Por Jonathan Bailey, personal de campo de la CBF
On the evening of 25 June, the museum gardens in Batubulan filled with the sound of gamelan and the quieter sound of people leaning in to l
isten. We called the evening Beauty as Resistance to Despair. It was five works, one arc, and a great many hands.
After 30 years here, “outreach” is not a word I use. What we do at Narwastu is slower and stranger than that. We make things together—Balinese and international musicians, Christians and Hindus and those who claim no name for the sacred—and in the making, something happens that no program note can promise. Strangers become a company. I think of how much of Jesus’s own ministry happened at shared tables, where the belonging was the message and the meal did the work no sermon could. We ate together many times through these weeks, and cooked—halloumi and kebabs from Cyprus, Jelena’s grandmother’s bread from Serbia, UK tacos and more, each of us handing the others a piece of home. That is the ministry. The concert is only where it becomes visible.
The five works came from differe
nt corners of the world and found their common ground on Museum Wiswakarma’s selonding and semar pagulingan instruments and joined by kekawin voices. Harriet Riley, a young British composer, gave us Tika, a meditation on the Balinese calendars. Kadek Astawa, whose roots run straight into this village’s soil, offered the earnest and comic Rujak. Chris Hull brought Kodok Nyasar, a lost frog’s lament for a homeland vanishing under new development. And Andys Skordis, our longtime collaborator from Cyprus, brought the second and third parts of AR…RAY…—a piece from a five-work cycle we have been building over several years, inspired by the Nawasangga, which painter and mentor Nyoman Darsane understood as a metaphor for the search for God. Jelena Vuksanovic held it all together as dramaturg.
Andys’s earlier work was grounded in the Greek instinct to stage the tragic in order to summon change. This time he turned. Given a world heavy with war, with the rise of authoritarian regimes, the erosion of human rights, we did not want to add one more lament. We wanted to insist on the beauty that persists. Not as denial. As refusal. We will not hand the world over to despair.
I keep returning to what built this evening: months of ordinary collaboration. Bilingual program notes drafted and redrafted. Gamelans carefully relocated with the blessing of Pak Ketut Pradnya, who family owns the museum. Wooden platforms measured to the centimeter for the selonding. T-shirts ordered from a local printer. Conversations with the warung manager about feeding everyone. None of this is spiritual on its face. All of it is the practice.
Because that is where the interculturality lives—not in the finished performance but in the negotiation that precedes it. When Harriet and Kadek sort out a rhythm neither tradition would have arrived at alone, they are doing the work of learning to belong to one another. The audience received the fruit of that. The company received the transformation.
An Argentine residency now unfolds through the summer—more musicians, more encounter, the community widening again.
I am grateful, as always, for the CBF friends who make this possible. You are not funding concerts. You are funding the slow, patient practice of building a community across every line that usually divides us. In a despairing world, that is not a small thing. It may be the whole thing.