Concert:
Saturday October 5, 7:30pm, Meyer Hall, Freer Gallery
Keroncong classics and newer kreasi (compositions)
Workshops:
Sunday October 6, 1pm and 4pm, Freer Gallery 5
Lecture/demonstration on the history and fundamentals of keroncong. Bring a stringed instrument to play along!
Endah Laras is a renowned keroncong performer with an equally robust background in traditional Javanese arts. Her father was a dalang (shadow puppeteer), her mother a dancer, and they taught her karawitan, sindhenan, and Javanese dance. This foundation in traditional Javanese arts laid the groundwork for her studies and collaborations in contemporary and experimental music. Laras has performed with acclaimed dalang Ki Enthus Susmono in the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Korea. She collaborated with Japanese choreographer Akiko Kitamura on “To Belong”, which appeared in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Indonesia. She routinely gives dance and music workshops at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and UWCSEA, an international school in Singapore. Her mellifluous and versatile voice lends itself well to keroncong, as heard on recordings with keroncong maestros Andjar Any and Mus Mulyadi.
Danis Sugiyanto is a professor of karawitan at Institut Seni Indonesia Solo (Indonesian Arts University of Solo) and a master keroncong musician. Born in Surakarta, Sugiyanto has appeared in musical and theatrical productions throughout the world. In 1997, he performed in a production of “King Lear” in Japan under the direction of Ong Ken Seng and Rahayu Supanggah. He also performed karawitan in a production of “I Lagaligo” by acclaimed director Robert Wilson and Rahayu Supanggah in New York (2005), Jakarta (2006), Melbourne (2006), Milan, and Taipei (2008). He is an accomplished composer who contributed music for a production with “Wayang Keroncong Gendut” at the Malay Festival of Singapore, 2016. With the support of a Fulbright fellowship, Danis Sugiyanto taught at the University of Richmond and the College of William & Mary as a scholar-in-residence during the Spring semester of 2018.
Social media aggregator Line Today reposted our video of Jali-Jali, calling it “luar biasa fasih” (extraordinarily fluent). It soared past 100k views in a week!
5:00-6:30 Family-friendly performance of Javanese and Balinese traditional gamelan music with Gamelan Raga Kusuma. Complimentary Javanese snacks and coffee. Audience is invited to try the instruments afterward.
6:30-7:30 Grab dinner at the food truck parked out front or at your fav Scott’s Addition restaurant/brewery. (Remember, Don’t Look Back [tacos] is right next door; and Courthouse Creek Cidery is in the back. . . )
7:30-8:30 Rumput String-band and Shadow Theater.
Suggested donation: $10 for Rumput or GRK, $15 for both. No one turned away for lack of funds.
US premiere of Akar at The Roundhouse, Richmond VA, September 2 2018.
Last September was the US premiere of Akar, our intercultural retelling of Jack & the Beanstalk, here in Richmond Virginia, following our tour of Java.
Come by James Simon Studios for an evening of experimental stringband music, dazzling vocal feats, scrolling panoramas and shadow theater.
