Potential Disaster

Um, so I don't think I've mentioned that we're performing on Saturday. As in a few days from now. 3 pieces. One I don't think we've quite finished and we're completely diastrous at playing. It doesn't help that the rhythyms are really complicated and that the guys teaching us aren't sure of it either so it takes them awhile to work out the tunes and the patterns before showing us. Not to mention that yesterday I learned 3 slightly different versions of the same thing, today starting out learned another 3 versions from 3 different people, and all of these left out a difficult part we'd spent about 20 minutes on the day before that the guys today were insisting I didn't play. Needless to say I spent the morning extremely frustrated. We'll see how this goes.

The performance is for a cremation ceremony for 2 members of the royal Balinese family. At first I was highly uncomfortable about playing here, but after we talked about the ceremony I don't feel colonialist and now the uncomfortable feeling has changed to pure fear at the thought of performing pieces we've only been playing for 2 weeks in front of a few thousand people. Thats right, I said thousand. Its mostly ceremony but as part of that there are lots of performances for entertainment while the ceremonies are going on. Balinese audiences are nothing like Western ones. They are very vocal, and laugh really hard when they enjoy something and will make all kinds of comments during the performance. So they will really be going wild to see foreigners, and the fact that there will be 30 of us dance and music students all at the same time, which I guess is a large number. Yikes! We're all ready to pee our pants from nervousness at this point. Some of the guys from the hotel might show up to give us some encouragement. I'll let you know how it goes.

But when we came to lunch the dancers were still practicing this dance with a move that is my new favorite, watch for it at the Portland clubs when I get back. Its supposed to look like a broken wing but its kind of sassy, I love it. We also got to do kecak today which is a blast. This time 2 of the guys were leading us, and you have to do what they say, its a lot of playing back and forth and tones of fun. A good ending to a highly frustrating day.