DENPASAR, Bali (BPN) – After an intensive journey exploring the lineage of Balinese dance through research and creation, emerging Balinese choreographer Mang Tri Ray Dewantara presents his latest art work, Dancing with Marya—a significant marker in his development as a choreographer.
The dance was showcased at the 2025 Tainan Arts Festival on 26 October 2025 at the Yong Kang Social Education Center in Taiwan, as part of the festival’s international program.
Previously, Dancing with Marya was performed at Kunstenfestivaldesarts earlier the same year in Brussels, Belgium, where it drew attention for its reflective approach to the history of Balinese dance.
The piece stems from a critical exploration of the archives of Kebyar Duduk—a dance created by I Ketut Marya (I Mario), the legendary figure celebrated for his improvisational response to the dynamic, high-energy rhythms of gamelan kebyar.
As it travels across various international contexts, Dancing with Marya also contributes to expanding the meeting spaces between Indonesian artists and the global stage.
For its presentation at the 2025 Tainan Arts Festival, the work collaborates with the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Indonesia through the Manajemen Talenta Nasional (MTN) for Arts and Culture program—a national priority initiative dedicated to identifying, developing, and promoting Indonesian artistic talents while connecting them to opportunities for growth and market access at both national and global levels.
“MTN Arts and Culture—particularly its International Recognition support—is, to me, part of a cultural effort to encourage conversations so that dance practices from Indonesia can be read, encountered, and discussed within global contexts that often have their own perspectives on ‘tradition,” said Mang Tri Ray Dewantara.
In this dance, Mang Tri dances with the archive: aligning his body with footage of I Ketut Marya from 1931, recorded by Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias.
Mang Tri connects two temporal horizons—the colonial era and the present—to trace how Kebyar Duduk has been shaped by Western perceptions as well as by internal mechanisms within Bali, particularly through education and tourism systems that demand “authenticity” and adherence to “standards.”
The performance began as a lecture-performance and has since evolved into a living, embodied experience.
By dancing between archive and imagination, Mang Tri seeks to reanimate a dance that has long remained fixed within documentation and institutional frameworks.
He presents Dancing with Marya as a reflective space for reimagining how the body can serve as a medium of history, archive, and resistance against the fixation of form.
The dance is created by Mang Tri in collaboration with Mulawali Institute—an interdisciplinary Bali-based organization dedicated to performance research and creation—and co-created by the Indonesian Dance Festival and the 2025 Tainan Arts Festival.
Through Dancing with Marya, Mang Tri offers an interpretation of Balinese dance archives—particularly Kebyar Duduk—while inviting audiences to witness how archives can breathe anew through the dancer’s body, opening a fluid meeting point between past, present, and possible futures.
