Festive Season at SAKA: Daily Workshops of Living Traditions

Festive Season at SAKA: Daily Workshops of Living Traditions‍

by Marlowe Bandem

Late December 2025 at AYANA Bali is high season. Arrivals stack up, poolside hours stretch, and the resort runs on bright holiday momentum. Inside that pace, the award-winning  SAKA Museum offered a different kind of time.

From 26 December 2025 to 3 January 2026, Festive Season at SAKA unfolded as a sequence of afternoon workshops, 14.00 to 16.00 WITA, scheduled like a daily pause. After sun and before dinner, the museum became a place to participate, where Bali was not only observed but entered through practice.

Balinese Dance Lesson: Rejang and Baris, with Warastrasi Dewi Bandem
Friday, 26 December 2025, 14.00 to 16.00 WITA

The program began with welcoming movements. Dewi opened by performing Sekar Jagat, a modern Balinese welcome dance created in 1993 by N.L.N. Swasthi Widjaja Bandem. The piece carries gentle hospitality, a choreography that offers peace as if it were a bouquet.

Then Dewi shifted the room from viewing to doing. She explained how Balinese dance and gamelan are often learned through temple life rather than formal lessons, absorbed by watching elders, then joining when the community calls.

Participants stepped into Rejang, the sacred women’s dance defined by simple recurring movements and circular formations, and into Baris, the warrior dance built on formation and disciplined intensity.

A surprise arrived with her father, I Made Bandem, master topeng (mask) dancer and ethnomusicologist. Together, they framed the movements of Balinese dance into four clear pillars that participants could carry in their bodies.

Agem is the grounded stance, with knees open, torso poised, arms held like sculpture. Tandang is the travelling step, how a dancer moves through space without losing that held energy. Tangkis is the sharp accent and shift, the sudden punctuation that changes direction and intensity. Lastly, tangkep is expression, especially the seledét eye flicker and facial nuance that makes movement speak. With that frame, the room stopped copying shapes and started understanding how Balinese dance stays alive.

The atmosphere held laughter and concentration at once. When Dewi introduced Kecak, the energy moved from technique into togetherness. Everyone lowered themselves to sit on the floor, forming a circle where breath and sound could travel easily between bodies. The first cak syllables came out tentatively, then the rhythm caught, tightened, and began to carry the group as if it had always been there. Someone fell out of sync and laughed, then rejoined without embarrassment, held by the chorus.

By the end, a few participants joked they were ready for the iconic Kecak Ramayana at Uluwatu Temple, suddenly imagining themselves not only as spectators, but as part of the chant. People realised quickly that devotion here is as physical as a posture held, a rhythm shared, a community formed through repetition.

Workshop, Linocut Printmaking with I Kadek Septa Adi
Saturday, 27 December 2025, 14.00 to 16.00 WITA

The next afternoon changed tools but kept the same spirit with learning by doing. Septa Adi, a Balinese printmaker trained at Universitas Pendidikan Ganesha and recognised through exhibitions and national graphic art triennial selections, led a crowd-favourite workshop that carried participants through the full cycle of printmaking: drawing, carving, inking, and printing.

The key idea was reversal. Linocut forces you to think in mirror mode. A design must be imagined backwards, and every mark becomes a decision about absence and presence: what is cut away, and what remains to hold ink. Participants learned to use pisau cukil carving tools in different widths, testing shallow and deep cuts that changed texture and light.

The workshop became meditative in the carving and electric in the reveal. Ink rolled on, paper and tote bags pressed down, and every lift produced its own moment of surprise, because the print always teaches you something you did not know you were doing.

A young participant carved independently with steady confidence, and an architecture student visiting from Adelaide printed the SAKA building from memory, turning the museum into a handmade emblem. The lesson was simple: culture can be carried as an imprint, not only a souvenir, but an image earned through attention.

Workshop, Incense Making with Zen Munkey by Tony Tandun
Tuesday, 30 December 2025, 14.00 to 16.00 WITA

Midweek, the program turned from line and pressure to scent and atmosphere. Tony Tandun, the creative behind Zen Munkey, also known as a graphic designer, illustrator, painter, and electronica DJ with connections to the early ruangrupa art collective, guided a two-hour hands-on session where each participant created two to three unique blends and produced six to nine incense sticks.

