Featuring Guests Dewa Ayu Eka Putri and I Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena
Sunday, May 19 | 3-4:30 p.m.
Memorial Chapel
Three ensembles (the LU student gamelan, and the community and children’s gamelans of the Lawrence Community Music School) will be joined by Indonesian performing artists Dewa Ayu Eka Putri and I Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena. Both guests come from respective families with deep roots in Balinese performing arts and work to bridge indigenous cultural practices with contemporary global perspectives.
This concert is free and open to the public!
About Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena
Putu Tangkas Adi Hiranmayena is an Indonesian artist-scholar serving as Assistant Professor of Music (Performance and Creativity), where he directs the Balinese Sound Ensemble and teaches courses on Heavy Metal Music, Electronic Music, and Noise and Activism. He also is a founding member of Balinese Experimental duo, ghOstMiSt, with dancer-anthropologist, Dewa Ayu Eka Putri; PAK Yeh (free-improvisation trio) from Denver, Colorado; and T.A.T.W.D. (improvised noise-metal trio) from Urbana, Illinois.
Hiranmayena’s academic, performance, and compositional research focuses on the intersections of Cosmology, Indigeneity, Environmental Activism, and Performativity in Balinese Gamelan, Heavy Metal, and Noise. He takes post-colonial, performance studies, and creative ethnographic approaches to looking at the state of sound in the social sciences and humanities. His work constitutes equitable forms of knowledge production in the form of public-facing academic articles and Glocal creative artistic pieces.
As a creative ethnographer, Hiranmayena has written articles, coupled with artistic compositions, that interrogate the state of performance in South-East Asian performing arts. Most notably, his articles, “If a Dragon Dies in the Forest, Do Humans Hear a Sound?” (2022); “Fix Your Face”: Performing Attitudes Between Mathcore and Beleganjur,” (2022); “ghOstMiSt’s Trails of Indigeneity,” (2021), discuss myriad of perspectives on traditional, popular, and experimental Balinese performance idioms. Hiranmayena continues to perform and compose internationally while also maintaining status as board member of Insitu Recordings and Gamelan Tunas Mekar.
About Dewa Ayu Eka Putri
Dewa Ayu Eka Putri is a Balinese artist-anthropologist and is currently a Lecturer of Dance at Grinnell College. She teaches courses on Balinese Dance and Performing Arts, specializing in traditional and contemporary dance styles. Putri also maintains her position as dance instructor at the critically acclaimed arts organization, Sanggar Cudamani, from Pengosekan, Bali, Indonesia.
She received her B.A. from Universitas Udayana in cultural anthropology and is a leading figure in women’s gamelan ensembles all around Bali. Born into a family of artists, Dewa Ayu is internationally known for her collaborations of traditional and contemporary works in theater, music, and dance while actively working as a freelance research assistant. The majority of her work advocates for the legal protection of women and children which is highlighted in various discursive artistic modalities.
Currently, Putri has international projects with organizations in Mexico, Switzerland, and Japan, as well as annual projects in Indonesia. She also organizes the performing arts shelf in the virtual library at BasaBali Wiki.
