L

span class="inline inline-left">Looking for freedom: The set for Shackled Spirits was designed by Balinese artist Made Wianta. He used simple materials to evoke people’s struggle to free themselves from both their illnesses and their doctors.Bali’s most talented artists find ways to celebrate their island’s creative energy wherever they are.

This was demonstrated last week in the United States when Made Wianta, Made Bandem and Suasti Bandem presented an extraordinary performance created during a four-month collaboration with Lynn Kremer at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Kremer has collaborated often with Balinese artists, and in a piece called Shackled Spirits she chose to explore the theme of mental illness. The dance/theater performance was inspired by the efforts of Luh Ketut Suryani, a professor of psychiatry at Udayana University in Denpasar, Bali, to rescue mentally ill individuals who have been tied up and restrained by their impoverished families because they cannot afford a doctor.

Kremer and her team visited Bangli Psychiatric Hospital to observe treatments of mental illness, and their performance depicts a group of mentally disturbed patients receiving various types of therapy.

Most of the dialogue is sung and spoken by a writer who is imprisoned in the hospital against his will. This character was originally based on the late Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who was jailed under Soeharto’s regime for the political nature of his work.

The set for Shackled Spirits was designed by the multi-talented Balinese artist Made Wianta. His ingenious use of simple materials evokes the complex struggle of shackled spirits trying to free themselves from both their illnesses and their doctors.

The patients rearrange ladders into changing configurations, but are unable to climb out of their spiritual and physical incarceration. Their disembodied souls seem to watch them from the back of the stage in the form of oversized puppet heads. These abstract creations undergo spectacular transformations over the course of the performance. Initially they are seen only in silhouette, perched at the bottom of a white backdrop, like figures in a wayang puppet play.

Later they are illuminated by rainbows of light that give their faces the haunting glow of ancestral spirits. Finally, the puppets are animated by the ensemble in a circular procession.

Meticulously constructed with a textured collage of painted fabrics, newspaper, plastic, acrylic and other materials, the puppets generate multiple illusions. On the most basic level, they entrance the audience with the elegance of their cubist design.

Then once the puppets begin to move, each new angle changes the spectators’ perspectives, suggesting that the distorted faces mirror the troubled minds of the characters who carry them.

The puppets and the actors in this production are animated by the energetic choreography of Made Bandem and Suasti Bandem who have introduced audiences all over the world to the mysteries of Balinese dance. In Shackled Spirits their dance steps capture the madness and the playfulness of mental patients by twisting traditional Balinese and Javanese dance steps into new variations. They also play with the complex rhythmic structures of music from Aceh to create an intoxicating scene in which patients transform themselves into an orchestra by banging on tin cups and slapping their bodies.

Another scene uses the syncopations of kecak chants and the melodies of Colin McPhee to simulate a music therapy session in which the patients tap out rhythms on a variety of pots, pans, and other household objects. A 40-gallon plastic water-cooler jug is hit with a stick to replicate the sound of a gong.

Bandem borrowed the idea for creating instruments out of found objects from the chronicles of a Dutch colonial prison camp in West Papua where an incarcerated Javanese musician constructed a gamelan from sardine cans, milk tins and animal skins.

As part of his preparation for Shackled Spirits, Wianta conducted art workshops with the patients at the Bangli hospital encouraging them to listen to music and dance while they painted. Some of the artwork he created at Bangli was projected on screens during the performance in America.

Individuals with mental illness often hear voices. Shackled Spirits links these unseen voices to the spirits of the invisible world that manifest themselves in sacred Balinese ceremonies.

One of these ceremonies is evoked in a sequence that captures the phantasmagoric qualities of a Balinese calonarang dance. A masked demoness dances in the center of the stage while characters around her fall into trance. The mask used in the dance was modeled by Wianta to resemble the sacred figure of Rangda.

For Wianta the link between music, visual art and movement is rooted in the way those elements interact in the natural world. “I had a teacher,” he said, “a carver who would look into the water and see a piece of wood and imagine it to be a snake or a dragon, and that is what he would carve. Art emerges from the way we look at nature.”

Although Shackled Spirits is set in a mental hospital, Wianta’s set together with the Bandems’ choreography elicit visions of natural elements like earth, air, fire and water.

Tiny glowing lights suggest fireflies hovering in the night air. A giant metal bird soars through the air trailed by wings of fiery red cloth. Undulating expanses of blue fabric simulate the flow of a river. These natural phenomena are evoked during the trances of the patients, but the gritty world of urban reality is never completely left behind.

On mental illness: Shackled Spirits, a performance created by three Balinese artists, was performed at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, recently.All the play’s action is framed by an installation of colored panels covered in graffiti. This homage to street art was inspired by the patients at Bangli, who leave their mark on their environment by writing on whatever surface they could find.

According to Kremer, “They wrote on the walls. They wrote on the floors. They wrote on their beds. They wrote on themselves, and they wrote on each other.”

As portrayed in Shackled Spirits, the men and women at the Bangli hospital have found another area where they can make their mark. Their eloquent attempts to find meaning in the grim circumstances of their lives will be deeply etched into the memories of audiences who see the play.

Dances, puppet plays, drawings, trances and music free the patients to express what their illness prevents them from putting into words. Their spirits are unshackled by art.

The writer is a professor of theater at Wesleyan University in the US and has been researching Indonesian culture since 1976 with the support of Fulbright, Guggenheim, Watson and Asian Cultural Council Fellowships.
He is now directing a project to digitize thousands of Balinese lontar manuscripts that can be accessed at the Internet Archive Foundation’s archive.org/details/bali.