Doors are at 7pm, music at 8pm. BYOB $10 donation
Soprano Anna Elder’s voice has been described by The New York Times as “ethereal…a voice that has blues, reds and purples in it”. She currently performs with ensembles Kamratōn and wolfTrap. She has appeared with Alia Musica and Nat28. Anna sang with Squonk Opera, premiering Go Roadshow and the Off-Broadway version of Mayhem and Majesty. Other engagements include Music for 18 with New Music Detroit, and appearing as a guest vocalist with Quince Ensemble. A graduate of The Eastman School of music, Ms. Elder’s repertoire includes works by Giacinto Scelsi, Luciano Berio, Georges Aperghis, Anton Webern, Kaija Saariaho, Arnold Schoenberg, and Claude Debussy. She will premiere a new piece by Elizabeth Brown in March and Her Holiness The Winter Dog, an opera by Curtis Rumrill for Kamratōn, Quince Ensemble, and Shana Simmons Contemporary Dance in May, 2019. Anna received a $10,000 award from an anonymous donor for her artistic contributions to Pittsburgh, PA. Anna can be heard on the album Squonk Opera’s “Go Roadshow” and can be seen anywhere from a basement to a concert hall. https://www.bleepbloopvoice.com/
Papercut artist, story teller, puppeteer, Katherine Fahey’s intricate cut paper artwork have become music posters, shadow puppets, crankies, as well as lush music videos, and films. Katherine spent years designing and printing posters, shirts, and CD covers for musicians before she becoming a performer in her own right through the form of shadow puppetry. She was drawn to this art from because of its accessible, intimate, and communal nature. She has performed locally and nationally at festivals, theaters, and schools. In the past few years, she finished her largest shadow puppet show yet, a moving panorama (or crankie) for a live action film for a Museum at Yorktown, a crankie for a public TV station in Kentucky, and her third commissioned shadow show for the Peabody School of Music. Katherine has presented at the National Puppetry Festival, Light City, and the National Paper Cutters Guild festival as a featured artist. Her most recent performance pieces include a show about the Arabbers of Baltimore, Edgar Allan Poe’s, The Raven, and a collaboration with two Inuit throat singers, a creation myth from Northern Quebec.
PERMIAS Penn State presents its annual gala event, Indonesian Cultural Night 2019, featuring a theatrical performance of the story of Roro Mendut, a classical folk tale of love and war adapted for the modern world.
Additional performances from Saung Budaya, a traditional Indonesian Dance group well known for performing for the Indonesian Embassy, and Rumput, playing Indonesian fusion music and kecak, a traditional Balinese style of interactive signing and chanting.
Date: Sunday, March 17 2019
Location: HUB Alumni Hall
Doors Open: 6:00PM
Join us at The Highpoint for an evening of puppetry and music! $8 donation! Doors are at 6pm, show at 7pm, be home by 10pm!
All the Saints Theater Company is a Richmond-based political puppet theater who uses paper-mache masks and larger-than-life puppets for activism and community-building. All the Saints is celebrated 13 years with last year’s Halloween Parade. Lily Lamberta, Director and master puppeteer founded the Annual Halloween Parade in 2006. Under her direction, a team of artists, activists, and community volunteers, build the puppets, organize the volunteers and execute Richmond’s favorite permit free street tradition for 12 consecutive years.
World Famous Bread and Puppet Theater visits Richmond on a rare 14 week tour across the continent!
BASIC BYEBYE SHOW: A manifesto on transformation, inspired by Albrecht Dürer’s apocalyptic woodcuts and the daily news.
“The Basic Byebye Show originally set out to define and illuminate the need for basic byebyes in our culture, but has progressed to respond to the event of regular mass shootings, in particular the massacre in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida”, says director Peter Schumann. “The theme is the birth of the gun by the 2nd Amendment Holy Bull, presided over by James Madison, which leads to the routine occurrence of horror and ends with the funeralization of that ill-conceived symbol of a free people.”
The Basic Byebye Show expands on the traditional byebyes of funerals and train stations by turning byebye-saying into a political act. It helps us say byebye to the gun – as a practical tool for massacre-making, as a symbol of “freedom,” as an instrument of political influence, and as an economic dependency. The show mourns the victims of gun massacres and turns this mourning toward the transformative political possibility of saying byebye to the gun once and for all.
After the performance Bread and Puppet will serve its famous free sourdough rye bread with aioli, and Bread and Puppet’s “Cheap Art” – books, posters, postcards, pamphlets and banners from the Bread and Puppet Press – will be for sale.
Rumput opens at 7pm, featuring crankie shadow theater, and traditional and experimental music. We will perform Akar, our retelling of the Jack & the Beanstalk tale, fresh off our tour of Java.
The Khmer Magic Music Bus helps Cambodian master musicians and their students return traditional music performance and education to the people of rural Cambodia, one village at a time.
Rumput will play a brief opening set.
Donations for the KMMB and their mission are much appreciated!
English
Indonesian
Rumput is honored to support keroncong royalty Endah Laras and Danis Sugiyanto for a concert and workshops at the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian Institution.
