FESTIVAL ’90 : ‘Children of Bali’ Keep Island Traditions Alive : Youthful ensemble: With gamelans in tow, the group of 9- to 15-year-olds will demonstrate Indonesian music and dance this weekend.

I Putu Silayasa, 13, normally spends his monthlong mid-year vacation flying his kite, playing soccer, helping his mother clean the family batik shop or playing drums with his grandfather. But this is no ordinary summer.

Nearly every morning now, Silayasa has studiously practiced his drumming by playing along with a cassette of an adult gamelan ensemble (the traditional Balinese percussion orchestra). Later, he jumps aboard a flatbed truck for the hour’s ride to “Children of Bali” rehearsals at the government art institute in Denpasar.

Just ahead: a one-month, coast-to-coast American tour, beginning at 8 p.m. on Friday in UCLA’s Sunset Canyon Recreation Center as part of the Los Angeles Festival. (Other local performances: Saturday at 10 a.m. in Plaza de la Raza, Sunday at 6 p.m. in Griffith Park, private appearances on Tuesday at Rosemont Avenue Elementary School near Echo Park.) Besides performing, Silayasa and the other 9-to-15-year-olds on the tour are scheduled for residency activities, workshops and in-school demonstrations.

Silayasa began drumming five years ago but says he became serious about it only in the past six months. Dance accompaniments interest him most: the formal patterns of the Legong, in which he drums using a bare hand, or the stick drumming on a large instrument for the Baris, where the dancer cues him by changes of position and he, in turn, cues the gamelan.

He’s already told his parents that he wants to become a professional, and though his mother wonders who will take over the family business, she acknowledges that “once he gets a goal in his head, he has to reach it.”

Silayasa has never been on an airplane before and doesn’t know what to expect in exotic, far-away America. In contrast, 12-year-old “Children of Bali” Baris dancer I Made Bagus Basuki Mahardika is practically a jet-setter. He performed in Vancouver this April and even visited Disneyland on a Southern California stopover.

Mahardika is definitely eager to return, though he remembers being very cold in Canada and was turned off by the very idea of a hamburger. (“Bread with meat inside? No thank you.”)

He began dancing at 4 1/2 and says he particularly likes the fierce Baris solo because the character he portrays is “proud, strong, a warrior--and he wins.” He says his teacher told him that he didn’t have any problem being a warrior, but the layered, intricately decorated costume is very heavy, and he was warned not to surrender to it.

Turning is the most difficult task, he says, because the costume panels fly out. He’s got to manage all that and stay in control.

On stage, during the first full “Children of Bali” run-through in costume, Mahardika succeeds in dominating both the gamelan and all the glittering collars and aprons and ribbons he wears.

Indeed, his forceful stamping and dramatic shifts of weight (feet turned out, legs often in demi- plie ) make you forget how tiny he is. His eyes dart from side to side, his fingers quiver as his hands circle in the air.

He never gets nervous, he says, “because I always think of the character and how I can embody the spirit of what this dance is supposed to be.”

Mahardika’s father is principal of a junior high school and his mother a doctor’s assistant, but both continue to dance. He too plans a double career: dancer and doctor.

Like many of his 19 “Children of Bali” colleagues, he was chosen for this brand-new performing company after winning an islandwide competition.

Artistic adviser I Made Bandem, a leading Balinese authority on music and dance, explains that the idea of forming a children’s ensemble began to take shape about two years ago. “There was a great group in the 1930s,” he recalls, and on the historic 1952 “Dancers of Bali” tour to America and England, a few dancers were children.

The archetypally masculine Baris originated in military drill maneuvers. The vibrantly feminine Legong, (usually a duet or trio) derived from ritual origins. Each reached its present form in the early decades of this century and is not a single dance, but an evolving sub-genre.

Indeed, Bandem says that there are at least 16 different Baris dances, and master dance teacher Ni Ketut Arini counts 13 classic Legongs. “These 13 are set, too good to mess with,” she says, “though new ones are created all the time.” Arini says she makes all her students study Legong, and only after they’ve mastered that does she allow them to try newer forms.

“There are parts (of Legong) that are pure dance,” she explains, “and parts that tell a story. In all Balinese dance, you need a contrast between strong, sharp movements and sweet, soft ones.”

One of Arini’s pupils is 11-year-old Ida Ayu Gandayukti, the soloist at the beginning and end of the “Children of Bali” Legong. Onstage, Gandayukti carries two fans and wears a golden headdress trimmed with 75 frangipani blossoms, a glittering belt across her chest, a fringed collar and enormous tassels--all of which shimmer as if they were alive as she begins her incredibly swift, dynamic and intricate performance.

And America? Does she have a fantasy about her upcoming visit? A grave pause. “I was dreaming about flying in an airplane,” she says very quietly and shyly. “And then I went to ask someone where Mickey Mouse and Disneyland might be.”