This was more like the behavior of audiences in music clubs than in Western theaters, where they were expected to sit quietly and only leave or converse once the show was over. People would wander in and out, go get a snack from a cart or leave to smoke a bidi cigarette, and then return to watch some more. The audiences, mostly local villagers of all ages, weren't paying attention half the time. I was struck by other peripheral aspects of these performances. It wasn't all thrashing chaos, as a Westerner might expect, but a deeper kind of dance.Īs In Japanese theater, the performers often wore masks and extreme makeup their movements, too, were stylized and "unnatural." It began to sink in that this kind of "presentational" theater has more in common with certain kinds of pop-music performance that traditional Western theater did. (A gamelan is a small orchestra made up mainly of tuned metallic gongs and xylophone-like instruments-the interplay between the parts is beautiful and intricate.) In these latter events some participants would often fall into a trance, but even in trance there were prescribed procedures. Sure enough, night after night I would catch dances accompanied by gamelan orchestras and shadow-puppet excerpts from the Hindu Ramayana-epic and sometimes ritual performances that blended religious and theatrical elements. I soon discovered that if one saw offerings of flowers and fruit being brought to a village temple compound in the afternoon, one could be pretty certain that some sort of ritual performance would follow there at night.
I rented a small motorcycle and headed up into the hills, away from the beach resort. “On a break from the tour, I went south to Bali, a place the choreographer Toni Basil, whom Eno and I had met during the Bush Of Ghosts sessions, had recommended as being transporting and all about performance. Capitalism tends toward the creation of passive consumers, and in many ways this tendency is counterproductive.” The way we are taught about music, and the way it’s socially and economically positioned, affect whether it’s integrated (or not) into our lives, and even what kind of music might come into existence in the future. This might sound like I believe there is some vast conspiracy at work, which I don’t, but the situation we find ourselves in is effectively the same as if there were one. It can often seem that those in power don’t want us to enjoy making things for ourselves-they’d prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation. And yet for a very long time, the attitude of the state toward teaching and funding the arts has been in direct opposition to fostering creativity among the general population. “The act of making music, clothes, art, or even food has a very different, and possibly more beneficial effect on us than simply consuming those things.
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