Back at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to work with a class in Indonesian performance, Sulochana Dissanayake ’09 works with rod puppets in Olin Arts Center during a rehearsal for a May 14 concert. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“I learned the value of doing what you love for a living through the professionals I met at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ – who were all 100 percent committed to their chosen path,” Sulochana Dissanayake ’09 told the seniors gathered for the annual honors banquet on May 6.

In a world crisscrossed with intriguing life paths, Dissanayake’s stands out. A double major in economics and theater at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, and a Watson Fellow after she graduated, her chosen path afterward ultimately led home to Sri Lanka.

There she launched Power of Play, a communication company dedicated to practicing performing arts with a special focus on puppetry and theater for education, awareness, reconciliation and development in Sri Lanka.

Sulo Dissanayake ’09 gives the keynote address at the May 6, 2015, honors thesis dinner. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

But this month her path has brought Dissanayake back to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, where she is collaborating with the Short Term gamelan ensemble and Indonesian guest artists on a performance of puppetry and music at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 14, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission to the performance is free. The event is made possible in part by support from the Edith C. and Raymond A. Kendall ’19 Endowment Fund and a gift from Eijk and Rose-Marie van Otterloo. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

Titled Stories From the Seven Seas, the program pulls together:

• two Indonesian puppetry styles, Javanese shadow puppets and Sundanese “wayang golek” or three-dimensional rod puppets;
• Dissanayake’s puppet work, which is influenced by wayang golek and Sri Lankan folk traditions;
• and the percussion-based Indonesian music called gamelan, performed in this case by students in the Short Term unit Performing Musical Art of Indonesia.

Gamelan is a traditional Indonesian musical form played on tuned percussion instruments. The term can refer to a given collection of instruments, which tend to be crafted in sets, as well as to the genre itself. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has two sets of gamelan instruments.

Visiting ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ from West Java are wayang puppeteer Kodrat Hidayah Taryana and Jaja Diatmaja, who instructs the 19-year-old Taryana at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Bandung, West Java.

Sulochana Dissanayake ’09 explains a fine point of puppet communications to students in the course Performing Musical Art of Indonesia, Taizaburo Inoue ’18 of Toon-Shi, Japan, and Leah Zulkoski ’15 of Charlotte, Vt. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Diatmaja will conduct the gamelan ensemble and provide the highly specialized drum accompaniment for the wayang golek puppetry, says Gina Fatone, associate professor of music and director of the gamelan ensemble.

“Sulo is used to performing collaboratively, so Kodrat will perform with Sundanese puppets” — referring to a region in West Java — “alongside the Sri Lankan version of the wayang golek puppets that Sulo uses,” Fatone explains.

The program will include “The Power of People,” a puppet story that Dissanayake created collaboratively with students in the Performing Musical Art of Indonesia course. A classic tale of good vs. evil set in a fictional land facing the real perils of a modern country, “The Power of People” the story pits a fallen leader against a true savior who has rebelled against the regime.

“Finally, evil succumbs to good in an epic battle,” says Dissanayake, “which ends with the reminder that each human is a combination of good and evil — and true victory is achieving a sustainable balance.”

Dissanayake was prominent in the theater department during her time at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Among other achievements, she was one of the rare students to direct a mainstage production — in this case, a 2008 production of Sam Shepard’s Lie of the Mind. She graduated cum laude from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

With the ultimate dream of founding a theater company and school to explore sociopolitical issues in her native Sri Lanka, Dissanayake visited Indonesia and South Africa to observe how people in these countries —former colonies with social, political and economic histories similar to Sri Lanka’s — use puppetry and nonverbal theater to explore socially critical issues, an approach not common in Sri Lanka.

Surrounded by gamelan instruments, Sulo Dissanayake ’09 talks with students in the 2015 Short Term course Performing Musical Art of Indonesia. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

In Indonesia, Dissanayake studied wayang golek, in which wooden puppets are controlled by rods attached to the hands and a central rod attached to the body and head. There she worked with the most famous wayang golek dalang (master puppeteer), the recently deceased Pak Asep Sunandar Sunarya.

“Indonesian puppeteers have made their work relevant and entertaining to modern audiences,” Dissanayake told the Sri Lankan art magazine Artra. “And that was the goal I came back to Sri Lanka with, that we’re going to revive what’s ours, in terms of puppetry and traditional arts, and we’re going to make it relevant to modern audiences.”

Dissanayake founded Power of Play upon returning to Sri Lanka after her Watson year. Power of Play seeks to use the puppetry and other arts not only to entertain, but also to promote communication and break social, political and economic barriers in Sri Lanka.

