Gamelan Sekar Jaya: A Culturally Rich Mix from Bali

Gamelan Sekar Jaya

A Culturally Rich Mix From Bali

Calvin Ahlgren, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, May 24, 1992

CROSS-CULTURAL diversity took on a disturbing warp for choreographer Rachel Cooper on a recent trip to Bali. The new Michael Jackson video “In the Closet” was playing on Indonesian TV screens everywhere she went, but what gave Cooper pause – and moved her to make a video of her own – was the sight of a group of Balinese teenagers aping Jackson’s peculiar dance maneuvers. “They were in front of a temple, in their blue jeans, doing the entire choreography” of the pop idol’s latest self-promotional gyrations.

The sight impressed Cooper for a number of reasons, not the least of which was her longtime investment in bringing Balinese dance to the United States. A graduate in dance ethnology from UCLA, she had begun traveling to Bali for research in 1975, living and studying in Indonesia for a year after that, as well as from 1983 to 1987. Together with composer Michael Tenzer, she co-founded the Bay Area’s own Balinese-style, western- staffed orchestra, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, that was invited by the Balinese government to tour the island in 1985. (That event was recorded in the award-winning documentary “Kembali,” that has had repeated national airings on PBS.) She was in Bali this last time in connection with the end of the Festival of Indonesia, the 18-month international touring event for which she was the United States performing arts coordinator — a job that occupied her for the past four years, she said.

Having worked so hard to learn the Balinese art forms, Cooper was acutely conscious of the irony in her Jackson epiphany. Its spirit informs her new piece that will be part of a series of Bay Area concerts before Gamelan Sekar Jaya takes off for a second invited tour to Bali, to perform at the 1992 Festival of the Arts.

Cooper’s piece is based on, and uses as its title, the traditional Prembon form that combines the music of the gamelan (orchestra), masked dance drama (topeng) and spoken dance drama (drama gong). “The word ‘prembon’ means ‘mixture,”’ Cooper said in the East Bay home whose basement serves as practice space for the gamelan. She and her teacher, Balinese composer I Nyoman Windha, sat among several dozen exotic instruments that reposed statue-like in the cool, low-ceilinged room.

“We’re using (the title) more in that meaning; it . . . has some situational elements of traditional Balinese dance-drama — certain stock characters. There’s usually an attendant, two translators who speak for the king, and a protagonist who has some kind of problem.”

Bay Area dancer Maxine Heppner portrays the protagonist, a starry-eyed Westerner new to Indonesia. “She’s awe-struck and wonderfully, foolishly naive” about her “discovery” of the ancient culture, Cooper said. “She wants to learn it all at once.”

Her counterpart is a Balinese who, with a like anxiety and determination, wants to get the western mode. In the third section of “Prembon” the two meet, Cooper said, in “a slightly slapstick encounter. Each realizes the other has something he wants to learn. Without hitting (the viewer) on the head with it, the message inside is that we each have something to give in the exchange. I think that for us as a group, that’s one of the most important components of it.”

Cooper’s piece, in which she is being aided by composer Windha’s wife, I Gusti Agung Ayu Warsiki, as choreographer and guest dance director, is one of four commissioned for the Festival of the Arts. The others include Sekar Jaya co- founder Tenzer’s “Tubah Banyuari (Tributaries),” a musical piece that uses gamelan instruments in wider contexts. Tenzer, author of the book “Balinese Music” (Periplus Editions, 1991), teaches composition at Yale. “He really thinks in gamelan, from the basic concept of that set of instruments,” Cooper said. “But he puts it together differently; he may change meters — you feel other influences with it.”

Evan Ziporyn was, like Tenzer, a Fullbright Scholar in Bali before joining Sekar Jaya. He now teaches composition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His commissioned piece is “Aneh Tapi Nyata (Strange but True),” blending gamelan instruments with electric guitar and mandolin, cello, violin, clarinet, viola, flute and voices. Ziporyn’s work, Cooper said, follows the Balinese line of interaction among notes played by fellow musicians in a gamelan. “The concept is the interlocking counterpoint, and the gong cycles.” Wayne Vitale’s piece is “Byomantara (Big Sound From Space),” written in traditional Balinese style for gamelan instruments. Vitale is in Bali under a National Endowment for the Humanities research grant.

COOPER, 37, said hers and her colleagues’ long years of learning Balinese music and dance have had their effects in more than artistic ways. The whole approaches, in a western approximation, the way Balinese art forms fit into the fabric of everyday living, as opposed to an extroverted, forcibly integrated factor.

“I’m constantly rethinking what it means to be doing this,” she said. “At a certain time there was a pretense that I was one of the experts; that was just silly, and that just blew up.” Because of the gradual growth of understanding, “everything is fresh all the time.”

“At one point I tried to be Balinese all the time — which meant suppressing who I was. I found I can still be who I am and still be conscious of the culture.” The process was equally mystifying for the celebrated composer Windha, a teacher at an academy in the Balinese capital of Denpasar, whose current American residence is his third such. Teaching the admittedly talented Sekar Jaya musicians threw up a number of cross-cultural challenges, he said, the hardest of which was patience. “In Bali we need feeling” instead of western musical notation, to grasp a given composition. “We feel that music; also important is technique. We work very serious . . . over and over again.”

But, he added, “I also learn something; I have to learn patience” with the slow western grip on things that the Balinese take for granted. “In Bali, teaching is quick.”

Cooper emphasized the group effort at getting the music right, both for the sake of loyal Bay Area audiences and the Balinese. “We’re working very hard, every day,” she said. “We have a responsibility to ourselves, to our teacher and to the Bay Area. There is a sense that this music really emphasizes the community.”

In that regard, she said, the youthful Michael Jackson imitators in Bali could be seen from a larger point of view. “That video was playing everywhere. And if it was playing in Bali, that means it was playing in the villages of Sumatra, too. But one thing that makes me happy is that Bali’s art is so integrated into society that it’s relevant” to the whole structure, and not likely to deteriorate on account of western influences.

Likewise, she said, this country can incorporate other art forms in the true spirit of the melting-pot. “We often take ‘The American Culture’ to other countries. Our hope is that the idea of a culture is expanding. If you take ‘multicultural’ seriously, we feel as serious about studying gamelan as Yo Yo Ma is about studying cello. It means something about who we are as Americans, and also as people from the Bay Area.”

PHOTO CAPTION: Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s Rachel Cooper with her teacher, Balinese composer I Nyoman Windha, ‘In Bali, we feel that music’, BY DEANNE FITZMAURICE, THE CHRONICLE

SUNDAY DATEBOOK; Pg. 5

©1992 San Francisco Chronicle