Check Out Los Angeles Gamelan Festival Production Team’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Los Angeles Gamelan Festival Production Team.

Hi Los Angeles Gamelan Festival, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
In the summer of 2025, the gamelan community in Los Angeles held the Los Angeles Gamelan Festival (LAGF). This festival celebrated the 50th Teaching Anniversary of Bapak I Nyoman Wenten and Ibu Nanik Wenten who have dedicated decades of their lives to teaching gamelan and dance in California, and are central in the sharing of Balinese gamelan and dance with students in the US. This celebration was an opportunity to bring together the larger gamelan community and Indonesian diaspora across the US in one festival.

The Los Angeles Gamelan Festival sought to unite the massive gamelan network spread across the United States through universities, colleges, and community ensembles. Gamelan remains inspiring to composers worldwide, many of whom incorporate unique elements into their music or produce full traditional and experimental gamelan pieces. Choreographers across different styles have also drawn inspiration from Indonesian movement. As artists, we do not have a central system to connect us, and we are not always aware of the work people accomplish. Through LAGF, we hope to connect artists and groups to one another as they continue studying and performing Indonesian gamelan and dance in the US.

The LAGF team brought this vision to life, through the hard work of Producers Adam Berg, Dewa Ayu Dewi Larassanti and Matthew Clough-Hunter, the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia as the host, and Burat Wangi Gamelan the home base. Through this Festival, the team hopes to connect people across the country through gamelan and dance, but also to nurture artistic relationships across cities, states, countries, and generations.

LAGF hopes to come back in 2027, stay tuned!

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The Los Angeles Gamelan Festival was definitely not a smooth ride.

For LAGF, we featured 15+ gamelan groups and ensembles, 20+ vendors, and around 200+ artists, some of them traveling all the way from Indonesia. Finding the perfect time slot and coordinating plans was a big challenge for an event of this scale. Since we involved so many individuals from across state lines, the logistics of this event need to be planned meticulously.

Another challenge was getting information about the event out to the public. We have so many branches within the LA community, and we want to share this event with as many people as possible. Our marketing team was working around the clock to publicize the Los Angeles Gamelan Festival!

A number of the support systems we had in place at the end of 2024 are unable to support us in 2025. Firstly, government funding has been cut for the arts in the US. This affects all of the grants and funding we would have received from different universities. And secondly, the Los Angeles Wildfires had a devastating impact on the LA community, and members of our gamelan family in LA lost their homes.

Lastly, we encountered massive unforeseen circumstances, including the deployment of the national guard in LA, increased ICE presence in LA, and intense restrictions on immigrant rights. LA was under a curfew that weekend and we needed to adjust our entire schedule the night before the festival, moving it up a few hours and having performances happen simultaneously. We wanted to ensure that our attendees and artists were safe during the festival. This was definitely not an ideal circumstance but our team worked tirelessly to overcome these challenges.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
The first Los Angeles Gamelan Festival was supported by Burat Wangi and the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia. Burat Wangi Gamelan is a professional Indonesian music and dance group based in Los Angeles. The group was founded in 1972 by Bapak I Nyoman Wenten, Ibu Nanik Wenten, and K.P.H. Notoprojo at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. The Los Angeles Gamelan Festival is held in celebration of the 50th Teaching Anniversary of our founders Bapak I Nyoman Wenten and Ibu Nanik Wenten.

The LAGF Production Team, including Adam Berg, Dewa Ayu Dewi Larassanti, and Matthew Clough-Hunter brought LAGF to life. Working with production coordinator Lizzy Erickson, LAGF’s team collaborated with Reason One to fulfill production needs, including stage, sound, and lighting. Additional sound and production support was provided by Unity Studios LA and producer Adam Berg. Marketing campaigns were boosted by the support of our marketing team: Shella Berg, Kerri Shak, Arista Nareswari, and Dewa Ayu Dewi Larassanti. A festival at this level requires a plethora of expertise, LAGF drew from backgrounds within our diverse team to make the event as successful as possible.

This Festival brought together artists from across the US that rarely get to see one another. Some of us being part of the Indonesian diaspora ourselves, we find great value in providing a space for Indonesian gamelans across the states to become a community. And as artists, we recognize the significance of sharing our own cultures, compositions, and choreographies while learning more about Indonesian arts that we ourselves have not been exposed to. From Iowa to California, from North Bali to the South, from traditional to modern, the Los Angeles Gamelan Festival will connect us all.

Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
There are endless possibilities! When you are starting out, just go for it and try your best. Especially when starting something new, have good intentions, be kind, and have fun! Everyone starts somewhere and you never know where life will take you. Take stock of what resources you already have and who you already know, and see how far you can go.

Having a strong team is also important. When we were starting the planning process we realized we needed a strong core team, so we brought on people that we knew had passion and could do the job. Without a dream and our team, our festival would not have been possible!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://losangelesgamelan.wixsite.com/lagf
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/la.gamelan.festival
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/la.gamelan.festival
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LosAngeles.GamelanFestival