“You can’t get angry at a puppet,” Dissanayake said in an interview with the magazine Lanka Woman. “A completely genuine channel of communication is created between puppet and audience.”

The shadow puppets to be used in the performance are part of a collection of more than 300 on permanent loan to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College. David Eisler, an attorney in New Hampshire, has loaned the collection to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to honor the memory of his father, Dr. Milton Eisler, and to ensure that the collection remains intact.

“Songful Vietnam” artistic director Phong Nguyen.

Mid-November concerts at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ reflect the diversity and international scope of the arts at the college.

In the span of four days, the college’s Olin Arts Center Concert Hall presents an evening of Vietnamese performing arts, two performances of Carl Orff’s choral masterpiece “Carmina Burana” and an afternoon of Indonesian music and shadow puppetry.

Songful Vietnam: Three Rivers — One Source, featuring performers in a variety of traditional genres, takes place at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 14.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Choir, under the direction of John Corrie, performs “Carmina Burana” at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Nov. 15-16.

“Perang Kembang” (“The Flower Battle”), a family-friendly performance of Indonesian shadow puppetry by guest artists accompanied by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra, takes place at 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 17.

All those performances are open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required, available at . The Olin Arts Center Concert Hall is located at 75 Russell St. For more information, please call 207-786-6163 or email olinarts@bates.edu.

‘Songful Vietnam’

Under the artistic direction of Phong Nguyen, five performers from Vietnam and the United States offer Songful Vietnam: Three Rivers — One Source, an evening of music, poetry, dance and dramatic pieces from the traditions of the Hong (“Red”), Huong (“Perfume”) and Mekong river regions.

The event is co-sponsored by the departments of art and visual culture, music and theater, by the Asian studies program and by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Museum of Art.

The diverse works on the program represent traditional, ethnic and contemporary influences, and draw on the lowland and Central Highland cultures of Vietnam.

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John Corrie conducts the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Choir.

‘Carmina Burana’

“Carmina Burana” may get its broadest exposure nowadays through the popularity of its opening theme as end-of-the-world movie soundtrack music. But in fact, the monumental choral work that German composer Orff created in the 1930s is a musical setting of poems dating back to the 13th century and celebrating nature, fate, tavern society and especially love.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Choir is composed of 60 singers, including 10 student soloists. This production of “Carmina Burana” is arranged for two pianos and six percussionists including three ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students. The pianists for these performances are Chiharu Naruse and Bridget Convey of the college’s applied music faculty.

Corrie began teaching musicianship at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 1982, conducting the College Choir in 1986 and teaching voice in 1991, and he became college organist in 2005. He is a harpsichord and organ performer with degrees from the Oberlin Conservatory, Northwestern University and Yale University. He has been artistic director of the Maine Music Society since 2006.

Sumarsam in performance.

‘The Flower Battle’

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra, a student ensemble performing Indonesian percussion-based music, will be joined by three guest artists from Wesleyan University for “The Flower Battle.” Puppet master Sumarsam and musician I. M. Harjito are well-known and highly respected gamelan musicians. Also performing is Maho Ishiguro, a doctoral student who will play a gamelan instrument called the “gender.”

This “wayang kulit,” or shadow puppet performance, is an hour-long story adapted from the Sanskrit epic “Mahabharata.” During a tumultuous time, the hero Arjuna attempts to clear his mind by taking a journey in a forest of great beauty. He and his companions are confronted by the fanged Cakil, a demon sent by the enemy, and his minions.

Ultimately they engage in the “Flower Battle,” which gives the puppeteer a chance to demonstrate his skill at the intricate manipulation of several puppets.

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A ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College alumna who used her 2009 Watson Fellowship to study performance arts in South Africa and Indonesia returns to discuss her experiences at 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 10, in the college’s Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St.

An information session about applying for the Watson follows.

Sulochana Dissanayake of Pita Kotte, Sri Lanka, was one of 40 recipients of the 2009 fellowship, a $28,000 award supporting a year of independent research abroad. Driven by her ultimate goal of creating a Sri Lankan theater company and school that will examine her own country’s social and political issues, Dissanayake used her Watson year to study performance traditions in Indonesia and contemporary theater companies in South Africa. .

South Africa and Indonesia “are similar to Sri Lanka in terms of our colonized histories, and economic, social and political backgrounds,” Dissanayake explained after receiving the fellowship. “But both these countries, South Africa specifically, have discovered theater as a voice of their people — something yet to be done in local English-language theater in Sri Lanka.”

Accordingly, her goal for the Watson-funded research was to observe the creative and developmental processes from start to finish, from the conception and writing of a socially relevant play to its casting and direction.

