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Future of dance unmasked
The past is always present: Balinese dancers prepare for the opening dance of the 2015 Indonesian Mask Festival in Mas, Bali
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The past is always present: Balinese dancers prepare for the opening dance of the 2015 Indonesian Mask Festival in Mas, Bali.
No one can fight globalization and the best one can do is to harness new technologies to support a traditional art form.
When the electric lights died last Sunday during a mask dance in Pajeng, the audience was transported back to the days of flickering lamps and shadows deep on the stage. With a clunk the floodlights failed, leaving dancers in pitch black night, the bells on their ankles ringing brightly in the sudden silence. Within seconds pale torches from handphones lit the stage, almost as if a swarm of fireflies had joined the audience, which had collectively turned to mobile technology to illuminate the way for the dancers.
This unexpected marriage of ancient art and technology was precisely what the organizers of the 2015 Indonesian Mask Festival and Exhibition had hoped for, says I Wayan Dibia, professor of dance at Denpasar's prestigious fine arts institute, the ISI. Along with several other masters of Indonesian mask and dance culture, Dibia led seminars and workshops during the festival. Hosted by Gianyar Culture Agency, Dibia says the two-day event, based in Mas village, aimed at reconciling the fact of globalization with traditional art forms.
'Currently we are in the midst of a global culture and this is penetrating our traditions. We want to bring the attention of the younger generation back to our culture to balance this out. No one can stop globalization, but with events like this, we can strengthen ourselves and remind all people of the richness of our mask performances,' says Dibia, adding that new technologies could enhance the knowledge transfer of Indonesia's cultural traditions.
Forgetting the stories and legends of Indonesia's history, told through dance, would be to cast off not only the epic tales of the nation, but in Bali, the island's personal history handed down over generations through mask dances, according to ethnomusicologist and the former rector of Yogyakarta's Fine Arts Institute (ISI), Professor I Made Bandem.
Bandem is a luminary of Indonesia's visual arts community and he gave presentations at the three-day festival. The festival attracted hundreds of Indonesians and a smattering of foreigners to a series of evening performances in Pajeng and Mas.
'Masks are a medium of communication for Balinese people to their ancestors and gods. Mask performances denote family histories, the chronicles. So the masks can bring the past into the present within the performance,' says Bandem, who can trace his family history back to 1343 when his family was thrown (bebandem) from Java to Bali, settling in a village still named Bebandem.
The professor stresses that in handing down the chronicles and legends of Indonesia, there must be innovation if the younger generation is to pick up the baton in mask-making and performance and add their own stories drawn from the current era.
'This exhibition is important to strengthen our love for our culture and to give this to our younger generation, for them to learn the art of mask-making. Here we have contemporary masks, so it is more creative and there is a transformation in the modern world. Central characters evolve, adapt and change. That is the way we preserve the arts, keep them alive and carry them forward through innovation and evolution,' says Bandem.
Bandem hopes the festival communicated the critical importance of traditional culture continuing to reflect society in its many changing forms, including the technological society of today.
The mask exhibition gave viewers the opportunity to read the differences in Balinese and Javanese mask designs. Javanese masks have highly stylized, almond-shaped eyes, longer noses and delicate facial structures. Balinese masks, on the other hand, focus on exaggerated eyes that are painted to lifelike levels.
'Balinese masks have bulging and excellent eyes because in Balinese dance the glancing and flickering of the eyes is the most important movement. This underlines the dramatic content in the drama,' explains Bandem, adding that the differences seen in the masks are also alive in the dances.
'Javanese dance is more internal, the emotions are held inside, while Balinese dance is external and more romantic. Javanese is classical, introverted and controlled, with dancers looking modestly downwards.'
This control was beautifully executed on Sunday evening in a performance by the Surakarta Palace's Soerya Soemirat and later again by the Yogyakarta ISI dance troupe.
Dancers glided across the stage as smoothly as a canoe slicing through still water. In stark contrast were the electrically vibrant Balinese masks and contemporary Balinese dances on Monday evening in Mas.
Mask dancers from Jakarta, Cirebon and Malang also performed, introducing the Balinese audience to just a tiny slice of the extraordinary and diverse masks present in the Indonesian archipelago. The head of the Gianyar Cultural Agency, Gusti Wijana, says the festival exhibited a 'bottom up, top down concept'.
'Gianyar, in the context of preserving culture, has become the center with mask performances,' Wijana said during a seminar on the history of mask dances.
' Photos by JP/JB Jwan
