Vale, the Bow Gamelan and the like - which will likely fall outside the remit of the British Gamelan Trail project.

The project is a clever and fascinating one - hope it gets funded...

RNCM Gamelan Weekend

I spent last weekend (28-29 November) in Manchester, attending a wonderful weekend of gamelan-related events at the Royal Northern College of Music. The event launched the RNCNM's beautiful new gamelan, purchased along with a brand-new set of shadow puppets and a very fancy-looking puppet screen.

I caught an early gamelan-inspired work by Lou Harrison, Suite for violin, piano and small orchestra played by the RNCM chamber orchestra; the second half of Birth, Death and Marriage: A Journey through life in Javanese Music and Poetry - a concert by the Southbank Gamelan Players featuring Ni Made Pujawati in two dances; the end piece of a degung concert by the University of Manchester/Hallé Gamelan Degung; a wonderful and inventive concert of new music for gamelan by Gamelan Sekar Petak from the University of York mc-ed by Neil Sorrell; and performances of youth groups of a shadow puppet Ramayana and a gamelan-accompanied dance drama.

What a treat!

I also performed a 2 hour 15 minute version of Kresna Denawa, with the full forces of the Southbank Gamelan Players accompanying.

My friend and former Naga Mas colleague Simon van der Walt (one of three Naga Mas-ers who came down from Glasgow for the event) wrote in his blog that:

'the wayang performance in English by Matthew Isaac Cohen [...] was more than anything else what I had come to Manchester to see. I've seen wayang in Indonesia, but the language barrier is really quite steep, and it's a big part of what's going on; from high-flown court Javanese to crude street slang, its a form which traverses a great range of linguistic and performative registers. Matthew and the South Bank Players have done a number of wayang recently, and this is the first chance I've been able to see them. It seems to me they are doing a fantastic job of translating waying into a shorter form in a different language, making it understandable and enjoyable to UK audiences while retaining a great deal of honesty to the original. Matthew has a great sense of humour, which was on this occasion slighly lost on a noisy audience in a reverberant space. I look forward to seeing him perform again' (http://theplugboard.blogspot.com/2009/11/gamelan-weekend-at-rncm-saturday.html).

Didn't manage to get any pictures of the event though...

WWW stuff

I am missing the stimulation of being in Malaysia and Indonesia, with the range of traditional performance on offer, but have been enjoying attending a London puppet festival over the last week. I am reviewing some of the shows for Animations Online, an online puppet magazine I edit, and also attending a number of seminars.

I have also been checking out various web materials. For example, I read a fine New York Times article published in 2002 on Jlitheng Suparman and Slament Gundhono's experimental wayang work, titled Political turmoil gives new life to Indonesian shadow play : Out of the shadows, a new art. I also saw some nice material from Jlitheng on youtube, including a clip of a sexy dangdut singer puppet and another one showing the same dangdut singer plus a Rhoma Irama type singer-guitar player from the puppet side of the screen (HEBOH DANGDUT GLOBAL WARMING WAYANG KAMPUNG).



A colleague from Australia pointed me to a really fine clip of Wayang Ceng Blok - a popular Balinese wayang company - with a long non-verbal sequence showing various animals at play. Check it out here.

Another friend from New York also told me about a robotic Balinese gamelan in New York,called Gamelatron, which has an interesting website featuring some performance vids and a brief television segment on them. Check out their website at http://gamelatron.com/

Blog review of Kresna Denawa in Cambridge

Blogger Oli O'Shea reviewed my performance of Kresna Denawa with the Cambridge gamelan at http://olioshea.wordpress.com/category/music.

'I enjoyed the shadows much more now I understood the conventions and was more patient. It made me think about perspective and how knowing how something works changes how we feel about it. .... Patience was required to get into this performance but it was rewarding upon giving it a chance ....'

Kresna Denawa at Cambridge University

On 23 October, I gave a a 2 hour 45 minute rendition of Kresna Denawa, a traditional lakon (play episode) with the Cambridge Gamelan and a few guest artists from London's Southbank Gamelan Players at Cambridge University's West Road Concert Hall. Hannah, my daughter, made a cameo, performing a little wayang kancil number (Kancil dan Buaya) that she had learned in Yogyakarta earlier in the year, using puppets made by Ledjar Subroto. The performance was part of Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas, and I performed at the invitation of the gamelan's director, Rob Campion.

