Body music in Bali and monkey chant in San Francisco. These are cultural juxtapositions that don't seem too incongruous to I Wayan Dibia and Keith Terry.
This odd couple of choreographers spent 10 days along with their families at Snowbird Institute during early August, working on a piece that will occur at the point where their experience and talents intersect. And though theirs is an unlikely collaboration, it just may work.Dibia is a doctoral candidate at UCLA, in interdisciplinary study of Southeast Asian performing arts. He also holds a master's degree in choreography from UCLA, and is a prolific choreographer in his native Bali, where he is assistant director of the National Academy of Music and Dance. His specialty is Kecak or Cak (pronounced Tjak), which he is integrating with more contemporary forms in his own choreographies.
In its original form, Cak, or monkey chanting, was used to depict the story of the monkey army in Ramayana, the Hindu epic. It is high energy dance, "interlocking vocal patterns, ranging from primordial animal gutteral sounds to ethereal melodies of exquisite beauty and sophistication, which have inspired some of Bali's most innovative contemporary choreography," Dibia explained. He also specializes in Topeng Tua, or mask dance dramas, which he likes to integrate, along with other historic dance specialties, with more contemporary movement.
Terry creates body music, a hybrid form of expression made famous by Bobby McFerrin, though Terry said there was body music B.M. (before McFerrin), and he has his own original applications. "Body music has existed for a long time, especially among primitive tribes," he said. "In fact, body music was the first music in many cultures."
He began as a percussionist, having performed with the Pickle Family Circus, Robin Williams, Tex Williams, McFerrin and Charles "Honi" Coles, among others. Five years with the Jazz Tap Ensemble moved him to express himself with his own body, rather than his drums.
Terry finds big tie-ins between tap dancers and the old-time drummers. "They really were tap dancers," he asserted. "Some of us felt we would like to physically move, and a lot of what we once did on drums is transferred to our bodies. For me, it was very liberating, to suddenly move in space, not encumbered by my instruments.
"Body music is a fascinating new use and awareness of body sounds as old as man himself," continued Terry, a sandy-haired, skinny young man with the resilience of a rubber ball. "It is `played' by clapping hands, rubbing palms, popping fingers, stamping feet, slapping various body parts that give off different resonances (belly, chest, bottom), plucking the cheek, skipping and sliding, babbling and other vocal noises. I've seen my material spring up in TV commercials," he laughed.
The professional life of a body musician is not an orderly progression, for he deals in serendipity, combining and recombining with others, and only limited by his own imagination. Terry's many performing experiences include Live from Off Center on PBS, touring Indonesia with the American percussion ensemble Gamelan Sekar Jaya, performance at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, in prestigious theater and mime outlets, and choreographing under fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Since Dibia came to America eight years ago, he and Terry have become fast friends and found many points of contact in their artistic lives. To devise their collaborative work, they have conducted a series of workshops, and will do more before the fall of 1990, when the work, as yet unnamed, is scheduled for premiere at the Cowell Bayfront Theater in San Francisco, as part of the city's Festival 2000.
"We are weaving body music and Kecak through our imaginations, combining and extending these forms into a new artistic expression which blends, exchanges and stretches their sensibilities and possibilities," said Terry.
The evening-length work they envision will feature a cast of 24, 12 Americans and 12 Indonesians, including themselves, dancing in solo, ethnic group and all together. All will dance and vocalize, while many visual effects and percussion instruments such as tuned bells, gongs and cymbals highlight their movement. Life-size puppets will narrate the work.
Puppets have special significance in Bali, where "they represent the elders, with power over the future," said Dibia. "They are not gods, but guides, and maybe even ghosts. They may be shadow images, male or female."
Dibia will use his modern training to get his convention-oriented students in Bali to think in another culture, in a fresh way.
"Keith's and my dance cultures are really not too far separated," he said. "We have had to decide what can be blended. Rhythms are some of the most universal elements, though each set of dancers will be working with the gesture inherent to their own culture."
After the San Francisco run, the work is scheduled to appear in Los Angeles, New York City and Boston, and possibly Minneapolis. Then if funding holds up, it will go to Denpasar, Bali and village locations and Jakarta, Java.