Bali Alloy with JACK Quartet and Balinese Choreographer Dr. I Made Bandem and American composer Brian Baumbusch.

Bali Alloy

The JACK Quartet is currently fundraising for their collaboration with Balinese Choreographer Dr. I Made Bandem, and American composer Brian Baumbusch.

More information on the project is posted here:

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The JACK Quartet, New York, April 23, 2012:

We are excited to announce our new collaboration with Bali’s legendary choreographer and educator, Dr. I Made Bandem, and American composer Brian Baumbusch in preparation for a tour to Indonesia to perform at the Bali Arts Festival in June, 2012. The collaboration will involve a union of string quartet music with Balinese gamelan repertoire involving adaptations for string quartet of traditional gamelan pieces, and new works for strings, gamelan, and Balinese dance. The project began in 2010, and this year we have all been invited by the Provincial Government of Bali to present this first-of-a-kind collaboration at the annual art festival. We recently won a grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation in support of the project.

The performance at the festival will involve three, one hour long sets of different ensemble formations highlighting the JACK Quartet, Brian Baumbusch and Musicians, and the Balinese Makaradhwaja Performing Arts Group directed by Dr. Bandem. The show will include many different styles of music, from the secular to the sacred, and will present an array of new works all inspired by the long standing tradition of the Balinese performing arts. We have commissioned a new work for string quartet entitled Mantle Eruption based on the volcanic activity in the ocean’s around Bali, composed by Brian Baumbusch using Balinese tunings and choreographed by Dr. Bandem. The show will also include a 40-minute dance drama based on the Balinese legend of Calonarang, composed in collaboration by Mr. Baumbusch and famous Balinese composer Nyoman Windha, and involving new choreography by Dr. Bandem.

We arrive in Bali on June 21st, and will have a week to rehearse with the Balinese performers before our performance at the Art Festival in front of an audience of 5,000 people. The festival is infamous for being the authoritative presenter of the most exciting and definitive Balinese gamelan music, and the Balinese community looks to the festival to discover new trends that are occurring in the Balinese performing arts. We are excited about the challenge of adapting to the learning model of an unfamiliar tradition of performing arts, and look forward to the opportunity to present our own interpretation of this famous culture of music and dance to a community of native listeners.

This engagement is supported by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation through USArtists International in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.