Audiences experienced the living culture of a Balinese village in "Odalan Bali: An Offering of Music and Dance," Oct. 22 and 23 in Bailey Hall. The Oct. 22 evening performance, presented by the Cornell Concert Series, was followed the next morning by a free one-hour program for more than 400 area schoolchildren.

With a colorful stage set and costumes, masks and headdresses, the 26-member ensemble Gamelan Çudamani staged a theatrical and dynamic re-creation of an elaborate temple ceremony, or Odalan, designed to create and maintain harmony among the divine, the human and the natural worlds. Thousands of such ceremonies are celebrated at temples across Bali each year.

Combining festival and Hindu ritual, spirituality and community, the production went from preparing offerings and appeasing mischievous spirits to dances that celebrate youth and honor a protective, lionlike creature called the Barong.

"In Bali, dance is not something that's separate from life," said Emiko Susilo, assistant artistic director of the ensemble. The lead dancers, 16 and 17 years old, had been dancing for 10 years, she said. The dances, performed with precision and technical skill, included the classic Legong as well as new choreography.

Onstage, the gamelan musicians were integral to the action -- playing gongs, wooden drums, suspended bronze pots and kettles hit with wooden sticks, metal hammers, rubber mallets or bare hands; and the gambang and saron, xylophonelike instruments that carry the melody line. The instruments comprised a hybrid gamelan orchestra, providing seven tones rather than the traditional five.

Gamelan Çudamani also performed at Cornell three years ago, invited by the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble and its director, Martin Hatch, an associate professor of music.

"I took them around to five different schools and GIAC [Greater Ithaca Activities Center], and they remember Ithaca as a home away from home," Hatch said. "They're very interested in the way that arts function in people's lives and want to communicate the immediacy of that in Balinese life."

The students attending Oct. 23 included sixth-grade classes from Boynton and DeWitt Middle Schools; fifth-, sixth- and seventh-graders from Immaculate Conception School; seventh- and eighth-grade band members from Trumansburg Central School, English as a Second Language students from DeWitt and orchestra members from Ithaca's Alternative Community School. The educational outreach program was coordinated by Cornell's Southeast Asia Program [SEAP], with assistance from the Department of Music and Cornell Gamelan Ensemble.

"For our students, this event was much, much more than an 'exotic' performance. It made them proud of their own cultures, too," wrote teacher Patricia Forton of her group of DeWitt ESOL students from Korea, China and Burma. One Burmese refugee boy, she said, "was uplifted by the example of so many strong, proud, talented Southeast Asian 'brothers.'"

SEAP provided teachers from the schools with a resource binder of background materials on Indonesian life and culture, including food, music, religion and dance. An Indonesian "explorer box" of materials was also loaned for use by a class at Boynton Middle School.

SEAP Outreach is funded in part by a U.S. Department of Education National Resource Center grant.

For more information on the performers and the outreach program, visit http://www.cudamani.org and http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/southeastasia/outreach.