They Sing the Body Eclectic : Balinese, American dancers and musicians learn a few cross-cultural lessons and take their show on the road

Tradition nuzzles innovation in “Body Tjak,” a collaborative work developed by Balinese choreographer I Wayan Dibia and American “body musician” Keith Terry. Centuries-old forms of musical and dance expression meld with contemporary riffs to produce a fusion that continues to evolve.

In late September, 12 American performers, representing several races and many parts of the country, threw in their lot with a dozen Balinese, teaming up in a Berkeley rehearsal hall.

“Body Tjak”--which has its last two California performances Friday at Mandeville Center Auditorium at UC San Diego, and Saturday at the Wadsworth Theater in Westwood--was then only a mad dream, the joint inspiration of two men who’d met in a gamelan orchestra, traveled to each other’s countries, and found themselves, years later, pushing the envelope of cross-cultural communication.

Now, trailing banners, strumming a bouzouki and carting puppets and percussion instruments, the 28-member ensemble is touring the West Coast before departing for a week of performances in Indonesia. (Finding East Coast dates for the project proved impossible during the planning phase. When positive word got out, presenters from around the country who initially rebuffed Terry’s overtures are calling to invite “Body Tjak” to their sites, but the ensemble will dissolve after the Indonesia performances.)

Jugglers and tap dancers, acrobats and instrumentalists, practitioners of classic and contemporary art, they had just 24 days to forge their many talents into a coherent program.

The hourlong piece--which opened last month at San Francisco’s Cowell Theater as part of the multicultural arts celebration Festival 2000--has been running for weeks, but as the performers get to know each other better, they share more of their own artistry, and off-stage improvisations have been incorporated into the show.

Fiscal improvisation has also become necessary since the collapse of Festival 2000, which was one of the project’s co-sponsoring presenters. A final payment of $8,000 promised by the bankrupt festival will not be made to the production, which is budgeted at nearly $250,000.

In the version seen during opening week in San Francisco, giant puppets, worn like coats by their operators, conducted a bilingual dialogue, sometimes translated and sometimes not, as they guided viewers through the forms and processes of the work.

“The big puppets are invented,” Terry said, while the small puppets, called wayang golek, are “traditional with a twist. We’ve tried to craft the text so that if you understand English or Indonesian, you’ll get the gist of the whole conversation. The other language becomes music.”

The Indonesian visitors, all graduates, teachers or students at the Indonesian College of Art in Denpasar, Bali--where Dibia is assistant director--knew one another before the start of the project, but the Americans met for the first time on Sept. 22 in a San Francisco theater.

“To understand another culture is an important layer of this project,” said the 42-year-old Dibia. “We learn about how to express ourselves, how to listen, to understand each other.”

“The cultural and educational aspects are as important as the final artistic product,” Terry agreed. “It was important, when selecting performers from both sides, to find people who were adventurous in spirit. We have some very special individuals.”

Learning to respect each other’s customs and cultural expectations was the first step; the visitors belong to several castes and speak various Balinese dialects, so Indonesian was chosen as the common language for their side of the project. Gestures considered harmless or casual by Americans, such as standing with hands on hips, communicate hostility to the Balinese; Dibia offered the American performers an introductory lecture on body language diplomacy.

“Body Tjak” is also part of the 18-month Festival of Indonesia, which opened here in September and runs into 1992. It exposes North America to the arts of the huge tropical region consisting of 17,508 islands crossing the Equator from Asia to Australia. “Body Tjak,” however, is blending forms to create something new and unexpected, and will bring American art expressions to Bali and Java side by side with Balinese music, chanting and dance.

“Tjak” is shorthand for “Kecak,” the Balinese monkey chant which was originally a part of Bali’s trance dance and now usually depicts the story of the Monkey Army in the Hindu epic “The Ramayana.”

Six years after they met at UCLA in 1982, Dibia and Terry began offering workshops combining “body music,” Terry’s eclectic explorations of the many sounds a body can make, with the rhythmic vocal patterns of “Kecak.” The two artists attracted many American colleagues to these workshops, held in the Bay Area, Colorado and Utah, and chose from them the group now working on the project.

“It was important to us to reflect a racial and regional mixture, balanced sexually and having a range of ages,” Terry said. The American participants, six men and six women, are all in their 20s and 30s; two each are from Boston, New York, Colorado and Los Angeles, and four from the Bay Area.

Among the cast are Los Angeles tap dancer Mark Mendonca, a member of the Jazz Tap Ensemble who is half Latino and half Japanese; Ron McBee, a New York percussionist who has recently toured with the Sun Ra Arkestra; Regina Bustillos, a native of Ventura who now performs with a Bay Area Brazilian dance company, and Kezia Tenenbaum, a Boulder-based member of the juggling/dance troupe Airjazz. Richard Chen See, an Oakland dancer, is a Chinese who grew up in Jamaica.

In addition to the performers, other American artists have contributed giant woven puppets, cross-cultural modular costumes, light projections and metal instruments; Balinese craftsmen have made bamboo instruments, gongs and masks. Fourteen foundations, corporations and government agencies have contributed close to a quarter of a million dollars in cash

and services. And participants have done a tremendous amount of volunteer work.

“We needed time to plan such an ambitious project,” Terry said recently in San Francisco. “It’s not as though we’re next-door neighbors. I approached the Colorado Dance Festival, and the Snowbird Institute invited us to be in residency. During the summer of 1989, we spent a lot of time together, trying our ideas on bodies, creating blocks of material.”

The two directors auditioned the Indonesian members of their group in June of 1990. Seven are men and five are women. While traditional dance forms are well-preserved in Bali, Dibia’s creative experiments are also warmly received.

“Even though I was trained in classical dance, my vision is how to keep ‘Kecak’ moving and alive,” Dibia said. “In 1915 a new dynamic music emerged in Bali, inspired by Western music. In 1976 I broke all the circle elements in the traditional forms. The Balinese welcome it.”

“The Balinese are steeped in tradition, but open to contemporary, innovative work,” observed Terry, who has traveled extensively in Asia. “It’s an unusual combination. I’ve been fascinated by cultures that don’t make a distinction between music and dance.”