E-Mail This Article to a Friend Cultural study Çudamani at Sanders Theatre BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

It’s almost a cliché to observe that Balinese arts are woven into the culture of that tiny Indonesian island. Like all clichés, this one is built on bedrock, and the music-and-dance group Çudamani, which World Music presented Saturday night at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre, provided an exceptionally good validation. Its theatricalized version of an odalon festival, where an entire village gathers to summon and venerate the local deities, showed how spirituality permeates daily life, from mundane domestic tasks to devotional dance forms.

Many foreign companies have figured out how to give theatrical coherence to traditional dances, but Çudamani’s folkloric first act constituted more than a travelogue. As the villagers gathered to prepare for the festival, their tasks were choreographed to forecast the music and dances to come.

Women with brooms whisked a simple antiphonal meter. Two men sat upstage holding rod puppets and conducting an animated dialogue. Other men laid out baskets and tools and created complex interlocking rhythms as they carved imaginary meat, scraped and pounded imaginary roots and grain. Their quiet conversation gradually consolidated into a rhythmic chanting very much like the raucous but highly organized cak, or monkey chant. They used real implements and other props needed to make these sounds, but some of their actions were mimed, as if the material world had dissolved into pure music.

While this was going on, women prepared offerings and priests were uncovering costumes and set pieces that were to be used in the ceremony. Cloths were taken off the gamelan instruments. There was a sense that sacred objects, even the gods themselves, inhabited the place and needed only to be summoned properly to make their appearance.

Four men were dressed in costumes by assistants; then they danced the fierce and warlike Baris Gede. The other men leaped up with loud cymbals and chanting into a jumping ring around the cluster of artfully arranged offerings.

Act two represented the odalon ceremony itself, much condensed in time and space. The festival ordinarily takes place inside the temple compound, where people can wander from one event to another over the course of several hours. At Sanders, the low metallophones, tuned bowls, and gongs of the gamelan defined a formal space, but between specific dance and musical numbers the performers walked casually around, rearranging the positions of the instruments, bringing out props, administering holy water.

Again there was this feeling that all the elements were comfortable alongside one another, that girls could be transformed into sacred dancers, men could inhabit the fantastic body of the mythical Barong, or a child assist in a ritual. The clangor and competitive uproar of a simulated cockfight could be followed by moments of prayer and trance possession, and a dancer in gorgeous gold brocade could give way to the bumptious, shaggy, scorpion-tailed Barong.

As is customary in Balinese concerts, there were traditional dances — the women’s swaying, gracious offering dance Rejang, the young girls’ trance dance Legong, the flashy Kebyar — and musical selections to show off the gamelan in traditional and contemporary styles. But these flowed easily out of the sense of a community getting along with its festivities. What might seem a didactic recital was closer to the real thing.

Çudamani, both a performing ensemble and a community, is based in the village of Pengosekan, close to Bali’s cultural and touristic hub of Ubud. Led by artistic director I Dewa Putu Berata, its artists and teachers are presenting traditional arts and religious practices with a sophisticated international flair. For at least 20 years, dancers and musicians from Bali have engaged in active exchanges with America, and more recently with the Pacific Rim, as students, performers, and creative contributors. Çudamani has strong connections with UCLA’s World Arts and Cultures Department, and with a wider network of Bali hands in California, New York, and New England. The Cambridge-based Gamelan Galak Tika, for instance, has commissioned work from one of its principal composers, I Dewa Ketut Alit.

The program came with unusually good explanatory notes, too — another sign of the company’s touring savvy. Bali fans like me might have preferred a more extended exposure to the particular dances and musical works. I did want more of the gamelan’s glowing resonances and boisterous rhythmic outbursts. I scarcely had time to get into the undulating bodies and flickering hands of the legongs. But for those new to Bali, there was a good taste of everything, and for all, the authentic calm and acceptance of the final prayer, "Om om çanti om."