In the morning, we ran through a lot of pieces quickly since we had a shortened day. The upcoming cremation ceremony rearranged our schedule a little bit, and we have to get ready for the final performance — the end of the program is approaching very, very quickly. We worked on Gengongan and Legong on the full gamelan, Sekatian on reyong and terompong, and another piece on reyong, drum, and cymbals.
After lunch, we were visited by Pak Bandem and his wife Swahsti, both extremely accomplished scholars and artists, some of whose work we’ve performed before at Swat. After presenting Judy and Tom, both old friends of his, with books, and giving us a talk on his research into the history of gamelan, including their own intense involvement from the 1960s on into spreading and teaching gamelan music, they each performed a dance for us. Swahsti performed Rejang Dewa, a dance that she and her husband developed and which we play frequently. Bandem did a mask dance (I didn’t catch the name, unfortunately) that in his words is “not that long… about eight minutes.” Both were amazing. With the way Bandem turned his head, it looked to me like the painted eyes on the mask were moving from left to right.
That evening, Jon, Tom, Tim, Angelina and I went to the Kecak dance at the Pura Dalem in Ubud. Indra, who along with his wife Ayu played at Swarthmore with our gamelan in spring 2022, performed in it – he told us it’s his banjar’s show, and all the members are required to be involved in it (working or performing) and will be fined a small amount if they don’t. That was very interesting to learn, as I would have expected that kind of tourist show to be run by some company, but it’s actually part of the banjar’s responsibilities. The kecak told a Ramayana story featuring a monkey army, a giant, and a magical bird alongside characters like Rama and Hanoman the monkey king. Besides the rhythmic kecak chants, the performers also sang and chanted. Since we have been doing kecak ourselves in lessons, a lot of the rhythms and commands felt familiar, which was fun.
The final section was a dancer “in trance” kicking around burning embers in a fire dance. When we asked Indra afterwards how the dancer can do it without being burned, he mostly shrugged and said that those particular dancers just have “a special gift.” We’ll never know.
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