Join us in Hadden Park for an evening of gamelan music, featuring new works by Gamelan Bike Bike, plus an opening set of ‘gender wayang’ music, traditional repertoire associated with the Balinese art of shadow puppetry ‘wayang kulit’.
A Co-Presentation with Publik Secrets
Performance begins at 5:30pm. Advance registration is requested. Registration is by donation. Bring your own seating or blanket on the grass. Picnics and beverages are also permitted. 🙂
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Gamelan Bike Bike draws its musical inspiration from Bali, Indonesia and its raw materials from the scrap metal bins of Vancouver. Founded in 2012 as a community-based ensemble, the group’s instruments were created from various scrap metals, including over 100 discarded bicycle frames, that were transformed into tuned metallophones and gongs. The 10-member ensemble is dedicated to performing new music for gamelan, including recent compositions from guest composer I Putu Gede Sukaryana (Balot) from Bali. The ensemble has presented performances with the Western Front, Vancouver New Music, Vancouver Folk Music Festival, and in 2017 released Hi-Ten, an album of original works with the Indonesia-based label Insitu Recordings. Gamelan Bike Bike is currently based at the Hadden Park Fieldhouse as part of the Publik Secrets fieldhouse residency with the Vancouver Park Board and regularly offers workshops and performances to the community.
Gamelan Gendér Wayang
Opening the evening is a quartet of musicians (George Rahi, Robyn Jacob, Kaia Stoesz, and Laura Crowe) who will perform repertoire from gendér wayang, traditional music used to accompany the ‘wayang kulit’, the Balinese art of shadow puppetry. UBC gamelan scholar Michael Tenzer described the music of gendér wayang as “intimate, richly polyphonic and full of mind-bending structural twists and turns lovingly attended to by generation after generation of its creators”. As part of the oral tradition of learning and performing Balinese gamelan, the featured pieces were learned from renowned gamelan masters such as I Wayan Suweca and I Made Subandi. The group is joined by Vancouver-based musician Laura Crowe, whose Masters thesis ‘Gender Wayang in twenty-first century Bali: new music and a growing performing tradition’ explores the recent popularity of this instrumental music outside of its association with the wayang shadow theatre.