Edinburgh International Festival 2024 Unites Us with Rituals

When Peni Candra Rini starts to sing it’s as if time stands still. She kneels on a low platform beside a triangular kayon (Javanese shadow puppet) which she has brought on stage with her and which traditionally starts a Javanese wayang kulit show. Her Edinburgh show is intriguingly devised to outline her life story from aged five in her village, where she was born to a dalang (puppet master) father, including how she became a sindhen singer and set off on a career travelling the world and collaborating with musicians like Kronos Quartet, as well as being the first woman to write music for the Mangkunegaran palace gamelan in Surakarta (where she now teaches at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts). Most of the songs are slow, but exquisitely sung and accompanied by Andy McGraw (a gamelan expert) and Shahzad Ismaily, both American, on several Indonesian zithers, guitars and carefully selected samples. They were the musicians on her recent album Wulansih (reviewed in Songlines #201). The performance is absolutely intoxicating. The Hub, the intimate Edinburgh venue which feels like a cross between a church and a nightclub and where the show took place, feels transformed into a night sky of a thousand stars, a warm breeze, her gestures imitating fireflies and this pure voice telling her story.

“My father taught me to sing every day against the waves and it was a six-hour walk from my village,” she says. “I asked him why he wanted me to sing at the sea. Who will listen to me? He said it would make my voice stronger.”

The stated theme of the Edinburgh International Festival this year is Rituals that Unite Us, something that Rini totally identifies with. “My performance is a ritual to remind us, not only the Javanese but humans everywhere, that we have just one home. I was born into a Hindu family, although I’m now a Muslim and the Hindus have so many rituals of making offerings with flowers. It’s a philosophy of life.”

The performance also features two of the four pieces she’s written for the Kronos Quartet in a suite called Segara Gunung (Ocean-Mountain), premiered earlier this year. The four pieces are about the effects of climate change on Indonesia. One of them calls on Roro Kidul, the goddess of the southern sea “to protect our earth in the ocean and to reconnect with nature.” She carries a shadow puppet which she says represents a combination of the goddess and Rini herself – she’s clearly an important new voice from Southeast Asia.

Peni Candra Rini won an Aga Khan Award in 2022 and it was the Aga Khan Music Programme organising these concerts at The Hub, including the UK’s Soumik Datta who also won an Aga Khan Award in 2022. Another show in the programme is by Kyrgyz group Ustatshakirt. The name appears intimidating at first but breaks into two parts: ‘ustat’ (Master, as in the Urdu word Ustad) and ‘shakirt’ (Pupil). And the group is indeed made up of old masters and younger disciples. They’ve also thought carefully about the ritual theme.

The Kyrgyz have an epic poem called Manas, one of the longest with some 500,000 lines. The Ustat in the group is Samat Kochorbaev, a renowned manaschy, Manas singer. “Most epic poems in the world are kind of dead because they’ve just become written down and are no longer inspiring people,” he says. “With Manas it’s different. Everyone learns some excerpts of Manas in school, but that doesn’t make them manaschy. I found I wanted to tell the story and I have the storyline inside of me and then put it into music and rhythm with inspiration.”

There are five musicians (although the whole ensemble in Bishkek is bigger) with Kochorbaev as the main singer, and instrumentalists on plucked komuz, wooden and metal jaw harps and the bowed kyl-kiyak, an instrument with shamanistic associations like the Kazakh qobyz. Raziya Syrdybaeva, one of the directors of the ensemble, describes the larger qobyz as an instrument of the steppes, whereas the narrower kyl-kiyak is an instrument of the mountains. She says it almost disappeared in Soviet times because it was not suited to the ‘classical ’music they preferred. In Edinburgh it is played by Makhabat Kobogonova in a lament, the bow rasping against its two thick strings. It was traditionally also used for putting people into a trance and healing. Ustatshakirt make all their instruments themselves and put on quite a show, notable for the playing of the komuz upside down or behind the head, which receives a rapturous reception.

Another show with a ritual or spiritual theme was Songs of the Bulbul, a dance piece performed by Aakash Odedra. A bulbul is a nightingale and the inspiration is a Sufi poem in which a songbird is caged and dies of grief, but in accepting its fate gains a spiritual power. At this moment, candles are lit around the stage. It’s perhaps deliberately obtuse to ask a dancer to be a songbird, although many of the images are beautiful – the dancer/bird emerging from a shroud on stage, rose petals falling, the bird fighting within the cage and then illuminating candles at the end. Odedra’s camp Kathak dancing perhaps suits the lightness of the bird, but the recorded music score by Rushil Ranjan is much too loud and its cinematic orchestration seems too exaggerated for this rather sensitive story. There are delicate moments like the bansuri flute and tabla for the bird flying free, though there is a bombastic version of the qawwali favourite ‘Allah Hoo’, representing God in everything. A lack of subtitles translating the lyrics of the poems is a shame, particularly for Muhammad Iqbal’s ‘Shikwa’ complaining to Allah that he mistreated Muslims. The vocals by Sarthak Kalyani and Abi Sampa are strong, but of course, recorded music is never as good as live.

While the choreographic and theatrical images of Bulbul are striking, it’s the pictures in the imagination that Peni Candra Rini creates that stay in the mind.

This article originally appeared in the November 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today