Indonesian Pornography Bill

The Bali Times ran a rather alarming blog today entitled Fury, Incredulity in Bali over Porn Bill.

The article quotes many who are concerned about the bill, which "criminalizes all public acts and material capable of raising sexual desires or violating 'community morality,' including poetry and music."

In a diverse, multi-cultural country like Indonesia, defining pornography and enforcing laws prohibiting the raising of sexual desires from one island to another may present quite a challenge:
"Bali Governor I Made Mangku Pastika has said the bill fails to consider cultural diversity in a nation that stretches from the conservative Islamic province of Aceh to the animist highlands of Papua, where women go topless and men wear almost nothing but long gourds on their penises."

As regards Balinese art, the article continues: "Critics say Balinese customs threatened by the bill include the ubiquitous Hindu religious statues of Lingga and Yoni that depict male and female genitals, and the Kecak dance which is performed semi-naked."

The bill is supported by the Islamic Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), which has rising influence in Indonesian politics. Will Indonesia be the next hot spot of religious extremism?

See also ABC News Australia's post, "Thousand of Balinese rally against anti-porn bill"
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/18/2367546.htm

Balinese cremations on YouTube

I was searching Youtube to see what videos might have been posted about the cremation ceremony I witnessed in Ubud this past July, and found some interesting videos of the cremation of AA Gede Oka Djelantik posted by "stiffchilli" from 2007. These videos show some of the aspects that few people could see in the cremation in Ubud this year due to the sheer number of people crowding everywhere. This part shows the body carried to its nine-storey tower conveyance (bade).



Another segment of video from stiffchilli shows the body being washed, which I think chronologically would have happened before the body is loaded into the tower. This practice is surprising from a western perspective, where we have been conditioned to be timid, if not a bit freaked out, around the dead. When I was about nine years old, my cousins dared me to touch my great grandmother at her viewing, and I felt ashamed to have been so disrespectful to have taken the dare and touched her cheek with my hand. If I had been a Balinese kid maybe it would have been OK.

village to hotel--bookending Balinese dance

Readers may recall from my July 18 post a discussion about art created for the Balinese in a village context and art created for the tourists. I have posted images from that memorable day, which included a morning visit to Asak, a village in the eastern part of the island, and an evening performance at Tandjung Sari Hotel.

Looking at the pictures, you may notice differences in place/staging/lighting, and makeup/costume. Most striking to me, although not obvious from the photos, was the difference in attitude of the dancers. At Asak, the young village women dance the way any young person participating in their community life does--with a mix of eyes-rolled obligation to family, peer bonding, and excitement of being able to dress up and fulfill a central role on the community stage. The performers at Tandjung Sari represent the budding talent of professional Balinese dance. They may also perform at their home village temple ceremonies, but their skill and training sets them apart as an elite artist with the potential to earn a relatively high status (if not particularly lucrative) living from their talent.













At yet another event in Singapadu I witnessed what seems to represent a third category of dance performance in Bali--that of professional dancers performing for a Balinese audience in a hybrid of sacred ritual and pure entertainment. The Singapadu performance featured highly trained, world-class Balinese dancers on a stage mounted in the village temple, but with rather professional lighting and staging. The stage backdrop is painted to mimic a temple gate and is set up for such special performances. The powerful, boar-headed temple barong was danced at the beginning of the evening. Everyone was dressed in formal temple costumes and the sassy boys kicking my chair and goofing for my cameras still had rice stuck to their foreheads from being blessed earlier. But judging from the anticipation of the crowd who lined up chairs in front of the stage, the dance part of the ritual clearly provided entertainment on top of whatever sacred function it served.

We had heard about this performance from the master dance teacher, scholar, and choreographer I Wayan Dibia who had danced the evening before at Singapadu. That afternoon, he arranged for us to meet the renowned, senior mask maker I Wayan Tangguh, and his son, I Ketut Kodi, a great topeng dancer. Pak Kodi was shy and distracted when we met; we had called him away from temple preparations for the evening ceremony and performance. On stage (see the bottom right image) he was like a completely different person. He reminded me of the great Shakespearean character actors, who give life, humor, and sparkle to classic tales. Even though I could not understand the dialogue, I found myself laughing at his antics, and was completely caught up in his character.

