“Kali Yuga: The Age of Chaos”
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley
October 14, 2006
A fantastical battle between gods crosses paths with the realism of a modern world out of balance in Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s spell-binding drama “Kali Yuga: The Age of Chaos,” which premiered in its entirety at Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall on Saturday night.
Co-sponsored by Cal Performances and World Arts West, this lavish, multi-textured work draws its inspiration from Hindu cosmology in which the last of the four cyclical yugas, or ages of humanity, is called the Kali Yuga, a dark time marked spiritual dissolution, conflict and hypocrisy. Gamelan Sekar Jaya performed excerpts of the evening-length piece at last year’s San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, and it is a such worthy theatrical spectacle that it seems a real pity that there was only one day of performances it.
A collaboration that brings Hindu together with Muslim, American with Balinese, “Kali Yuga” could be taken as a microcosm of a land of diverse contradictions – a paradisical island steeped in Hindu mythologywhere families still give offerings to the gods to protect their rice paddies, and a part of a Muslim nation torn by religious conflict and terrorist violence. Directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang -- who also directed the 2001 “Kawit Legong”— this richly appointed production finds the kind of unique flavor of fusion that we’ve come to expect from this American gamelan ensemble.
Founded in 1979, El Cerrito’s Gamelan Sekar Jaya – whose name means “victorious flower orchestra” in Balinese – has become one of the most distinguished groups of its kind in or outside of Bali. Under the musical direction of Indonesian guest artists I Made Arnawa and I Dewa Putu Berata, Sekar Jaya impressively navigates the music composed by Arnawa, along with the troupe’s general manager Wayne Vitale.
The term “gamelan” refers to a set of metal or bamboo instruments, and each gamelan collection is tuned as a unit, with the instruments always remaining together, no matter who the players are. Sekar Jaya is comprised of five smaller gamelan ensembles whose potent combinations of percussion instruments include small metal pots, gongs, drums, flutes, and jegogan made from giant bamboo tubes, among many others. There is a universe implied in the gamelan sounds, which can elicit the sense of consonant order or dissonant chaos with equal ease, and it all adds up to a robust and deeply satisfying layering of sound that fill the ears literally, even as Elaine Buckholtz’s visuals and Jack Carpenter’s lighting fill the eye.
The thirty musicians of Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s ensemble make for an impressive centerpiece, enfolded by a U-shaped ramp along which unfolds the epic battle between Dewi Sri, the Balinese Rice Goddess and Bursasana, a demon who disturbs the order of the universe. Looming overhead is a rough circular hanging woven out of palms highlighted by a palette of light and shifting projections, but the bulk of the action takes place at the front of stage, where divine battles metamorphose into seemingly innocuous jaunts by tourists traveling through Bali or a masked dance turns into a modern rave. It’s a pleasing arrangement which places the musicians in the middle, and sometimes as a part, of the dance drama.
Part mythos and part morality play, “Kali Yuga” unfolds in seven episodes. There are ritualistically paced Balinese dances from the Rice Goddess – an elaborately costumed Tjokorda Isteri Putra Padmini -- and her four acolytes. I Ketut Rina unleashes savage gravelly screeches and raucous laughter as the demon Bursasana, who tempts “Kali Yuga” choreographer I Wayan Dibia, as the Man with Four Faces, while they dance an unsettling series of topeng or masked dances. There’s a nightclubbing rave, a kind of contemporary version of the Balinese warrior’s kecak dance. And as a modern tourist, Oakland rap artist Rashidi Oman-Byrd even throws in a few hiphop moves as he raps the words of Jakarta-based poet Goenawan Mohamed.
Ambitious in scope, “Kali Yuga” gets at a multiplicity of concepts, but underlying it, there is the sense that in a world wracked by violence, nightclub bombings, vice and corruption, there is still the hope of order and consonance rising from the chaos.
If the ending -- a few lines spoken by children -- seems inconclusive and vague, still “Kali Yuga’s” emotional resonance hangs in the air like the reverberant sounding of the gongs.
This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.
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