Balinese Performing Arts
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TEACHER RESOURCE GUIDE SUITABLE FOR Balinese Performing Arts K-12 for Your Students SPRING 2016 Photo courtesy of Eric Chang at the East-West Center Arts Program Photo courtesy of Eric Chang at the East-West With identified connections to Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and Hawai‘i Content & Performance Standards (HCPS III). To view connections, visit our webpage at www.cseashawaii.org/programs/performance/wayang-listrik In conjunction with the Asian Theatre Program’s Jan 22-31 BALINESE WAYANG LISTRIK 2016 Large-screen Shadow Puppet Theatre 2 Aloha TABLE OF CONTENTS educators! 2 7 - 8 11 - 12 Welcome, and About this guide Shadow puppetry* Puppet templates* Selamat Datang! The 3 - 5 9 13 UH Mānoa Asian About the island of Bali* About Wayang Listrik; About the guests artists Theatre Program and performing arts as a Quick guide on Balinese and producers and the practice performing art forms Center for Southeast Asian Studies are pleased to bring Balinese performing 6 10 14 arts to the children Balinese gamelan music Suggested discussion Sponsors and supporters and youth of Hawai‘i! and dance questions and dance activity* *includes activity ABOUT THIS GUIDE order to benefit from the material presented in this This educational resource guide. guide includes materials and resources to introduce you WHY BALINESE and your students to PERFORMING ARTS? traditional and contemporary Balinese performing arts. Bali is a small island in the island nation of Indonesia in This resource guide is also Southeast Asia. Balinese downloadable on our music, dance, theatre and website, along with updates shadow puppetry are rich on the production, outreach with history, culture and events, educational behind- storytelling in ways that the-scene videos and other naturally invoke creativity in ways to connect. every child. Image: Balinese Dance, Drama & Music, Dibia & Ballinger, 2004 www.cseashawaii.org/ Guest artist Ketut Wirtawan when he was programs/performance/ Most Balinese artists would a young boy learning the baris dance wayang-listrik from his grandfather, the famous I have begun their creative Nyoman Kakul Information in this guide endeavor very early in their Background image: Heru S. Sudjarwo works best with our in-school lives, making Balinese “playshops,” but can also be performing arts readily CONTACT US: used as standalone material. accessible to children and For questions on outreach activities and the It is not necessary to have youth of prime learning age. Kennedy Theatre show, please contact seen the Kennedy Theatre We are excited for you and Margot Fitzsimmons, coordinator for the Theatre for Young Audiences Office, at Spring 2016 production of your students to discover all (808) 956-2591 and [email protected]. Balinese Wayang Listrik in that our program has to offer! *** INCLUDES ACTIVITY *** 3 Hawaiian Islands PHILIPPINES MICRONESIA Pacific Ocean POLYNESIA SOUTHEAST ASIA INDONESIA PAPUA NEW GUINEA MELANESIA Bali AUSTRALIA Image:Wikimedia Commons Hawai‘i and Bali map images: www.lonelyplanet.com/maps ABOUT BALI (and connections to Hawai‘i!) •Bali is a small island in the eastern part of ENGLISH HAWAIIAN BALINESE (B) / Indonesia, a country in Southeast Asia. INDONESIAN (I) •Indonesia is a huge country with about 17,000 islands, 6,000 of which are Fish I‘a Ikan (I) inhabited, with different ethnic groups and languages. Eye Maka Mata (B/I) •Bali is one of the smaller islands, just east of Java, and has about 4.2 million people. Rooster/Bird Manu Manuk (B) •Eighty-five percent of the people in Bali are Balinese Hindu (though it’s quite different Coconut Niu Nyuh (B) from Hinduism in India). •Most Balinese are bilingual, speaking both Water Wai Yeh/Air (B/I) Indonesian and Balinese. Me A‘u Aku (I) DID YOU KNOW that on April 14, 2014, Flower Pua Bunga (I) Bali and Hawai‘i became sister islands? This makes sense because not only are the two Come/Let’s Mai Mai (B) places part of the Asia Pacific region, they are both beautiful islands with rich performing art traditions. What is really Body hair Hulu Bulu (B/I) cool is that they also share linguistic similarities despite being thousands of miles Leaf Lau Daun (B/I) away. The Hawaiian and Balinese/ Indonesian languages descend from a Fruit Hua Buah (B/I) common ancestral speech community. **Check out these Indonesian, Balinese and Hawaiian words that sound very similar Root A‘a Akah/Akar (B/I) to each other! Try them out loud with your students! ** Three Kolu Telu (B) 4 About Balinese Performing Arts Photo courtesy of Eric Chang at the East-West Center Arts Program Made Sidia, a well-known Balinese artist, greets students at a Life, ritual and performance school outreach event during his 2010 East-West Center residency. He is wearing the topeng tua mask depicting an old Balinese performing arts are