The theme here was memory in the air. Participants began by smelling, returning to notes the way you return to places. Choices became personal. Some chased bright citrus and clean freshness. Others leaned toward deeper resins and warmth. The process was manual and slightly messy, powders clinging to fingers as mixtures were adjusted and shaped. The East Gallery filled with layered aroma, not one single fragrance but a shared cloud of experiments.

Tony spoke about care in production: handmade methods, collaborations with artisans and communities, attractive yet thoughtful packaging, and an avoidance of harsh chemicals.

Participants left with their own incense and a gift from Zen Munkey, a small gesture that made the workshop feel generous rather than transactional. In Bali, dupa is not only ritual but daily rhythm. Morning streets often carry that scent alongside canang sari offerings, flowers placed on thresholds like quiet punctuation. What can look exotic from afar is simply lived devotion, renewed every day. In that context, incense making at SAKA felt like learning the island’s atmosphere from the inside.

Balinese Dance Lesson, second session, with Dewi Bandem
Friday, 2 January 2026, 14.00 to 16.00 WITA

The dance workshop welcomed the New Year as a fresh beginning for newly arrived guests, and a second passage for those who wanted to return to the movements with more confidence. The theme was repetition as belonging. In Bali, knowledge often deepens through returning.

In this second session, the room felt less like a first attempt and more like a shared practice. Arms steadied. Eyes dared the seledét again. People moved with less self-consciousness and more awareness of the group, as if the formation itself was teaching them how to be present.

I Made Bandem, who was also present during the workshop, offered a moment that felt like a gift. Now 80 years old, he performed Topeng Arsawijaya with a calm magnificence that made the room go quiet. He wore a mask inherited from his father, a piece once bestowed by the King of Bangli, and he treated it not as an object but as a living partner.

Afterward, Bandem shared the secret behind his endurance, known as ngunda bayu, a discipline of breath and energy distribution, similar in spirit to yoga, guiding strength through the limbs rather than forcing it. He added something even more striking. Even behind the mask, he still mimics the mask’s expression, so face and body never contradict each other. He called it nganten sareng topeng, marrying the mask.

In that explanation, the workshop’s message sharpened. Technique is not only external form. It is inner control, breath, and a relationship to tradition that becomes fully alive only when you return to it again and again.

Kamasan Portrait with Made Chandra
Saturday, 3 January 2026, 14.00 to 16.00 WITA

The series closed with a quieter intensity as the movement of pencil and pigment. Made Chandra, a young painter and writer born in Baturaja, South Sumatra, and now based in Denpasar, introduced Kamasan as a foundational Balinese visual language.

His own approach blends classical Kamasan iconography with abstract expression and deliberate negative space that gives the composition room to breathe. The theme here was restraint. Participants created portraits in a Kamasan and wayang-inspired manner, working with earth colours and learning that blank paper is not an empty background but part of the image.

Negative space holds air, distance, and sky. Small motifs, including dust-particle marks that suggest vastness, changed how participants understood the atmosphere on a flat surface. The portraits that emerged were not only drawings of faces. They were exercises in balance: between ornament and silence, between tradition and a contemporary hand.

Seen chronologically, Festive Season at SAKA formed a coherent arc of movement. The body moved in dance, carrying devotion through posture and rhythm. The knife moved in linocut, carving an image by thinking backwards and learning through reveal. Aromatic smoke moved through the gallery in incense making, turning memory into something you could take home. Pencil and dispersed colour moved in Kamasan portraiture, where restraint became a form of respect.

Together, these workshops described Bali without flattening it. During the busiest week of the year at AYANA, SAKA Museum did not compete with spectacle. It offered practice. Timeless culture–boldly reimagined, appeared not as a slogan, but as shared afternoons where different kinds of movement made the island’s living tradition tangible.

As the festive week fades, SAKA continues to offer a slower, richer way to meet Bali through living practice. Beyond the workshops, visitors can still move through SAKA’s core exhibitions, including Panca Maha Bhuta, Kasanga, Twilight Journey, and Subak: The Ancient Order of Bali, alongside guided-style experiences like the Island of Bali: Museum Trail.