Cambridge Youth Gamelan & Special Guests

Cambridge Youth Gamelan celebrates their eighth concert season together with special guest, Putu and Ayu, as well as Gamelan Sleeping Fox.

Cambridge Youth Gamelan celebrates their eighth concert season with a special featuring our dear friends - Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena & Dewa Ayu Eka Putri - as well as our first joint performance with Gamelan Sleeping Fox, a Balinese youth gamelan ensemble from The Pike School (Andover, MA).

In this performance, Cambridge Youth Gamelan will perform the world premiere of a new Balinese lullaby, composed by Putu and Ayu, featuring vocals and live gamelan. We will also perform two versions of the dance classic, Topeng Keras, on both the gamelan gong kebyar and the gamelan angklung ensembles with featured dancer, Chiara Evans. In addition to these groups, both ensembles will perform Tari Gopala, Hujan Mas (older angklung version), and Bapang Selisir.

This concert is free and family friendly. Audience members will be invited to try out instruments and meet the musicians after the show. Please register for your tickets today!

Cambridge Youth Gamelan
Cambridge Youth Gamelan (Gamelan Anak Tika) teaches youth about traditional gamelan music and dance of Bali, Indonesia through hands-on learning experiences delivered by experienced instructors. Founded in 2016 by Mark Stewart and Emeric Viani, the ensemble is open to students in grades 2 - 12 regardless of prior musical experience. Over the years, the Cambridge Youth Gamelan has performed as special guests with Gamelan Galak Tika (MIT) and in performances at the Cambridge Public Library. The ensemble has also had the opportunity to work with notable Balinese artists such as Dewa Ketut Alit, Gusti Komin, Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena, and Dewa Ayu Eka Putri.

This program is supported in part by a grant from Cambridge Arts, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.

Gamelan Sleeping Fox (The Pike School)Gamelan Sleeping Fox is an afterschool Balinese gamelan angklung for students in grades 3 - 8 at The Pike School in Andover, Massachusetts. The ensemble performs traditional repertoire for gamelan angklung as well as more modern angklung-kebyar repertoire. Founded by Emeric Viani in 2019, Gamelan Sleeping Fox has had the privilege of working with notable Balinese artists such as Gusti Komin, Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena, and Dewa Ayu Eka Putri.
 

Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena is an Indonesian artist-scholar serving as Assistant Professor of Music (Performance and Creativity) at Grinnell College, where he directs the Balinese Sound Ensemble and teaches courses on Heavy Metal Music, Electronic Music, and Noise and Activism. He also is a founding member of Balinese Experimental duo, ghOstMiSt, with dancer-anthropologist, Dewa Ayu Eka Putri; PAK Yeh (free-improvisation trio) from Denver, Colorado; and T.A.T.W.D. (improvised noise-metal trio) from Urbana, Illinois. Hiranmayena’s academic, performance, and compositional research focuses on the intersections of Cosmology, Indigeneity, Environmental Activism, and Performativity in Balinese Gamelan, Heavy Metal, and Noise. He takes post-colonial, performance studies, and creative ethnographic approaches to looking at the state of sound in the social sciences and humanities. His work constitutes equitable forms of knowledge production in the form of public-facing academic articles and Glocal creative artistic pieces.

Dewa Ayu Eka Putri is a Balinese artist-anthropologist and is currently a Lecturer of Dance at Grinnell College. She teaches courses on Balinese Dance and Performing Arts, specializing in traditional and contemporary dance styles. Putri also maintains her position as dance instructor at the critically acclaimed arts organization, Sanggar Cudamani, from Pengosekan, Bali, Indonesia. She received her B.A. from Universitas Udayana in cultural anthropology and is a leading figure in women’s gamelan ensembles all around Bali. Born into a family of artists, Dewa Ayu is internationally known for her collaborations of traditional and contemporary works in theater, music, and dance while actively working as a freelance research assistant. The majority of her work advocates for the legal protection of women and children which is highlighted in various discursive artistic modalities.