a smorgasbord of man. visual, tactile and auditory richness. Bali is special because of the fluid intersection between spiritual life and creative endeavor. Music, dance and theatre Desa, kala, patra - are learned and performed for the divine as well as Place, time, circumstance the human audience. Stories are told both to teach the A pretty special thing about Balinese performing young about their tradition at the same time that it is arts is also its rootedness in Balinese religious and a favorite activity enjoyed by all. Children are exposed spiritual philosophy. One of the prevalent philosophies to these art forms from a very early age through is that of desa, kala, patra or place, time, context. temple ceremonies and other community activities Embracing this philosophy motivates one to consider that happen on a regular basis. whether an action suits the particular place, time and context that he or she is in. This extends to the performing arts as well. Instead of rendering the arts rigid and “regimented” however, this philosophy may actually help explain why every performance is unique and in some cases, improvisatory in nature and essence. For example, while the “main” story is an episode from the Ramayana, it is not unusual for a performance to incorporate social commentary on current events or the latest gadget trends! Telling stories through sound, movement, masks and puppets Image: www.handsomecitizens.com At the core of the craft, as is the case generally in Balinese performing arts, is learning how to breathe A young Balinese girl waits for the start of a ceremony involving dance during the celebration of Nyepi in Bali, life into an object (including one’s own body!) and tell a day of silence, which also marks the new year on the a story or depict a character in a compelling, Balinese lunar-based saka calendar. entertaining and almost other-worldly way. 5 Multiple sources of stories and culture for centuries. These texts are so long that performances, whether through dance, theatre or The different Balinese art forms draw from many puppetry, usually only depict a particular shorter episode sources of stories. The main ones are native and specific rather than the entire text. to Bali and nearby Java - old epic poetry recounting tales of grandeur of old Javanese kingdoms such as the Panji cycle, as well as local adaptations of the Indian Ramayana and Mahabharata. Like the Odyssey and other old epic poems, the Ramayana, a story approximately 2,400 years old, is about a journey of external and internal struggle, with a rich serving of kings and queens, advisers and seers, as well as magical beings like the elusive golden deer, the white monkey king and scary giant ogres. Image: www.ft.com The Indian Ramayana epic, along with the A mosaic of one of the episodes from Homer’s Mahabharata, have had a great influence on Balinese arts Odyssey depicting Odysseus and his men approaching the island of the sirens Character types in Balinese performance Across the different genres of performance, character types in the stories or sketches being performed can roughly be divided into strong (keras) and refined (alus). And then there are the clown characters, who are typically also narrators in Balinese performance, able to translate from the ancient literary language of kawi (old Balinese/Javanese) to present-day Balinese, acting as a conduit between the world of the characters and that of the audience. “At the core of the craft, as is the case generally in Balinese performing arts, is learning how to breathe life into an object (including one’s own body!) and tell a story or depict a character in a compelling, entertaining and almost other-worldly way.” Image: www.luk.staff.ugm.ac.id An intricate painting of an episode from the Ramayana, portraying the battle of Sugriwa and Subali born out of an unfortunate misunderstanding 6 Balinese gamelan music culture and education are multitudinous and dynamic. In general the art form can be described as different kinds of ensembles of percussion- Balinese Gamelan based traditional instruments made up of metallophones, kettle-gongs, hanging gongs and drums. But even this mouthful description does little justice to the variety and MUSIC and DANCE recent developments in approaches to the creation of sound and music both in and outside of Bali using the instruments. For example, the traditional gamelan jegog from Jembrana in west Bali is made up of vibraphone-like bamboo-based rather than metal-based instruments. Not to mention different scales being used, such as the popular pentatonic gamelan gong kebyar, the 4-tone angklung, and the more recent 7-tone gamelan semaradana. But perhaps most importantly is the concept of teamwork - gamelan is a group effort, both in terms of the socialization of its practice and the actual physical creation of sound and is therefore a wonderful tool for learning.