Gamelan Sekar Jaya
Kali Yuga: The Age of Chaos

Kali Yuga Artists

Director: Ellen Sebastian Chang

Choreographer: I Wayan Dibia, with I Ketut Rina and Tjokorda Istri Putra Padmini

Composers: Wayne Vitale, I Made Arnawa

Guest Music Directors: I Made Arnawa, I Dewa Putu Berata

Poet: Goenawan Mohamad

Visual design, sets, and lighting: Elaine Buckholtz, Jack Carpenter

Sound Design: Jay Cloidt

Dancers: I Wayan Dibia, Tjokorda Istri Putra Padmini, I Ketut Rina, Rashidi Omari Byrd, I Made Moja, Rose Nisker, Emiko Saraswati Susilo, Luh Andarawati, Christina Sunardi

Gamelan Sekar Jaya Musicians: I Made Arnawa (composer, guest music director), I Dewa Putu Berata (guest music director), Dudley Brooks, Bea Deering, Tom Deering, Sara Gambin, Todd Greenspan, Jim Hogan, Maddie Hogan, Andrej Hronco, Steve Johnson, Dan Kennedy, Debbie Lloyd, Emerson Munkres, Mudita Nisker, Alicia Patrice, I Putu Putrawan (special guest artist), I Made Putrayasa, Nicci Reisnour, Molly Smart, Nicholas Statan, I Ketut Suardana, Suzanne La, Wayne Vitale (composer, director of Gamelan Sekar Jaya), Sarah Willner, Ben Zadan

Luh Andarawati, dancer, has studied and performed Balinese dance since she was a young girl, when she first appeared with the local gamelan ensemble in her village of Banda. She has also studied pencak silat, a form of Indonesian martial arts. She came to the US in 1995 to pursue her studies, and has been performing and teaching dance workshops with GSJ since that time. Noni has performed in several major Sekar Jaya productions, including Subali-Sugriwa, The Ramayana, and Kawit Legong: Prince Karna's Dream. She has her BA from Mills College in biology, and her MA at San Francisco State University.

I Made Arnawa, composer, music director, is a prolific composer, performer, and teacher. He comes from the village of Tunjuk in West Bali, widely known for its traditions in music, dance, and shadow puppet theater. A senior faculty member at ISI Denpasar, Bali's National Institute of the Arts, he has performed and taught internationally, including tours to Australia, India, several European countries, and the U.S. He has composed extensively for Balinese gamelan, especially in the forms kreasi baru and lelambatan, and has won numerous awards in the annual Bali Arts Festival. His most recent works are innovative in nature, exploring new textures, meters, and forms.

I Dewa Putu Berata, music director, is a musician, composer, dancer, and visual artist from Bali, Indonesia. He is a noted figure in the Balinese performing arts world, skilled in both traditional and innovative styles. A graduate of STSI Denpasar (Bali's National Academy of the Arts), he has been an artistic collaborator with the Abhinaya Dance Company, ShadowLight Productions, and UCLA's Asia Pacific Performance Exchange (APPEX). He is the founder and director of Çudamani, one of Bali's most innovative new gamelan ensembles, which has toured internationally. Çudamani has become a vital artistic center in Bali, endeavoring to study and preserve classic forms of Balinese arts.

Elaine Buckholtz, visual and set designer, is a multi-media artist living in San Francisco. Her work combines the mediums of moving light, video, sculpture, and sound. She has worked with Merce Cunningham and Meredith Monk recreating their visual environments internationally, and with Pamela Z as a Lighting Designer. Following her first solo show at The Luggage Store in San Francisco, her worked has been shown at The San Francisco Arts Commission, New Langton Arts, California College of The Arts, Stanford, The Wexner Center, and Fusion Art Space. She attended The California College Of The Arts on a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and recently obtained an MFA at Stanford University.

Rashidi Omari Byrd, dancer and actor, was brought to the stage through dance. Hip-Hop, B-Boying, Popping, Locking and House are integral parts of his repertoire. He has been performing professionally for thirteen years. His recent performance with Dream Dance Company in Full Circle was noted for bridging the gap between urban dance and traditional folkloric styles. He was recently invited to choreograph for The Movement, a Philippino-American cultural theatre production based in San Francisco. He currently tours with DREAM Dance Company, Hip-Hop crew Company of Prophets, as well as live bands Loco Bloco and Unsmokables.

Jack Carpenter, lighting and set designer, has designed lighting and scenery for dance, music, theater, museum exhibits and opera. Notable recent productions include Picture: Powderhorn/Redhook for Zaccho Dance Theatre, Beauty Queen of Leenane for Berkeley Repertory Theater, Thirsting for Oakland Ballet with a live music by Zap Mama, Grace for Joe Goode Performance Group, Concerto Romantique for San Francisco Ballet, and MLADA for SF Symphony. Mr. Carpenter has received four Bay Area Critics Circle Awards, and four Isadora Duncan Awards for lighting design. He is currently the Production Manager for the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival.

Ellen Sebastian Chang, director, is a director, creative consultant and writer. She has created and directed a broad range of work: hip-hop youth performances, opera, site specific pieces and radio. And worked with some of the most interesting artists in the country, including KITKA, Youth Speaks, Oakland Opera Theater, Aya De Leon, Whoopi Goldberg, Jon Jang, and James Newton. She was a cofounder and artistic director of Life on the Water, a national and internationally known presenting and producing organization at San Francisco's Fort Mason Center from 1986 through 1995.

