Two-day event puts focus on gamelan and Indonesian culture in WNY

By Elmer Ploetz

For Matt Dunning, the journey toward Ayo!, the “festival of Indonesian gamelan music, dance and legend,” started 20 years ago in a classroom at SUNY Fredonia.

That’s where he first heard music of the gamelan, the collaborative and largely percussive style of music from Bali, Java and, more broadly, from Indonesia. It intrigued him enough that after graduating from Fredonia, he spent two years in Indonesia studying gamelan and learning about the culture.

That would lead Dunning to help found Nusantara Arts, a Buffalo nonprofit dedicated to bringing the music and art of Indonesia to Buffalo. The group, which grew out of the Buffalo Gamelan Club, takes its name from the Javanese name for Indonesia (and Indonesia is currently in the process of building a new capital city to be named Nusantara).

The two-day Ayo! festival is a new event for Nusantara Arts, divided over two nights. The first night’s events (Friday) will be at Nusantara’s home at 490 Lafayette Avenue, while the second (Saturday) will be at the Connecticut Street Armory.

Dunning said there is an Indonesian population in the area, but it’s spread out .

“The Indonesian community here isn’t like a refugee community, like some other of the more recent immigrant communities, so people are a little bit more dispersed throughout the region,” he said. “There wasn’t a central kind of community hub for Indonesian culture before Nusantara Arts came around. So now that Nusantara Arts is here, a lot of the Indonesian folks in the area can connect to the cultural aspects their lives through Nusantara Arts activities.”

The festival is also intended to be an introduction of Indonesian culture to the wider community as well. Dunning said the performers are major players within their art forms. In fact, that was part of the impetus for creating the festival.

“We actually have two incredible Indonesian artists that we’re working with right now who are in Buffalo,” he said. “We’ve had Heri Purwanto, who’s our Javanese guest artist. He’s been living in Buffalo since January, and we wanted to present something at the end of his time here that was the culmination of everything that he’s been teaching the people in Buffalo.

“But then we also have Gusti Komin, who’s our Balinese teacher, and he comes to Buffalo every two weeks from Kingston, N.Y. He’s a master and he’s a composer, and he goes back to Bali every year in the summer. So we needed to put on this big production sometime … so someone was like, ‘Let’s do a festival!'”

Those two performers will be leading performances at the Armory on Saturday night.

Purwanto will lead a performance with Nusantara’s full bronze gong orchestra, tuned to traditonal scales.

RELATED MEDIA: Heri Purwanto teaching Javanese gamelan

Komin’s performance will be a large-scale Balinese “Calonarang” dance drama , that “tells the mythic tale of Rangda the witch queen and the eternal battle between dark and light.” It will feature new music and script by Komin, with 15 live musicians and over 20 singers and dancers. The composition will mix eastern and western instrumentation, including flutes, djembes, drum kit and violin along side traditional gamelan.

RELATED MEDIA: Gusti Komin with the Nusantara Arts Balinese gamelan Gender Wayang.

The Friday night event at Nusantara will include a Balinese gamelan performance by the Eastman Community Music School’s Gamelan Ensemble, plus the film premiere of “Carve, Chisel, and Paint,” a documentary produced by Dunning and Nusantara Arts shot in Indonesia. It focuses on the process of creating handmade “wayang kulit” (shadow puppets) from rawhide into the flat leather puppets.

There will also be a free screening of the surreal “cult classic” Indonesian horror film “Mystics in Bali” that’s based around the same “Calonarang” story.

An Indonesian “Wedangan” cart will offer Javanenese-style tea and traditional snacks throughout the night.

Needless to say, Dunning is excited for the festival, especially for the Saturday performance.

“It’s a massive production, and it’s in a really cool venue,” he said. “And it’s a production bigger than we’ve ever done before. It’s something you’re not going to be able to see almost anywhere in the U.S. So it’s not just unique for Buffalo, it’s unique for the U.S. to have an event like this.

“Being able to see two large productions of both Javanese and Balinese music on the same day. That’s super rare. And the Balinese production is going to be this huge dance drama. It’s just a massive production, and it’s a big step up from anything that we’ve ever done. And I think it’s going to be a very unique experience for a lot of people. They’re going to come away feeling like they really saw something unique and really inspiring.”

For more information or tickets, go to https://www.nusantaraarts.com/events/gamelan-festival.

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Elmer Ploetz is editor-in-chief of The Buffalo Hive