Recent Summer Programs

A warm Balinese welcome to the Third Annual Payangan Festival of World Music, Dance, and Theater, July 31-August 8, in Payangan, Bali.The Payangan Festival, known in Indonesian as "Pesta Payangan," was launched in 2002 in a modest one-day format by participants in the Center for World Music's annual workshop in Bali.

Last year's festival, a joint venture of the Center and the local Camat's office (a kind of county supervisor) was greatly expanded. The first six days presented evening performances of old traditional music by gamelan groups from six Payangan banjars (important neighborhood divisions), together with six rare kinds of ancient gamelans from villages in East Bali. The last two days of the festival were devoted to the larger world of music, dance and theater, with performances of Javanese shadow play, Sundanese music and dance, and performing arts from Africa, India, the Middle East and medieval Europe, among others.

This year's Festival is planned to include old traditional forms of dance and theater, as well as gamelan music. Food, textile demonstrations, displays of local handicrafts, and folk dancing by the public and participants will again round out the festive atmosphere of what is developing into an annual event.

Touring gamelan groups from abroad are welcome to take advantage of the festival venue to help exemplify the spread of Indonesian performing arts abroad.

Festival Program

August 1

Opening ceremony on Sunday afternoon in the recently refurbished village wantilan, in the center of Payangan. The first traditional performances will begin.

August 2-6

A week of evening performances featuring groups from Payangan and other Balinese villages in the presentation of old traditional forms of music, dance, and theater.

August 7 and 8

All day and evening performances on the weekend of world music and dance by Summer Workshop participants representing Africa, India, the Middle East, and Europe.

Symposia and discussions on traditional arts in the 21st Century will continue this year on Saturday and Sunday. Inter-island ikat display and demonstration of geringsing double ikat weaving from Tenganan combine with displays of typical handicrafts from the Payangan area. Meli's Warung offers delicious Indonesian meals, snacks and beverages.. We hope to provide poco-poco line dance lessons for everyone, culminating in a general dance party where local residents and visitors can mix

Festival Dedication to
Colin McPhee and Guru Lunyuh

The 2002 festival was dedicated to Colin McPhee, the Canadian composer and ethnomusicologist who wrote the definitive "Music in Bali" from materials collected in the 1930s. The afternoon session featured gamelans associated with McPhee: (1) the famous gamelan semar pegulingan, now resident in Teges village, which McPhee kept in his house in Sayan village and which is pictured in many of his writings, (2) the gamelan angklung with the ancient tuned bamboo rattles (angklung), which he started in the 1930s for a group of children in Sayan and which is still active more than seventy years later, and a gamelan selunding group from Tenganan village, which had fascinated McPhee as one of the oldest styles of gamelan in Bali. The Teges group also played an hour of brilliant compositions by I Lotring, a Balinese composer whose music was much admired by McPhee.

The 2003 festival was dedicated to the Guru Lunyuh, a former palace musician for the king of Payangan. Colin McPhee's old informant, walked the ten miles from Payangan to Sayan each week to provide him with many old Balinese gamelan compositions, now known to scholars around the world through McPhee's transcriptions in "Music in Bali."

The 2004 and future festivals will continue to honor Colin McPhee and Guru Lunyuh, whose interaction in the 1930s can represent an admirable example of the felicitous meeting of cultures. We carry on in that spirit, emphasizing and projecting the importance of tradition, while at the same time exemplifying the world platform on which such an inheritance can now be displayed, as we move forward together into the new century.

Background to Payangan Festival
for Workshop Participants

2003 World Music Workshop

Flower Mountain, Bali

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