Entranced by performing since she was a toddler, when she and her father would improvise skits for the family, Dissanayake received the Watson at the end of a remarkable ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ career. She was one of the rare first-year students to direct a production by the student-run Robinson Players, and as a senior directed one of the college’s two annual mainstage productions — a responsibility usually undertaken by a professor of theater. All told, Dissanayake directed nine productions at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

In addition, during summer 2008 she was a directing intern at the acclaimed Guthrie Theater, in Minneapolis, and during the previous summer apprenticed at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, in Massachusetts.

Dissanayake double-majored in theater and economics, deliberately coupling creative development with coursework that acknowledges practical realities. “My goal is to ensure that when I set up an independent contemporary theater company in Sri Lanka, I’ll be able to make wise financial decisions.”

The Thomas J. Watson Foundation was created in 1961 by Mrs. Thomas J. Watson Sr. in honor of her late husband, the founder of International Business Machines Corp., widely known as IBM. The one-year Watson Fellowship offers college graduates of unusual promise a year of independent, purposeful exploration and travel, in international settings new to them, to enhance their resourcefulness, imagination, openness and leadership, and to foster their humane and effective participation in the world community.

At least one ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ senior or graduate received a Watson Fellowship every year from 1985 through 2000, in 2002 and 2003, and from 2006 through 2009.

An original composition by a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ senior from West Virginia is featured in a concert by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Orchestra at 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 11, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

“Gamelan” refers to a broad genre of traditional Indonesian music played primarily on percussion instruments. Barbara Byers, an interdisciplinary major in music and dance from Elkins, W.Va., composed and will dance a piece titled “Monkey” that’s included on the program. Byers studied various traditional performance disciplines, including gamelan, while in Indonesia last summer on a Phillips Fellowship from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

The concert is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The program comprises a variety of instrumental and vocal music, including a contemporary arrangement of a traditional lullaby. Also included is a solo masked dance that originates in Cirebon, a city on the north coast of West Java, and portrays a character from the Hindu epic “Ramayana.”

Assistant Professor of Music Gina Fatone directs the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Orchestra. The ensemble is composed of students and faculty members Carol Dilley, associate professor of dance, and Jennifer Woodruff, visiting assistant professor of music. The concert will also feature the vocals of a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alumna, Lisa McClellan ’09.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College has gamelan instruments from Central Java and West Java, Indonesia. The instrument set named Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“Blossom of Inspiration”), acquired by the College in 2001, is composed of iron and brass pieces and was made in Central Java in 1997.

A smaller bronze chamber ensemble from West Java, of a type called gamelan degung, was donated to the college in 2007. The concert will feature both sets.

In addition to its public performances, the orchestra makes a distinctive contribution to ceremonial events at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and is increasingly integrated into the arts and cultural curriculum.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Gamelan Orchestra, joined by professional guest artists from Indonesia, performs in concert at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 14, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

A few days earlier, a public workshop in Indonesian dance featuring two guest artists from Saturday’s program takes place at noon Wednesday, March 11, in the Olin concert hall.

Both events are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The March 14 program is dedicated entirely to West Javan, or Sundanese, music. Guest artists include Wahyu Roche, a virtuosic drummer, and Ening Rumbini, a dancer who specializes in “jaipongan,” a popular Sundanese dance. Roche and Rumbini will perform both by themselves and with the orchestra. They will also lead the March 11 dance workshop.

The concert also features singer Rina Oesman, who performs in a classical Indonesian style, and her accompanist, Andrew Bouchard, who plays the “kacapi,” a stringed instrument similar to the zither. All four artists live in Bandung, West Java.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ orchestra will perform music from a variety of Indonesian genres including “tembang Sunda,” a formal style of sung Sundanese poetry, and “degung kawih,” an ornamented style of singing accompanied by the “gamelan degung,” a smaller chamber ensemble used in traditional music of the aristocracy.

Roche is a member of Jugala, a pioneering jaipongan group in Indonesia. The group opened for Mick Jagger in Jakarta in 1989. Roche currently performs as a freelance musician for several groups, has written music for the influential workshop theater founded by the playwright Rendra, and recently released his debut album as a vocalist.

Rumbini is a leading dancer of jaipongan, a modern popular style based on martial arts and village forms of dance. She has performed throughout Southeast Asia.

Unusually for a woman, Oesman studied with several master musicians and began performing when she was young. After winning first place in a prestigious vocal contest, she became a member of Jugala and began to tour internationally.