I used a basically Solo style for the show, including sulukan, sabetan, and Solo's punakawan (Semar, Gareng, Petruk, Bagong) although the version of the lakon I used is from the Gegesik dalang Bahani (the Solo version is known as Bedahipun Dwarawati, or The Conquest of Dwarawati), and my voices, narrations, patterns of dialogue, tanceban etc remain at the core gaya Gegesik. My interpretation of Narayana, in particular, was done in emulation of the late Basari.

The performance was well attended, and while I chose an intentionally 'light' lakon (with an emphasis on battle scenes, rather than philosophical content; a small number of characters; simple story structure), a couple who had seen me perform in the past said it was far better than past shows - and that they loved the battle scenes in particular.

My drum player John Pawson was unfortunately mugged 6 days before the show, suffering a serious head injury, resulting in Simon Steptoe coming as a last minute substitute. I did not get a chance to run the full lakon with him, and this meant we experienced some problems in communication.

But I was happy overall with the performance, and look forward to getting another opportunity to perform the lakon with the SBGP in Manchester next month. And I was happy to receive a bottle of wine at the show's end!

Wayang in Malaysia, again

Another week for this Indonesian performance-goer in Malaysia. This week, in addition to watching a workshop production of a new dance piece by the English contemporary dance group Evolving Motion (at the Kuala Lumpur Performaing Arts Centre in Sentul Park), I looked at three very different sorts of wayang.

After making a post on facebook that I was looking to see a Chinese opera (known as wayang Cina here in Malaysia) during this Hungry Ghost Festival, I got a call from my colleague Aris that a friend of a friend had told him that there was a wayang going on in Melaka and do I want to go. The next day (1 September) a group of us met up and went down to Melaka in two cars. After driving around the city a bit, trying to find a stage, we called a reporter friend and found out that the wayang was in a temple next to a graveyard on the outskirs of a town.

We arrived at said temple after 10 at night, travelling down a dark, unpaved road. The temple was crowded with thousands of pilgrims. This was the fifth day of a five day celebration- each night with an opera performance by a small Hokien language troupe from Johor (keyboard on one side of the stage, all-purpose Chinese percussion kit onthe other). This was a ritual performance. In front of the stage were empty stools for the ghosts, and behind this a long line of 'believers' who were being blessed by a priest and symbolically whipped. Huge piles of offerings were at the sides of the temple. The opera was supposed to go on until 1am in the morning, but we weren't able to stay to the conclusion of the ceremony - when the believers marched barefoot around the temple.

Next time I'm in Malaysia I'd like to plan a visit to Melaka around this 5-day event, which happens annually during the 7th lunar month.

On Thursday (3 September) I met up at last with Fahmi Fadzil, a Malaysian puppeteer who has been creating wayang variants (wayang cardboard, wayang buku, wayang rakyat, wayang lampu etc) over the last 9 years. Fahmi is a marketing person for a graphic design firm, with a BA in chemical engineering for Purdue. He is also a member of 5 Arts, and is very articulate about his experimental work, using the language of performance studies (picked up from Krishen and attendance at the PSi conference in Singapore). He presented a number of interesting leads for me to follow up on. More research to do....

Finally, today (6 September), I went to The Curve, one of KL's many shopping malls, to see a young Kelantanese puppeteer named Baisah do a short wayang Siam performance. This was actually advertised as a 'wayang rakyat' (a term invented by Fahmi for his shopping plaza shows). But it was a very orthodox (if short) Kelantanese wayang I saw. Basiah studied wayang at Aswara with Nasir, and the musicians were all Aswara folk as well.

The play was a branch story called Bagong Kelimunan that the puppeteer learned from Nasir. Baisah has only been performing for a year, so his puppet movement was just fair and his stock of verbal formulae was limited. The MC for the event said he couldn't follow the story - this was not just because of the language (Kelantanese Malay) but also because he couldn't understand the symbolic meanings, such as the perang scene.

I was surprised to see a wayang in a mall during bulan puasa. But there is in fact a whole series of traditional performances going on in the Curve and elsewhere around KL. Right after the wayang, the same group did a short gamelan concert. This, the MC could appreciate - the music he said was very relaxing. A way to draw the shoppers in during Ramadhan, I suppose.

Rimbun Daha

Just returned from Rimbun Daha (www.rimbundahan.org), a private arts centre located about an hour outside of KL, which is also the home of Hijjas Kasturi, one of Malaysia's most successful and respected architects. Rimbun Daha has a residency programme for visual artists, writers and dancers, and has hosted a fair number of Indonesian painters in recent years for residencies of a few weeks to a few months, including Eko Nugroho. They organise a KL exhibit or performance for their artists at the end of the residency and have purchased work from many of their artists as well.

