Join us for the May edition of our CLEAT Series which concentrates on new work written for our 16-channel speaker system at Elastic Arts. This month has a very special mix of movement and sound.

Balinese Mask Dance and Shadow Puppet Theater

Join us for a performance of Balinese music, dance, and shadow play by dance master I Gusti Ngurah Kertayuda, embedded in an immersive performance of animated sounds from Bali and Sumatra by Bill Parod.

Who is not totally captivated when experiencing Balinese art and culture, whether music, dance, painting, carving, or the grace and blessing of everyday life there? We are fortunate to have such artistry here in Chicago with Balinese dance master, I Gusti Ngurah Kertayuda. His performance tonight is especially rare in featuring him in Topeng (mask dance), Wayang Kulit (shadow play), and in the vocal and instrumental performance of all the gamelan parts heard in tonight’s music.

The performance will open with an immersive collage of Balinese village and festival life, followed by a live Topeng performance before presenting the Wayang Kulit performance of Yudha Hati.

Yudha Hati means fighting with heart through joy, sadness, and death. This story is from the Sanskrit epic Ramayana and tells of the conflict between rival siblings Sugriva and Subali, the turmoil their ongoing war inflicts on the forest animals, and the alliance of gods Rama and Hanuman formed to restore peace to the kingdom. An expansive cast of gods, birds, monkeys, and environmental forces are heard with Balinese gamelan and Dalang vocals in this 16-channel, spatially animated forest drama.

Wayang Kulit is Balinese shadow play of myriad characters – animal, human, mortal, and immortal – silhouetted behind a translucent screen representing the boundary between earth and spirit. The characters’ dialog is spoken and sung in Sanskrit from the poetry of The Mahabharata and The Ramayana epics, with extemporaneous comments in Indonesian, Balinese, and occasional English.

Mr. Kertayuda recorded the instrumental and vocal parts for Yudha Hati with recording engineer, Alex Inglizian at Experimental Sound Studio during 2020 and 2021. The soundtrack was presented at the 30-channel SONIC PAVILION FESTIVAL 2021 in The Jay Pritzker Pavilion of Millennium Park, Chicago. A video of that project is below.

We are very excited, with the reopening of Elastic, to perform this piece with live shadow play.

I Gusti Ngurah Kertayuda is one of Bali’s most respected master dancers and the director of Indonesian Dance of Illinois. His charismatic performances have been well received throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States. A graduate of the National Performing Arts Institute (KOKAR) in Denpasar, Indonesia, he is well versed in the many forms of traditional dance and music from Indonesia. For more information: Indonesian Dance of Illinois.

Bill Parod is a composer, violinist, and software developer who works on their integration with interactive game technology, spatial audio, and mobile app delivery to create spontaneous and immersive music. For more information: earful.b

Scott Rubin / Rin Peisert Finding Common Time

Scott bio:

Scott Rubin is an interdisciplinary artist and improvising violist whose work interrogates relationships between sound and movement through analog and digital means. His projects have involved collaborations with musicians, dancers, and visual artists, often incorporating interactive acoustic/electronic improvisation, expanded performance practices, motion-sensors, and video. In these projects, he engages themes of intimacy, control, and the sublime.

Rin bio:

Erin Peisert’s interdisciplinary practice examines the impact of time and place upon the experiencing body to consider conscious awareness and the mystery of Being. She explores these concepts through research, performance, movement, video and sound. Her practice is influenced by Butoh, Actionism, and junkyard scrap.

Performance description:

Our experience has been that perception of time depends on our respective circumstances and cognitive dispositions.

These differences in time perception also affect our relationships.
When we engage with another person, we might attempt to adjust our own sense of time perception to align more closely with theirs.
This performance is about that process of adjustment.

We discover the similarities and differences of our cognitive dispositions.

Communicating them is important to understanding and being understood.
We use this creative process as a vehicle to investigate the relationship.

Blue Lick

Musicians Havadine Stone and Ben Billington have created new work for voice, percussion, and electronics. Their latest record Hold On Hold Fast was released in September 2021 on American Dreams Records. This new work will further explore their experiments with voice timbres weaving within oscillators and tonal percussion.

$15 – Tickets Available at the Door