PAGAR AYU 

Preview Premiere 

2023 

I Gusti Nyoman (Komin) Darta - Composition 

Shoko  Yamamuro - Choreography 

SUARA SANDI 

I Nyoman Windha - 1985 

MERAK NGELO 

Gender Wayang Ensemble 

Traditional 

REBONG 

Gender Wayang Ensemble 

Traditional 

NGAYON 

I Gusti Nyoman (Komin) Darta - 2018 

WIRANATA 

I Nyoman Kaler - 1942 

revised I Nyoman Ridet - 1945 

I Gusti Nyoman Darta (‘Gusti Komin’) 

Gusti Komin is a musician, artist, and teacher from the village of Pengosekan, Bali. Born in 1978, he studied music from an early age with his father, renowned musician I Gusti Ketut Kerta. During his studies at the Indonesian Institute for the Arts, he played regularly in his village gamelan and at wayang performances (shadow puppet plays) throughout Bali. As a founding member of the virtuosic Balinese gamelan ensemble Çudamani, Gusti Komin has toured extensively throughout Europe and the U.S. For more than a decade he has taught the gender wayang, reyong, and kendang instruments to local and foreign students. Gusti Komin teaches and performs widely along the east coast. He is currently artist-in-residence with Gamelan Dharma Swara. Considered to be one of his generation's most innovative performers and composers of gendér wayang, Gusti Komin released his first record, Pidan Jani in 2019.   

Shoko Yamamuro 

Shoko Yamamuro is a leading performer and teacher of Balinese dance in the U.S. She began her studies of Balinese dance as a child while living with her family in Jakarta, Indonesia. Receiving a scholarship from the Indonesian government after college to attend the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI) in Denpasar, her considerable experience saw her learning with mentors and masters of the discipline, Jero Made Puspawati, I Made Bukel (deceased), I Made Suteja, and I Made Keranca.  

With over 30 years of experience, Yamamuro is one of few international artists with extensive knowledge and skill in all styles (male, female, and a third, middle gender) of Balinese dance. She is a first-call performer and teacher in the U.S., Canada, and Japan. Her performances include those for Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, as well as over 20 appearances at the prestigious, annual Bali Arts Festival.  

She currently performs with Gamelan Sekar Jaya in the Bay Area, California, serving as dance director from 2019-2020. Prior to this, she was the dance director for Gamelan Dharma Swara and has taught courses and workshops at Columbia, Wesleyan, Bard College, Colgate University, Bates College and MIT. 

Gamelan Dharma Swara 

Musicians 

I Gusti Nyoman Darta, artist-in-residence

Jonathan Bailey, Elizabeth Behrend, Tom Burckhardt, Chris Canahui, Samir Chopra, Ari Dalbert, Stephanie Dixon, Paul Feitzinger, Vladimir Fleurima, Charlie Gullion, Tori Lo Mellin, Annie McCutchan, Jose Mediavilla, Gary Meister, Joel Mellin, Kyle Miller, Vera Much, Christopher Romero, Samantha Simorangkir, Nora Stanley, Nina Sultan, Coco Walsh, Siwen Xi, Remzi Yildrim 

Dancers 

Shoko Yamamuro, Choreographer 

Ilona Bito, Miranda Danusugondo, Stephanie Ho, Teresa Ibarra, Noopur Singha, Siwen Xi 

Gamelan Dharma Swara — “a duty of perpetuating sound” — is one of the United States’ leading Balinese music and dance ensembles. From their beginnings at the Indonesian Consulate of New York to the present day, they have been captivating audiences around the world with raucous performances for over 33 years and counting. 

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 compete 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 U.S. premiere) and Dewa Ketut Alit’s Cecanangan and Geregel (2015 U.S. 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, and 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. 

Pagar Ayu 

Tonight's performance will feature the Preview World Premiere of a new Dharma Swara commission, co-created by Artist-in-Residence Gusti Komin and long-time dance teacher and choreographer, Shoko Yamamuro. The traditional welcome piece to open a performance or event is reimagined. Works of this genre — typically in the female style — often focus on notions of reception and invitation alongside purification and blessing; however, this exploratory work will 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.  

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” literally 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.  

Gamelan Gender Wayang  

Gender Wayang is an ancient style of gamelan music that often accompanies wayang (shadow puppet theater) and most sacred Balinese Hindu rituals such as cremations and tooth filing ceremonies. The smallest of the gamelan ensembles, it requires only two players and is complete at four, the additional instruments doubling an octave above. It is considered to be the most complex music with elaborate kotekan (interlocking configurations) in both odd and even meters that must synchronize with their partner’s music. The hands are constantly playing contrapuntally. Damping is difficult and done with the outer part of the fourth and fifth fingers. The music has a resonating, shimmering and vibrating quality rich in overtones which is created by striking bronze keys with wooden mallets, all within the framework of pentatonic slendro tuning. 

Ngayon 

A piece written by the group’s artist-in-residence since 2017 Gusti Komin, titled Ngayon. Komin plays with the Balinese tradition of adding “N" to the beginning of nouns as a short-handed way to convey action (an example – “Kopi” means coffee; “Ngopi” means “to go drink coffee”). Ngayon’s wordplay conveys the feeling of performing the traditional Kayonan dance in wayang (shadow puppet theater), recontextualized as an instrumental piece. 

Wiranata 

Tari Wiranata is a non-narrative work that portrays the ideal qualities of a king: 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 Ride. Popularized 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 tonight 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 — commonly referred to as a third gender. Utilizing aspects of both male and female dance techniques, the dancers quickly alternate between refined grace and aggressive sharpness.