SPRINGTIME SUPERNOVA
Sunday, 18th MAY 2025
STONE CIRCLE THEATRE - 2:30PM
@ Ridgewood Presbyterian Church
BODY MEπA | GAMELAN DHARMA SWARA
MAS BUDI STREET FOOD | JAMUROQUAI | VARIETY COFFEE
Today’s program will be approximately 2 hours with a brief intermission.
PROGRAM
BODY MEπA
“..off-the-beaten-path math rock and post-rock” pieces from their new album PRAYER IN DUB and more.
- intermission -
GAMELAN DHARMA SWARA
NGAYON
I Gusti Nyoman (Komin) Darta 2018
PAGAR AYU
I Gusti Nyoman (Komin) Darta, Composer
Shoko Yamamuro, Choreographer
2024
SAPTA BHUANA
I Gusti Bagus Suarsana 1970
SUARA SANDI
I Nyoman Windha 1985
BARIS
Traditional
WIRANATA
I Nyoman Kaler 1942
revised I Nyoman Ridet 1945
PROGRAM NOTES
NGAYON
Ngayon is Gusti Komin’s creative imagining of the instrumental piece preceding a Balinese shadow puppet play. The Kayonan is the first puppet to emerge, signifying the set-up period of the ensemble cast of puppets for the play. The title Ngayon is a play on words — “I am dancing the Kayonan.” With his inclination to deeply explore simple ideas and minor instances, Komin creates a piece around the moment before which a story begins.
PAGAR AYU
Co-created by Artist-in-Residence, Gusti Komin and longtime Balinese dance teacher and choreographer, Shoko Yamamuro, the traditional welcome piece to open a performance is reimagined. Works of this genre — typically in the female style — often focus on notions of reception and invitation alongside purification and blessing. This exploratory work will however, also consider the group's identity as New Yorkers performing Balinese arts via the lens of expatriate artists — with the vast majority in the ensemble not being ethnically Balinese, nor having spent time in Bali. Shifts in the concepts of gender, style, and movement are explored, with the artists drawing simultaneously from Balinese roots and the freedom afforded by their émigré experience, in an introspective and ultimately, celebratory work. The piece vibrates from deep, underground to soar high above in the sky, with ideas of aspiration, lightness and beauty alongside those of grittiness and toughness, work and preparedness. The co-creators worked remotely to each other (New York and California, respectively) to form a uniquely responsive piece to persona, distance and context.
SAPTA BHUANA
Originally from Buleleng, the composer I Gusti Bagus Suarsana wrote many gong kebyar kreasi in the late 60s for the renowned gamelan group Abdi Budaya, in the remote village of Perean in Tabanan, Bali. Many of these works, including Sapta Bhuana, were eventually captured on cassette recordings in the 1980s, and helped establish Abdi Budaya's mythic and worldwide reputation for achieving exceedingly fast speeds. The recordings captured the attention of American composer and educator Wayne Vitale, who spent time living and studying with Abdi Budaya in the 1990s and once measured their performance of Sapta Bhuana at an impressive 600 hits per minute at its peak.
While Sapta Bhuana as a composition typifies the "Perean style", it also exemplifies the concept of musical authorship in Bali, where ideas are constantly borrowed, recontextualized and juxtaposed with entirely new material. In this case, musical phrases from the gegenderan (opening section) of another kebyar work Sekar Gendot, have been appropriated but, ultimately produce an entirely different and original result.
Interpreted loosely as the "seven sounds of the world", Sapta Bhuana continues to be a signature piece in Abdi Budaya's repertoire, and has now been passed down over two generations of musicians. Dharma Swara is grateful to have the opportunity to refine its performance of Sapta Bhuana with Abdi Budaya when they visit Bali in 2026. It was honestly maniacal for Dharma Swara to attempt to learn it. But it's really fun.
SUARA SANDI
Composed in 1985 as the overture for an undergraduate final recital by the now revered Balinese composer I Nyoman Windha, Suara Sandi is one of the earliest works that explored the tonal possibilities of the emergent semara dana set—a heptatonic system that embeds multiple modes. This work is an introduction to an extended suite entitled Kindama based upon a little-known character from the first canto of the Mahabharata epic. “Suara Sandi” translates to the Song of Dusk. In Balinese Hindu belief, times of transition are spiritually potent and potentially dangerous; dusk is considered an especially dangerous time, and the work foreshadows the inauspicious and unintentional slaying of Kindama by Pandu. In Suara Sandi transition is represented musically by dramatic modulations between two core modes in Balinese seven-tone music.
BARIS
The dance piece Baris references the ancient Balinese soldiers who protected the raja-raja (kings) and is a proud display of masculinity and fierceness. It is performed prior to ritualistic events as well as secular entertainment, and exemplifies a duality characteristic of Balinese dance: grand gestures complemented by intimate, choreographed eye movements. Baris demonstrates triumph in battle and the display of sublimity of a commanding presence. Most often presented in solo, today’s program will feature a pair of Baris Kembar (twins).
WIRANATA
Tari Wiranata is a non-narrative dance piece that portrays the ideal qualities of a king or a protector of people: boldness, strength, and courage. The dance is said to have been created by I Nyoman Kaler, one of Bali’s earliest and most famous kebyar dancers and teachers, and later revised by his student, I Nyoman Ridet. Popularised by the beloved bebancian* dancer Jero Gadung and typically performed by women, Wiranata features several unique choreographic features, including intensely darting and snaking eye movements, and a characteristic flipping of the dancers’ wrists. The Wiranata being presented today is a version taught by revered bebancian dancer and teacher Agung Oka Partini.
