Celebrate Gamelan Sekar Jaya's 30th Birthday!

Our dear friends and mentors at Gamelan Sekar Jaya have a wonderful weekend of celebration concerts approaching.
We've grown so much in knowing and working with them.  
Many members of Gamelan X have and continue to perform in GSJ's various ensembles.
This fall, Gamelan X and Gamelan Sekar Jaya will join forces to present "PLANETS" - a multi-media collaboration at the Exploratorium.

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Gamelan Sekar Jaya performs

SERASI: Three Concerts (& Thirty Years) of Balinese Music and Dance
in the San Francisco International Arts Festival

Sixty performers and six renowned Indonesian guest artists,
led by I Dewa Putu Berata and Emiko Saraswati Susilo

Friday, May 22 at 8pm
Saturday, May 23 at 2pm
Sunday, May 24 at 2pm

Cowell Theater, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, CA 94123

Tickets

$20 general admission in advance
$25 general admission at the door
$16 students & seniors
$12 children 12 and younger
For tix visit sfiaf.org
or call: 1-800-838-3006

Group tix available

Gamelan Sekar Jaya is pulling out all the stops for its thirtieth anniversary celebration -- extraordinary guest artists, multiple gamelan ensembles, and a vibrant combination of traditional and new work, in one of the Bay Area's most beautiful venues.

The concerts' highlight will be the world premiere of the suite SERASI ("Harmony") by renowned musicians and dancers I Dewa Putu Berata and Emiko Saraswati Susilo, artists-in-residence for the 2008-2009 season. With support from the Zellerbach Family Foundation, Mr. Berata and Ms. Susilo have created a dazzling array or works that encompasses a wide range of Balinese styles and genres, from the stately movements of a temple dance to the fiery outbursts of kebyar, the revolutionary musical style born in the early twentieth century. These stylistic threads will be woven together in an expression of the suite's primary themes -- balance, harmony, and collaboration.

For SERASI ("Harmony), Gamelan Sekar Jaya has also reached out to several renowned Indonesian artists and former dancers with the group to join the performances. They include Nyoman Wenten and Nanik Wenten, whose dance mastery has been long recognized on US stages. They will lend their skills to works that evoke the vibrant atmosphere of a Balinese odalan, or temple ceremony. The two dance pieces in the suite, one in rerejangan style (for female dancers) and the other in bebarisan style (for male dancers) lie at the heart of SERASI, in its expression of harmony and balance. The concert will also feature I Made Moja, a dancer with a multidisciplinary background in painting, shadow theater, and set design; and other company dancers skilled in the delicate hand and eye motions of Balinese dance. One of the special treats of the concert will be eight-year old Dewa Ayu Larassanti, who will perform a segment of Legong Kraton, the classical dance for young girls.

Gamelan Sekar Jaya is directed by Wayne Vitale, a composer, performer, and scholar of Balinese performing arts, and one of the group's founding members. Mr. Vitale has led the group over the past sixteen years in many large scale international artistic works, often involving teams of US-based and Indonesian artists working in collaboration, fusing traditional and newly-created materials in innovative ways.

Musically, the concert will showcase the wide sonic and orchestral range that resounds from this culturally rich island. The musicians will perform on four different gamelan ensembles -- percussion orchestras of bronze or bamboo instruments, gongs, drums, and flutes. These are the bronze gamelan gong kebyar, requiring 25 musicians, the four-tone ceremonial orchestra gamelan angklung with about 18 musicians; the rare orchestra of giant bamboo marimbas, gamelan jegog; and the delicate gender wayang quartet of metallophones.

visit www.gsj.org for more info