Jay Cloidt, sound designer, is a composer and sound designer. He has collaborated with many groups, including the Paul Dresher Ensemble, the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, ODC/San Francisco, California EAR Unit and Kronos Quartet. Recent projects include two dance scores for ODC/SF: Flight to Ixcan, and Noir; Span, a piece for solo piano; the score for the feature film Send Word; and Eleven Windows, his third commission for Kronos Quartet. Currently, he is collaborating with Amanda Moody on a new music theater piece, D'Arc. The San Francisco Chronicle has dubbed Cloidt "The Spike Jones of the Bay Area new music scene."

I Wayan Dibia, choreographer, is a one of Bali's most noted artists and scholars, whose expertise include dance performance, choreography, theater, music, and scholarship. He is a senior faculty member and former director of the National Institute of the Arts (ISI), in Denpasar, Bali, and the founder and director of GEOKS, a noted music and dance center in Bali dedicated to contemporary performing arts. In the traditional realm, his specialties include topeng (masked dance), barong (a form of ritual dance), and kecak (dance with vocal chant). A graduate of UCLA with a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies, he has performed and taught in more than twenty countries. Currently he is on leave from ISI Denpasar to teach at Holy Cross University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Goenawan Mohamad, poet, is an essayist, journalist, librettist, and poet regarded internationally as one of Indonesia's leading intellectuals. In 1971 he founded Tempo, which became Indonesia's largest weekly news magazine, and served as editor until its closure by government censors in 1994. He is an vocal critic of government policies and an advocate of democracy and free-speech in Indonesia. In 1992 he was named recipient of the distinguished Nieman Fellowship from Harvard University and, in 1993, was presented the first Professor A. Teeuw Award from the Netherlands. In 1998 he received an award in New York from the Committee to Protect Journalism. The following year, he was nominated by World Press Review as international editor of the year.

I Made Moja, dancer, is a dancer and visual artist from Batuan, a Balinese village known for its classical music and dance, wood carving and painting. While his compositions draw from Hindu mythology and traditional village life, he has taken it in new directions; and his work has been exhibited at several Bay Area venues. As a dancer, appearing frequently with Gamelan Sekar Jaya and with ShadowLight Productions, a San Francisco theater company that takes its inspiration from traditional shadow puppet theater. He has created set designs and puppets in ShadowLight's productions, and performed a variety of roles including Art Director of A (Balinese) Tempest, an adaptation of Shakespeare's play.

Rose Nisker, dancer, has been performing Balinese and other dance styles for more than twenty years. At the age of eight, she made her debut dance performance with Gamelan Sekar Jaya at the Bali Arts Festival in Denpasar, and has performed in four tours to Bali, EXPO '86 Vancouver, and the World Festival of Sacred Music at the Hollywood Bowl. She has performed Bharata Natyam at temples and venues at the University of Mysore, India; and Flamenco dance at Pena La Plateria in Granada, Spain. In 2005, she played the role of Prospero in ShadowLight Theater's A (Balinese) Tempest. Most recently, she assisted in the creation of Franco Dragone's Le Reve, a circus theater show.

Tjokorda Istri Putra Padmini, dancer and co-choreographer, is one of Bali's most widely known dancers and teachers. Born in Jakarta, Indonesia, she studied dance at various national arts institutions, including KOKAR, ASTI Denpasar; and ISI Yogyakarta, where she received her MA in Creative Arts in 2002. She has been on the dance faculty at ISI Denpasar, the National Institute of the Arts in Bali, since 1985. Her work as a choreographer has been presented in many Indonesian festivals and competitions in Bali and Jakarta. She has also participated in several international arts programs, including EXPO Sevilla (Spain), KIAS (the Indonesia-USA artistic exchange program), and ISTA (The International School of Theater and Anthropology) in Bologna, Italy.

I Ketut Rina, dancer and co-choreographer, is a dancers and choreographer from Bali, well known for his work in modern Indonesian and international theater works. He studied from a young age with the Javanese choreographer Sardono W. Kusumo as well as several master Balinese dancers, and continued formal training at the National Academy of Performing Arts (STSI) in Bali. In Sardono's The Sorceress of Dirah, he toured throughout Europe. His work Tarian Cak was presented at the Festival Shiraz in Iran. He performed at Expo 86 in Vancouver, Canada; in several exhibitions in Japan, and the Singapore Festival of the Arts. In the late 1990s, he was part of the ensemble Temps Fort Theater, which toured throughout Asia, France, the U.S., and Brazil. His most recent dance role was in Robert Wilson's acclaimed theatrical work, I La Galigo.

Emiko Saraswati Susilo, dancer, has performed internationally as a dancer, musician and vocalist. Born in Honolulu and raised in Los Angeles, she was surrounded by great artists from a young age. She played gamelan informally as a child and began to study Balinese and Javanese dance twenty years ago with Ni Made Wiratini and the late master KRT Sasmintadipura. In 1990 she began her formal study of Javanese gamelan and singing under master musician and dalang Midiyanto, and later continued under Tri Haryanto. She travels frequently between Indonesia and the United States and is a founding member of Çudamani, a Balinese arts organization dedicated to the study of traditional Balinese arts and to creating opportunities for young artists for artistic experimentation.

Wayne Vitale, composer and director of Gamelan Sekar Jaya, is a composer, performer, and scholar whose work has centered on Balinese music for the past 28 years. His compositions for gamelan are known throughout Bali through live performances, recordings, and television programs, and have impacted the evolution of kebyar music. Under his direction, Gamelan Sekar Jaya has developed into a performing ensemble of unparalleled international reputation. He has taught Balinese music at Portland State College, Pomona College, San Francisco State University, and CODARTS Music Academy in Rotterdam; published articles on Balinese music, released critically acclaimed CDs of Balinese music on his recording label, Vital Records, and travels internationally to tune and restore Balinese instruments.

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