TNUA’s School of Dance invited three masters of Kecak Dance of Bali to introduce the traditional art form of the Indonesian island earlier this semester.
I Wayan Dibia, I Gusti Putu Sudarta and I Wayan Sira, at TNUA under the school’s reconstruction program for classic dances, conducted a workshop introducing the various aspects of Kecak, including the dance, its music, costumes and backgrounds, during their two-month stay.
The workshop started on March 28 with 60 students taking part in Kecak Dance training. They trained for 10 hours for almost two months so as to present Kecak at the School of Dance’s summer production beginning from May 26.
The production of the traditional Bali dance was su-pported by dozens of students for making the costumes, scenes and props.
The performance’s venue was eventually decided to move from the TNUA Dance Theatre to outdoors on the Arts Boulevard, where the dance was presented amid breezes and trees with the venue decorated with bamboos, torches and drapes on an early summer night that made the audience feel they were actually on the tropical Bali island.
Kecak Dance is accompanied by male chorus without music. It was originally a form of trance performed du-ring religious rituals in Bali.
In the 1930s, German artist Walter Spies, while living in Bal, asked I Wayan LimBak from Bedulue to combine Kecak chanting with the Hindu epic Ramayana, turning it into a form of drama performance for European tourists.
Since then, Kecak Dance has become a popular tourist attraction, with many villages staging regular perfoman-ces.
With the establishment of the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (ISI), many other Kecak drama versions have been created. The School of Dance this time invited the creators of many of these experimental Kecak pieces to teach TNUA students the traditional Balinese art form.
During the workshop, they created a new Kecak work, “Arjuna in Meditation,” based on an episode of the Sanskrit epic, “The Mahabharata.”