*Bebancian is a category of Balinese dance in which the character is depicted as neither stereotypically male or female, but rather, a third, neutral gender. Utilising aspects of both male and female dance techniques, the dancers quickly alternate between refined grace and aggressive sharpness.
ABOUT BODY MEπA
Body Meπa is the New York-based quartet of Greg Fox (drums), Sasha Frere-Jones (guitar), Melvin Gibbs (bass), and Grey McMurray (guitar). As luminaries in the intersecting traditions of improvised music, rock, jazz, fusion, and contemporary classical music, the four artists have each spent decades building diverse practices that extend beyond sound into multiple disciplines. Prayer in Dub, their second release on Hausu Mountain, follows the band’s 2020 album The Work Is Slow. While Body Meπa recorded much of Prayer in Dub within the same period that followed their formation and first LP’s creation in 2020-2021, the album presents a band whose collective intuition as instrumentalists and live-in-the-room songwriters has deepened with each take that they put to tape. Focused on textural and rhythmic detail, repetition and variation of central motifs, and slowly evolving sessions that find room for improvisation, the quartet hesitate to pin down their amorphous output any further than the broad scope of what they describe as “New York City body music.” Their work engages with the physicality of “rock band” performance while stretching that idiom to its breaking point, all while evoking the environment that brought it to life: the city of New York in all its multitudes, where all four band members grew up.
ABOUT GAMELAN DHARMA SWARA
Gamelan Dharma Swara—"a duty of perpetuating sound"—has built a reputation as one of the country’s most accomplished and groundbreaking ensembles. The group performs a spellbinding blend of iconic traditional pieces paired with bold contemporary compositions, spanning some 500 years, and has been called "thrilling, mesmerizing and powerful" (New York Times) and "sublime, receiving perhaps the weekend's most rapturous response" (The New Yorker).
The first non-Balinese gamelan invited to participate in the prestigious Bali Arts Festival, the group has toured Bali and performed at Lincoln Center at the invitation of The New York Philharmonic, BAM, MoMA, Central Park Summerstage, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Symphony Space, The Asia Society, National Sawdust, Basilica Hudson, and at Yale, Princeton and Columbia Universities.
Dharma Swara has commissioned and premiered works by contemporary composers including leading Balinese composer Gusti Komin-who has worked with the group as artist-in-residence since 2017, and whose composition Sari Ing Kerta the group premiered in 2018-in addition to Joel Mellin (Synesthesia, 2012 world premiere), Nerissa Campbell (Legian 1983/Breathe My War, 2016), Matthew Welch (Bhima Swarga, 2006). The group has also performed works by many seminal Balinese composers, including Made Subandi's Kupu-Kupu Kuning (2011 US premiere) and Dewa Ketut Alit's Cecanangan and Geregel (2015 US premiere).
The group plays on instruments made by pande Made Sukerta in Bali in 2017, and combines the popular 20th century gong kebyar tuning (selisir, a five-tone scale) with the older seven-tone semar pagulingan (16th or 17th c.), making it possible to play a wide range of traditional and contemporary repertoire. Dharma Swara is proudly women-led, spearheaded by president/ugal player Victoria Lo Mellin and vice-president/dancer Miranda Danusugondo. Based in Queens, New York, the most diverse county in the US, the group maintains a commitment to its long-standing core values of celebrating community and promoting inclusion.
Gamelan Dharma Swara is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organisation operating under the legal name Arts Indonesia.
ABOUT GUSTI NYOMAN DARTA (GUSTI KOMIN)
Gusti Komin Darta is a musician, artist, and teacher from the village of Pengosekan, Bali. He has been hailed as a leading composer, performer, and teacher of Balinese music of his generation. He first studied music with his father, renowned musician Gusti Ketut Kerta, and began performing professionally for shadow puppet plays (wayang) at the age of 9, eventually enrolling at the prestigious national arts conservatory, now known as the Indonesian Institute for the Arts. Gusti Komin is a founding member of the virtuosic Balinese gamelan Çudamani and has toured extensively throughout Europe, Japan and the United States.
Gusti Komin currently performs and teaches widely along the U.S. east coast and is sought after as a composer, performer, and educator. He is Founding Director of the innovative chamber gamelan Saiban, and teaches at various American universities including MIT, as well as community-based groups such as Gamelan Galak Tika in Boston and Nusantara Arts Gamelan in Buffalo, and Gamelan Dharma Swara in NYC.
Widely acknowledged Master of gendér wayang, one of its foremost contemporary composers blending traditional and modern gamelan music in imaginative ways, exacting teacher and rebellious spirit, Komin writes music that explodes conventions and pushes limitations of even the strongest performers.
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE
I Gusti Nyoman (Komin) Darta
MUSICIANS
Liam Bader
Jonathan Bailey
Elizabeth Behrend
Stephanie Bruno Dixon
Oliver Budiardjo
Chris Canahui
Samir Chopra
Ari Dalbert
Steve DeBellis
Paul Feitzinger
Vladimir Fleurima
Calvin Grad
Charlie Gullion
Meesh Hauser
Ndaru Kartikaningsih
Victoria Lo Mellin
Annie McCutchan
José Mediavilla
Gary Meister
Joel Mellin
Kyle Miller
Vera Much
Christopher Romero
Samantha Simorangkir
Nora Stanley
Alex Vilanova
DANCERS
Miranda Danusugondo
Ndaru Kartikaningsih
Sabrina Kiamilev
Verena Lee