Bouchard began playing gamelan in 1984 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, under the direction of master drummer Undang Sumarna. From 1995 to 1998 Bouchard studied a variety of traditional instruments in West Java. He received a master’s in ethnomusicology from UCSC.

In addition to public performances, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Gamelan Orchestra makes a distinctive contribution to ceremonial events and is increasingly integrated into the arts and cultural curriculum.

The orchestra will perform on two sets of instruments, a complete Central Javanese set made by an artisan called Mulyadi, and a degung set acquired by the college in 2007 through the generosity of a private donor, Tony Lydgate, of Kaua’i, Hawaii. The degung instruments were made in Bandung, West Java, in 2006 by Asep Ahum.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Concert Series presents Gamelan Galak Tika, a Boston-area ensemble performing the gamelan music of Bali, Indonesia, in performance at 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 7, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Admission is $10 for adults and $3 for students. For reservations and more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu, or visit the concert series Web site.

is the Boston area’s first and foremost Balinese gamelan. The group performs traditional and modern Balinese dance and music, and develops innovative works that cross borders and defy genres. “Gamelan” refers to the large bronze percussion orchestras of Java and Bali, Indonesia.

The orchestra creates an “intoxicating tone of wave-like rhythms and ringing sonorities,” wrote a reviewer for the Newark Star-Ledger, who called the experience “a cross-cultural, color-rich mix of mesmeric gamelan resonance and rock drama!”

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ concert features legendary Balinese dancer and scholar I Made Bandem, former head of Bali’s prestigious ISI Arts Academy and author of “Balinese Dance in Transition” (Oxford University Press, 1995). He will perform traditional dance solos and duos while accompanied by Galak Tika’s 25-member ensemble of gongs, metallophones, drums and flutes.

The program also includes Galak Tika’s first performance of Bali’s most famous female dance, “Legong Kraton.” (The performer was not determined at press time.) Also on the program are different genres of instrumental music, both ancient and modern, performed on a variety of hand-forged and intricately carved instruments.

Galak Tika was formed in 1993 and is led by composer Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT. The words “galak tika” are classical Javanese for “intense togetherness.” The ensemble draws its members from the MIT community and functions in the tradition of a Balinese village “sekeha,” with decisions made communally and responsibilities shared among participants.

The ensemble has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at colleges in New England and New York. In summer 2005 Galak Tika toured Bali, bringing new American works to the Bali International Arts Festival as well as to villages throughout the island.

Its first ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ visit took place in 2004.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College Concert Series resumes in 2008 with acclaimed opera singers Kelly Kaduce, soprano, and Lee Gregory, baritone, on Saturday, Feb. 9; and the popular American roots band The Holmes Brothers on Saturday, March 1.

Gamelan music is played by a large ensemble using mostly percussion instruments – drums, tuned gongs and a variety of pieces akin to xylophones – along with voice, bamboo flute and a two-string instrument similar to a fiddle. Gamelan’s roots go back at least to the ninth century A.D., and today’s music also shows a variety of influences, notably Chinese, Indian and Arabic.

In structure and sound, gamelan music can be surprising to the unaccustomed ear. The percussion instruments create pure, sustaining tones that seem to come from all directions. The musical structure emerges from a sort of social order within the ensemble – one family of instruments laying out the basic melody, another elaborating on it, the different gongs cueing phrases and transitions.

The Indonesian islands of Bali and Java have distinctly different gamelan styles, although the two share instruments and musical fundamentals. “The Javanese style generally tends to be more mellow and stately,” where the Balinese is typically harder-edged and busier, even frenetic, explains Rose Pruiksma, director of the gamelan ensemble at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Pruiksma, a lecturer at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ since 2001, is a clarinetist and a specialist in French court music and ballet of Louis XIV’s era. While there seems to be some distance between 17th-century French court music and gamelan, Pruiksma points out that the latter is also court music, evolved as an important part of royal ceremony on Java.

In addition to Pruiksma and the 10 or so students in the gamelan ensemble, the concert features Pak Kuwat, a music master from Banyumas, a community in west central Java. Kuwat, who is accomplished on every instrument in the gamelan, has worked with the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ players since the beginning of March. Also performing is singer, composer and scholar Jody Diamond, director of the American Gamelan Institute, in Lebanon, N.H.

One reason gamelan is important in the academic setting, Pruiksma believes, is that “it gives students another way to experience making music. One of the nicest things, I think, about having the gamelan ensemble is that it is easy to incorporate students who have no prior musical experience.”

“In fact, having no prior musical experience can actually be an advantage, because you don’t have any of the preconceptions about how music is ‘supposed’ to go that you pick up when you train in Western classical music,” she says.

For more information about the performance, please call 207-786-6135.