THE PRINCE OF THE PAGODAS, GONGAND TABUH-TABUHAN: Balinese Music and Dance, Classical Ballet and Euro-American Composers and Choreographers

Abstract

This article looks at the work of 20th century choreographers and composers whose inspiration was Balinese gamelan music. It focuses on two dance works, The Prince of the Pagodas (1957) by Cranko, re-choreographed by MacMillan in 1989, and Gong (2000) by Mark Morris and discusses their interconnection through the music of composers McPhee and Britten, and the relationship of their choreography with Balinese dance. The article reconsiders issues of influence and cultural appropriation, of transformation and translation and highlights the negotiation of sexual identity through the use of the gamelan as a gay marker among 20th-century North American composers.

¹This an extended version of a paper presented at the Sound Moves conference, Roehampton University, 5–6 November 2005.

Notes

¹This an extended version of a paper presented at the Sound Moves conference, Roehampton University, 5–6 November 2005.

²Recently released as a CD by Chandos Records (2003) together with McPhee's Tabuh-tabuhan, BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin.

³This should not be understood as referring to people playing gamelan or indeed to ethnomusicologists, but only to a particular group of composers and their compositions, as will become clear from the ensuing discussion

⁴Peter Stoneley has discussed Romantic ballets of the 19th century as erotic spectacles and has revisited the stereotypical connection between fairies and homosexuality (going well beyond the use of the term ‘fairy’ to refer to homosexual men in late 19th-century New York). He sees this connection as a ‘cultural reverberation around the idea of the fairy and the fairy's aura of otherness [which] enabled writers and artists to begin to articulate a queer or deviant sensibility even before the advent of the homosexual’ (2006: 37–38). We need to consider here that The Prince was conceived as a neo-Romantic ballet and that Cranko was a 20th-century homosexual choreographer – the choice of the story was his and so was the idea of collaborating with Britten. The references of the ballet to same-sex desire need to be further unravelled and the lack of any recordings of Cranko's choreography makes it difficult, if not impossible, to do so.

⁵Robert Ottoway, Review, Illustrated, 19 Jan 1957 (cutting,Theatre Museum archive, London )

⁶ Daily Telegraph, Review, 2 January 1957.

⁷I here would like to express my gratitude to Balinese dancer Ni Madé Pujawati, with whom I watched the 1990 video-recording, who helped me to identify with accuracy the Balinese dance elements in the work.

⁸ Kecak is a dance performed by groups of men who rhythmically chant the syllables cak-cak and move their bodies in unison. It was fashioned in the 1930s under the direction of German expatriate Walter Spies but it was inspired by earlier trance dances (Dibia and Ballinger 2004: 92).

⁹ Baris is a warrior ritual dance, performed by men (Dibia and Ballinger 2004: 81)

¹⁰ Daily Telegraph, Review, 2 January 1957.

¹¹I have seen the Royal Ballet performance live and also the video-recording kept in the video-archive at the Royal Opera House. I have also viewed a video-recording of Gong as performed by American Ballet Theater and here I will refer primarily to this version of the ballet. I am grateful to Mark Morris for allowing me to have my own copy of the video-recording to work from.

¹²It is understood that these boys were below the age of consent but in this essay I will not pursue the issue of McPhee's alleged paedophilia, though I feel obliged to make a note of it.

¹³‘Why the Orient seems still to suggest not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generation energies, is something on which one could speculate’ (Said 1978: 188).

¹⁴‘Queer,’ says Sedgwick, is ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made ) to signify monolithically’ (Sedgwick 1994: 8–9). Queer therefore does not necessarily refer to same-sex choices, though, she continues, the same-sex sexual expression remains its ‘definitional centre’. Queer denotes, in other words, ‘an identity without essence’ (Halperin 1997: 62).

¹⁵Nadine Hubbs (2004) has taken this further, investigating the link between composition and modern homosexual identity, exploring the gay input into American modernist music and its codes (such as tonality versus atonality), making a case for a distinctly queer sensibility in the work of several American modernist (closet) gay composers, such as Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and Paul Bowles, working at a time of intense homophobia.

¹⁶Interestingly, McPhee wrote in The Absolute Music of Bali that ‘the difference between a pastiche and a creative work in which foreign material has been so absorbed by the artist as to become part of his equipment is something which has never been completely recognised’ (quoted in Mendonça 2002).