Show made from the fabric of Balinese life

The performance ensemble Gamelan Cudamani, last seen here as part of the 2002 World Festival of Sacred Music, is returning with a world premiere. The work’s creation was sparked by a desire to help non-Indonesians understand Balinese performing arts not as exotica but as part of the fabric of the everyday social and spiritual lives of the people.

Launching the group’s six-week national tour, “Odalan Bali: An Offering of Music & Dance” will play Saturday at UCLA’s Royce Hall as a benefit for the 2005 World Festival of Sacred Music, to be held in the fall.

Saturday’s audiences can expect the eye-filling opulence of shimmering, sinuous dancers, plus flutes and drums, and the bright gongs, bells and xylophone-like instruments of the gamelan orchestra.

However, instead of the usual mixed program of short pieces that tours outside Bali, “Odalan Bali” is a full-length work, composed and choreographed by a youthful company that has become one of Indonesia’s cultural treasures.

Framed as a morning- to-night temple festival day, it blends classical dance, masks, puppetry and traditional and contemporary music as it moves through a village’s rituals of purification, food preparation, offerings and religious ceremonies.

“With this performance, I want to show our relationship with people, with nature, with this world and with the gods,” Cudamani’s artistic director and co-founder, I Dewa Putu Berata, said last week.

He spoke from his village of Pengosekan, where the company has also established a school dedicated to the preservation and teaching of Balinese arts.

Among the works to be performed are the Barong, a sacred masked dance representing the revered spiritual force that protects the village, as well as the exuberant Truna Gandrung, which is so difficult that few artists now learn it and “it is almost lost,” Berata said.

“Putting this onstage is not any kind of transgression,” said Judy Mitoma, director of the UCLA Center for Intercultural Performance and Berata’s proud mother-in-law.

“They’ve been consulting with priests all along the way. Bali has a very open culture. As long as you’re respectful, they are very happy to share with the outside world.”

Well known for her forceful advocacy for Asian performing arts, Mitoma hopes the performance will encourage understanding “about how deeply the traditional values of a Balinese village are embedded in their ceremonies.”