Caravan World Rhythms and Chan Centre for the Performing Arts production. At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Monday, November 12. No remaining performances
Artistic performances in Bali sometimes run from dusk to dawn, but visiting troupe Gamelan Cudamani inverted that time line, starting with sunrise and ending at midnight–all while compressing a day in the life of a Balinese temple into a pair of audience-friendly 50-minute sets. The sense of slow unfolding that, I’m told, characterizes a real-life odalan (temple anniversary) ceremony was missing, but otherwise Cudamani’s performance was exceptionally rich in its sense of place.
That this was not going to be an ordinary concert was apparent from the opening scene, when Cudamani’s imaginary village slowly awakens to the sound of frogs and jungle fowl. The women are up first, fetching water, sweeping the temple floor, and disturbing the sleep of an embarrassed and quite likely hung-over musician who’s curled up under a dusty mat. The men soon arrive, carrying knives and lengths of bamboo, which they shape into a number of temple structures–and as they do, they make an extraordinary percussive clatter.
Music is inextricably woven into Balinese daily life, and that point is further driven home by a grand and noisy “drum solo” built from the sound of herbs being chopped and spices being grated. And in a culture so rich in ceremony–each temple celebrates its anniversary every 210 days, and there are more than 20,000 temples on the island–dance and theatre are similarly intertwined with religious observance.
Odalan Bali is not wholly liturgical in nature: the male contingent of the 28-member cast staged a rowdy mock cockfight that was also a tour de force of vocal percussion. But most of the segments mixed music, movement, and spirituality, as in the sublimely graceful “Mecaru: Appeasing the Playful Earth Spirits”. In its simplicity and grace, the mecaru ceremony might be an animist remnant in predominantly Hindu Dharma Bali. Its potency in modern times was reinforced by I Dewa Ketut Alit’s music, which built up from familiar metallophone patterns to a dense wash of swirling, abstract sound.
Again, the point was that Balinese art is alive and growing. At home, Gamelan Cudamani is dedicated to making vital music for a vital community, as opposed to the many ensembles providing rudimentary versions of Balinese art for the tourist trade. On tour, its intent is to spark a deeper interest in Balinese culture. With this performance, its members can consider their mission accomplished.
Source: http://www.straight.com/
November 16th, 2007
Trisha Sertori, Contributor, Kerobakan, Bali
More than six decades ago India’s Mahatma Gandhi called for villages across his nation to maintain ancestral professions such as weaving and embroidery. His goal was to crush dependence on England’s spinning mills and ensure economic sustainability in villages throughout India.
“We started spinning and weaving as a means of solving unemployment as well as a resolution of self-reliance,” Mahatma Gandhi is quoted when asked how “making one’s own cloth and inheriting one’s ancestral profession solve modern problems”.
About the same time as Mahatma Gandhi was revolutionizing India, on the other side of the world in New York’s Brooklyn, Paul Ropp was born. And now at 63 years of age the lad, who was born on the wrong side of the tracks and remained illiterate until he was 22 years old, is helping maintain Gandhi’s vision in India and in Bali.
In Bali, Paul Ropp is best known as a fabric and clothing designer; a designer who says “Fashion is dead. We don’t make fashion, we make ooh aah (clothing)”.
The ooh aah factor in Ropp’s designs is based in those Indian villages where his silks, wools and cottons are hand-dyed and loomed before being hand-embroidered then stitched in Bali.
This is what makes the pieces museum-quality garments. “The fact is that within 30 years these clothes will be in museums because the young people (in villages) don’t want to do this work (hand-weaving and hand-embroidery) anymore. For me it’s about trying to show them they can stay at home in their villages and make a good living.
“What Mahatma Gandhi wanted was for people to stay in their villages and not go to the cities to look for work. He wanted the villages to be strong (economically); to be independent of the British and that is in essence these fabrics,” said Ropp, who employs more than 500 people across Bali and 5,000 people across India. In the mix are Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists and more, said Ropp, of what he feels is the proof that economic health allows people from all backgrounds to work together creatively.
“India is the largest Hindu country in the world and Indonesia the largest Muslim country. The fabrics are woven by Indian Hindus, embroidered by Indian Muslims and exported to Muslim Indonesia, where they are stitched by Hindus, Muslims, Christians and others all working together in real harmony, and exported around the world,” Ropp said.
Engineering handwoven and embroidered fabrics demands an extraordinary attention to detail, planning where different motifs and colors fall on every meter of fabric is, Ropp said, a role he delights in. So specific is the fabric design that every garment is cut singly, literally one garment at a time. Ropp’s garments are incredibly labor-intensive; utterly hands on.
This invisible element of human creativity in his designs breathes life into the clothing, you can almost hear the loom’s shuttle and comb that gives birth to Ropp’s designs as you handle the fabrics rich in color, weight and movement.
“This is a real collaboration; weaving will take a family about two weeks, then another week for embroidery then here in Bali for cutting and stitching. People are using their expertise to create something that is then exported globally. This is global marketing from indigenous labor — that is the key — multi culture bridges the gap,” said Ropp of his designs that create a world market for remote villages that would not otherwise have global access.
“This is about sustainable development, the economic sustainability of villages; productivity based on community effort. And every time someone puts on a garment it supports that reality,” said Ropp adding that his fabrics are “not made by mills but by people”.
Ropp arrived in Bali back in 1978 after several years in India. A born entrepreneur, he had earlier gained a 32 percent share of the cigarette paper market in the U.S. before his move to India.
Ropp was making his American flag, draft cards and 100 dollar bill printed cigarette papers at the height of the Vietnam war and found a ready market of smokers keen to light up a little revolution with each puff; not bad business nous for a boy who gained his education in a reform school.
He is one of those people born to win against all odds. Perhaps if had he been born with a silver spoon the Ropp ebullience and creativity would have been stilted, drowned in middle-class mediocrity
It is his ability to think faster and wilder than most that has taken him to the top. Ropp is one of those multi-tasking people who get more done in a day than many of us achieve in a week. He checks skirt samples, suggests additional motifs on boots, stressing “we are not making boots we are making art — over the top is good,” and chats nonstop about fabric, embroidery, religion, art and the death of fashion at breakneck speed.
His eyes, as blue as his summer sky silks, encompass all under the Paul Ropp roof in Bali and further off into Hindustani and Muslim villages, and further still to the 14 countries that have absorbed his colors and designs like sun on a golden pond.
Source: The Jakarta Post
November 16th, 2007