The Singapadu performance in a way evokes the state of Balinese dance today--a vessel supported by three legs: village, hotel, and academy. To survive, Balinese dance will likely have to be relevant to Balinese temple life AND tourist dollars. Although many people I spoke with bemoaned the homogenizing influence of the dance universities on Balinese dance, this institution provides needed connective tissue as village teachers die off and young people get distracted by modern life. This remains one of the most compelling debates about the future of Balinese dance--how can dancers retain their particular village traditions while training at the professional and standardized dance academies?

--DC

Images:

Top left: Asak temple dance
Top right: Tandjung Sari Hotel dancer
Bottow left: Barong dance at Singapadu
Bottom right: Pak Kodi as "The Old Man" in Singapadu

From "Visit of a Lifetime" to Exhibition Development

Now that all AAM staff members have returned from, the logistical planning of the exhibition begins. The colorful and vibrant images of art, dance, and ritual must take a back seat to the more mundane tasks of budgeting, grant-writing, event-planning, and pest management. Nevertheless, as staff begin to carry out the individual tasks that constitute our job descriptions, we will always have the intense liveliness of Bali in our minds. In this way, none of our tasks ever become lifeless.

We hope to keep you, our readers, as up to date as possible on the development of this exhibition. In order to do so without burdening Deb, more of us will be contributing to this blog. My name is Tisha, and I work in the publications division of the museum.

(Here's Chief Curator Forrest McGill enjoying the Bali experience, above left; and to the lower right, Associate Curator of Southeast Asian Art Natasha Reichle and blog author and Director of Education Deb Clearwaters join local expert Garrett Kam at his home.)

The Bali exhibition will be held in the summer of 2010, and just like Hollywood moguls, we aim for a blockbuster. We’ve been encouraged to “think big,” and so we are. Our meetings are filled with exciting phrases like “flying in the dance troupe,” or “taking over the Civic Center.” We talk of ephemeral art, of artists in residency, of video installations. We fantasize about screen projections outside the museum showing the music and dance performances taking place inside.

We also talk about pest management and visitor safety—less colorful but equally vital issues in this exhibition, which will feature very old wood sculpture, deep-fried rice-paste offerings, and towers of sticks and paper whose only ultimate purpose is the spectacular fire they create when a match is struck.

And always, we talk about the budget, and how to present the most spectacular show possible on a nonprofit’s budget. Stay tuned to learn more about our process as we begin to bring this exhibition to its vivid manifestation.

--TCL

Cremation Ceremony Blog and the best of YouTube

It is been too long since my last post. Returning home from Indonesia on August 1, I was slammed with backlogged work, and I am still digging out. I had about 1800 unread emails! Much was spam, but you still have to wade through them all somehow....

My other projects at work include going to lots of meetings, finalizing programs for the autumn exhibition on Afghanistan (I am very excited about the possibility of Rory Stewart coming to give a lecture, details still TBD), working on grant proposals, and trying to set up an online videocasting process for the Society for Asian Art's Friday lecture series, which begins on August 29, with our new director Jay Xu giving a talk on "Mysterious Creatures, Towering Trees and Lofty Figures in

Sacrifice: The Lost Civilization at Sanxingdui, China." One could spend a lifetime studying the various fascinating burial practices and attendant magical creatures found in the arts all across Asia.

I have been working at home to upload some of my Bali images--please take a look on my Flickr site. I will write some posts related to these sets.

Some of the most indelible memories of my time in Bali circle back to the cremation ceremony. There were 1000s of folks with cameras there besides me and many of them got great shots. There is a fascinating official press blog about the events to be found at http://pelebon2008.blogspot.com/
Of particular interest are links to some YouTube videos of such things as the artisans creating the tower (bade). You can go directly to the YouTube clip here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvUmbj_ohkA

The other video link from the official blog is this very slick ad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAmYa4EkJXE
promoting the cremation ceremony apparently to encourage tourism for the event. This is an interesting approach to marketing--come see us burn our dead, it's beautiful, peaceful, harmonious, sacred. Funny thing is that the video looks nothing like what I experienced. I am not saying that the actual event lacked in majesty or sacredness, in its way, but it wasn't so clean and controlled as the video characterizes. All for the better.