In the 1990s Rimbun Daha also hosted Balinese gamelan musician I Wayan Rajeg and his dancer wife, who taught a community gamelan group on the premises and Balinese dance. The gamelan, a gong kebyar set, and Rajeg and his wife subsequently taught at USM, with salaries paid for by Rimbun Dahan. Rajeg left USM around 2005 and the gong kebyar was returned to Rimbun Dahan. It is currently sitting unused in the property. Angela Hijjas says she is keen for it to find a new home in Malaysia, where it can be used for teaching. Any takers?

Fatwa banning kuda kepang in Johor

Kuda Kepang, the horse trance dance, is today the most significant performing art associated with Javanese and people of Javanese descent living in Malaysia. There is no official count of Javanese in Malaysia, but most scholars agree that it is the largest population outside Indonesia, numbering several million perhaps. Most of the majority Javanese kampung (rural communities, hamlets) are to be found in the state of Johor, where there are also many migrant Indonesians working kelapa sawit plantations.

I learned earlier this month from a colleague teaching in Johor that the state of Johor has issued a fatwa banning all Muslims from 'being involved' with the performance of Kuda Kepang. A google search confirms this.

The fatwa (http://www.e-fatwa.gov.my/mufti/fatwa_search_result.asp?keyID=2140) state that kuda kepang is haram (forbidden) as it runs against Islam. The fatwa's 'explanation' or keterangan (http://www.e-fatwa.gov.my/mufti/fatwa_warta_hujah_view.asp?KeyIDv=2140) indicates that this is due to performers using non-Islamic magical formulae (jampi), being possessed by jin, going into trance (mabuk, the same word used for being drunk) and also cites as well audience behaviour, including not wearing red clothing.

Similar fatwa issued in the past in the northern state of Kelantan banned Muslims from performing or watching wayang kulit, mak yong and other traditional arts. These bans seem now no longer to be in place. A series of wayang kulit performances I attended at the Gelanggang Seni cultural centre in Kota Bharu attracted a mostly local audience.

So far, there has been very little attention paid to the kuda kepang fatwa. One blogger points to a TV9 television show broadcasting a local carnival with kuda kepang post-fatwa (http://pemudabukitkatil.blogspot.com/2009/07/tarian-kuda-kepang-haram-tetapi.html).

A kuda kepang troupe leader I spoke to said that the fatwa doesn't concern him - he believes that what he is doing is consistent with Islam, performing an art form introduced by the wali sanga that led to the conversion of millions of Javanese.

However, the fatwa has meant that all instruction of and about kuda kepang has ceased in Johor schools and universities. The future of the art form here in Malaysia is uncertain.

Gema Merdeka: Muzikal Tun Abdul Razak

Another slightly off topic post. This time on Gema Merdeka: Muzikal Tun Abdul Razak, which I saw at Istana Budaya, Malaysia's national theatre, on the last night of a 5 day run (20 August).

This was an ASWARA musical production, featuring mostly students from this ministry-run arts academy, but buttressed by some Malaysian pop stars, with professional direction and choreography and a pop score by Ruslan Mohd Imam. With funding from the 1Malaysia government initiative, this was as much a bio of politician Tun Abdul Razak (1922-1976) as a piece of government propaganda about the necessary rise of Barisan Nasional in the wake of the 1969 race riots.

Indonesia features in two scenes. One scene represents Konfrontasi: paratroupers are seen descending from the sky in a video backdrop as soldiers do dance manouvers in front. In a second, Tun mediates a post-konfrontasi treaty between Indonesia and Malaysia. All the Indonesians are dressed in batik-- batik skirts, pants, shirts, head coverings-- and the women take on stereotypical Javanese dance postures.

More interesting perhaps is the use of the gamelan. The orchestra features a full Terengganu style gamelan (kendang, gong, saron, peking, penerus, gambang, and 2 kromong) which plays at the opening. Thereafter the gamelan comes in occasionally as ethnic 'colour' in conjunction with other instruments. Orchestration of the gamelan is very simple - mostly all the instruments play in unison. Repeated gong strokes also features in one moment of the musical to illustrate a sense of urgency. Gamelan is of course part of the ASWARA curriculum and was elevated to a national Malaysian art form in the 1970s. But it has no real connection with Tun's life and times. I wonder what dramatic function gamelan take on in this musical. Clearly it is NOT to signal Indonesia....