Bates College presents performances of Indonesian shadow puppetry and gamelan music at 8 p.m. Friday, March 19, and 3 p.m. Saturday, March 20, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The performances are open to the public at no cost.

The performers are the Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“blossom of inspiration”), Bates’ own gamelan orchestra; singer Jody Diamond, a New-Hampshire based international expert on gamelan; and puppetry master Joko Susilo, a visiting Fulbright scholar at Bates this year and a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.

Bates is unique in Maine and distinguished nationally for its resources in these performing arts, including the 4-year-old gamelan ensemble and an extensive collection of shadow puppets — around 250 — on permanent loan by David Eisler, of Dover, N.H.

The gamelan is the traditional orchestra of Java and Bali that is most familiar to the rest of the world. Its gongs, drums and xylophones are played according to systems of pitch and timing very different from typical Western music. The players in the Bates ensemble include students and faculty, and work under the direction of visiting assistant professors of music Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma.

The shadow-puppet story for the performances, Pruiksma explains, comes from the Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu epic of India brought to Java by Indian colonists hundreds of years ago. Titled Bima Builds a Kingdom, the tale depicts the character Bima cutting down a magic forest, fighting giants, falling under a magic spell and being freed by an ogre.

“While a traditional performance of this story could last all night, our version will be about an hour and a half long,” Pruiksma says.

The gamelan will also take part in Bates’ World Music Weekend next month. The group will perform with the Bates Steel Pan Orchestra on Saturday, April 3, and will welcome MIT’s Balinese Gamelan Galak Tika for a concert on Sunday, April 4.

In Olin Arts Center Concert Hall performances a week apart, Indonesian-style orchestra breaks new ground for the Maine music scene. A concert at 8 p.m. Friday, March 28, pairs the Gamelan Mawar Mekar with the Bates College Orchestra, a collaboration that may well be Maine’s first between the traditional Indonesian form and a Western-style orchestra.

A definite first is the premiere of a composition for the two ensembles by Maine composer Philip Carlsen, a visiting assistant professor of music at Bates and conductor of the orchestra.

Two other composers performing that night, American gamelan specialist Jody Diamond and Indonesian musician I.M. Harjito, also contribute works bridging Western and Indonesian sensibilities. Traditional gamelan works complete the evening.

Again at 8 p.m. the following Friday, April 4, the gamelan band shares a bill with two Caribbean-influenced ensembles: Bates’ own Steel Pan Rhythm Riders and special guests, the Bowdoin College World Music Ensemble.Both concerts are free and open to the public.

In its third year at Bates, the Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“blossom of inspiration”) has 13 members. The gamelan — a term referring to both the genre and the musical ensemble itself — is the traditional orchestra of Java and Bali. It’s a percussion-based music whose systems of pitch and timing are very different from the systems familiar to Americans.

The March 28 concert “shows what kind of exciting collaborations can occur when composers cross cultural divides and bring their own traditions to an encounter with something new,” says Rose Pruiksma, director of the Gamelan Mawar Mekar.

The program includes:
Carlsen’s Suite Mawar Mekar in its world premiere. The performance comprises two movements from a projected larger work. Jody Diamond performs as vocal soloist, singing texts from Tennyson’s Song of the Lotos-Eaters and Wordsworth’s Prelude.

Harjito’s Dhandhanggula, for gamelan and orchestra will also be performed. A renowned Indonesian musician, Harjito is an artist-in residence at Wesleyan University, where he teaches gamelan performance. This composition, which features a chorus singing in Javanese, was first composed for gamelan and then adapted for orchestral participation — one of the rare instances of such an adaptation by a Javanese composer.

Diamond’s Sabbath Bride will be performed. A major figure in American gamelan, Diamond is the founder and executive director of the American Gamelan Institute in Hanover, N.H., and a singer in the Javanese “pesindhen” style. Sabbath Bride is based on a Hebrew Sabbath melody.

The April 4 program is divided among the two Bates bands and the Bowdoin ensemble. The gamelan portion highlights the playing of Jesse Fox, a senior from Potomac, Md., who is a founding member of the ensemble and plays a type of xylophone called a “génder” (pronounced “ghen-dare”).

The Steel Pan Rhythm Riders play Caribbean calypso as well as jazz and other genres. The steel band was founded and is directed by assistant professor of music Linda Williams. On April 4 the band will concentrate on major Trinidadian composers Lord Kitchener, Len Boogsie Sharpe and David Rudder, Williams explains. She adds, “We especially acknowledge Sharpe’s tune Woman is Boss, because 16 of the 17 members of the band are female students. That’s a rare departure from previous years.”

Well-known Portland percussionist Michael Wingfield directs the Bowdoin College World Music Ensemble. For more information about both performances, please call 207-786-6135.

Sumarsam, a Wesleyan University professor who had his first experience with Indonesian performing arts as a boy in his East Javanese village, devotes two evenings to Indonesian shadow puppetry this week.

At 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 23, Sumarsam (who, like many Indonesians, uses only one name) gives a lecture titled “Performing Hindu Stories in Indonesia: Introduction to Shadow Puppet Theater (Wayang Kulit).” At 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 24, he performs a puppet play accompanied by Indonesian and American musicians, including Bates’ own gamelan ensemble. Both events take place in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St., and are open to the public at no cost.

As the name indicates, the essence of Indonesian shadow puppetry is the action of puppets silhouetted against a backlit cloth screen. Performance is labor-intensive for the “dhalang,” or puppet master. This person manipulates the puppets, speaks for all the characters, sings, directs the accompanying musicians and makes sound effects (usually with his feet).

Born in Dander, East Java, in 1944, Sumarsam took part in an all-night performance of Indonesia’s traditional, percussion-based gamelan music when he was 7, sitting in for a sleepy drummer. He joined that ensemble at age 8 and stayed with music, studying gamelan at a performing-arts high school and later at the college level in Indonesia.

He went to Wesleyan in the early 1970s as a visiting artist, earned his master’s degree there in 1976, and in 1992 earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology and Southeast Asian studies at Cornell. Today he is an adjunct professor of music and director of graduate studies in Indonesian music and theater at Wesleyan.

Wayang kulit integrates the percussion-based music called “gamelan.” Performing with Sumarsam on Jan. 24 will be several highly regarded, U.S.-based musicians, including singer Jody Diamond of the American Gamelan Institute and drummer Harjito, also of Wesleyan, which has one of the premiere gamelan programs in the United States. The Bates ensemble Gamelan Mawar Mekar will also perform.

The puppets that Sumarsam will use in the performance are part of a collection of more than 300 on permanent loan to Bates College. David Eisler, an attorney in Dover, N.H., has loaned the collection to Bates to honor the memory of his father, Dr. Milton Eisler. Eisler made the loan, he says, to ensure that the collection remains intact. It includes characters, animals and scenic elements.

Wayang kulit, Eisler says, is a “theater tradition as sophisticated as Shakespeare and 1,000 years old.”

Sumarsam’s performance on Jan. 24, depicting a climactic battle scene from a much longer play, is based on a Hindu story. “In Java, which is primarily Muslim, where most of the musicians are at least nominally Muslim, most of the traditional wayang is based on Hindu epic,” says Rose Pruiksma, director of the Bates gamelan program.

“Indonesian Islam is not generally fundamentalist Islam,” she says. It assimilated beliefs and practices from Indonesian Hinduism and pantheism. “There’s actually a very rich mixture of traditions and a very high degree of religious tolerance in certain ways,” she explains.

These presentations are part of the Bates program “Islam in the World, the World and Islam,” made possible by the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation.

For more information, please call 207-786-6135.