For a sense of the chaos and excitement of the actual event, better to look at videos such as this one posted by Schooo1980
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYPx87Mjjjs&feature=related
of the bulls being carried down the main street in Ubud to the temple.

Or this one posted by putrasinggih of the flames in full force. Listen to the master of ceremonies, who switches to English and asks the crowd to calm down so that they can get the fire hose in position to dampen the flames.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmvCJ60NFc0&feature=related

Of course, these videos are only of the most public part of the cremation activities. I know that there were probably many quiet, private moments shared only by the family, quietly chatting while making offerings, praying in small groups, and the like.

To see my humble assortment of photos of the cremation, please click here http://www.flickr.com/photos/clearwaters/sets/72157606589742137/
I have lots of video footage, which is less accessible to me until we upgrade our video editing station at work. But in a month or so I should have some clips of this footage that I will share on YouTube.

Gamelan Sekar Jaya: Weekend Workshops in Balinese Music and Dance, Oct and Nov 2008

This posting is to pass along information about weekend workshops on Balinese music and dance in Oakland, CA in October and November presented by Gamelan Sekar Jaya, which hosts visiting Balinese master artists every year.



____________

Learn Balinese Gamelan music & dance at Sekar Jaya’s NEW center in Oakland
Taught by renowned artists:

• I Dewa Putu Berata – musician
• Emiko Saraswati Susilo – dancer
  

Two weekends:

• Oct. 4-5 10am-2pm each day, w/break
  
• Nov. 8-9 10am-2pm each day, w/break

Either weekend can be taken independently, since each will start at the same level. Different material will be covered, for those who want to take both.

http://gsj.org/Workshops

Bali: one of about 17,000 Indonesia Islands

I just returned from Indonesia tonight. It is a long journey. I left Bandung at 8am Aug. 1 Java time and got into San Francisco at 8pm the same day Pacific Time. Crossing so many time zones is really surreal--it defies logic somehow.

I spent the last week in Java, the island just to the west of Bali in the massive Indonesian archipelago. I recently saw a map of Indonesia superimposed over a map of North America and it was staggering--the 17,000 islands of Indonesia stretch from Oregon to Bermuda. Superimposed over Europe Indonesia stretches from London to Moscow, With population of 220 million it is the fourth most populous country in the world and is home to more Muslims than the nations of the Middle East combined. Indonesia's Islamic culture is more evident in Java than Bali, which remains the only majority Hindu culture in Southeast Asia.

From my personal experience, narrow American stereotypes about Islamic culture are all but irrelevant to Indonesia. Sure I saw a few women in full black veils, but I also saw many women without any head covering, some wearing short sleeves or shorts, and in between these two extremes, I saw many women wearing fashionable head scarves of every color, attractive long-sleeved tunics and jeans. People of different stripes seemed to mingle easily and I found folks to be quite friendly and laid back. In Borobudur I was woken by calls to prayer, but hardly heard them in Bandung. On the outskirts of Jakarta I noticed many small mosques, for the most part humble buildings, dotting the sky line. When I asked my friend Achmad about why there were so many, he explained that they were small and needed to have many to accommodate all the local residents. I asked if they represented different sects and he said no, all practiced the same version of Islam.

I never felt any hostility towards America during my travels in Indonesia. Several people expressed excitement about Obama's candidacy.

Java and Bali share lots of cultural elements--some foods, a national language, a love for music and dance and for performances of the great epics of the Mahabarata and Ramayana in traditional puppetry and theater forms as well as on modern TV adaptations. However, although they are close physical neighbors, the islands feel to the visitor to be quite different. In my next post I will share some of my experiences in Java, and then will return to the rich range of experiences I had and people I met in Bali. And will have had time to download some pictures and video by then as well.