DECONSTRUCTING DESTRUCTION
BY RITA FELCIANO

"The shattering of paradise" is how Kali Yuga director Ellen Sebastian Chang refers to the 2002 bombing in Bali in which 202 people from 22 nations died. A series of attacks in 2005 killed 23 more. A world indeed had crashed, not only for the Balinese people but for the music and dance lovers who have made pilgrimages to that magical isle where art is integrated into the texture of daily life.

Gamelan Sekar Jaya was particularly hard-hit. With both Balinese and American members, the El Cerrito–based music and dance group has had an ongoing, close relationship with Balinese culture.

'Kali Yuga': chaos and calm merge
El Cerrito's Gamelan Sekar Jaya performs a powerful piece set in a paradise shaded by religious, political conflict
By Mary Ellen Hunt
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

A fantastical battle between gods crosses paths with the realism of a modern world out of balance in Gamelan Sekar Jaya's spellbinding drama "Kali Yuga: The Age of Chaos," which premiered in its entirety at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall on Saturday night.

Co-sponsored by Cal Performances and World Arts West, this lavish, multitextured work draws its inspiration from Hindu cosmology in which the last of the four cyclical yugas, or ages of humanity, is called the Kali Yuga, a dark time marked spiritual dissolution, conflict and hypocrisy.

Gamelan Sekar Jaya performed excerpts from the evening-length piece at last year's San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, and it was such a worthy theatrical spectacle that it seemed a real pity there was only one day of performances from it.