Last weekend at the Stone Circle Theater, Dharma Swara (DS), a Balinese dance and music group based in Ridgewood, debuted a new Gamelon performance titled N’oreaster, composed by one of their own, Joel Mellin, as a preview for its upcoming concert at a summer arts festival in Bali, Indonesia.
DS joined forces with Foreshadow, a theatre troupe from Brooklyn, to tell the story of a traditional Hindu myth through a shadow-puppet play to open the show, before moving on to N’oreaster and several other songs.
The deeply meditative music gets a majority of its sound from the gendèr, a Balinese xylophone, and the bonang, a collection of small gongs, to create a symphony that quickly goes from the sound of crashing thunder to drizzling rain.
“There is constant collaboration happening, there’s no one single conductor,” said DS’s leader Victoria Lo Mellin.
Gamelon is traditional Balinese music played by an orchestra-esque ensemble of musicians on wind, string and wood instruments in time with accompanying dancers. Lo Mellin first joined DS over a decade ago, and fell in love with the music and a fellow musician in the group: her husband, Joel. Lo Mellin started as a classically trained flautist when she studied the bamboo flute in college, but said she often felt performance anxiety while on-stage by herself and noticed it could be heard within the notes she played. Finding Balinese Gamelon, which allowed her to play with a group and is more forgiving in nature due to the inherent “distortions” present in the style, freed her up to begin enjoying performances.
“There’s and inherent vibrato in the sounds,” Lo Mellin said. “It’s essentially representing the spirits in the sound, you know it’s living, because it’s not just a stable, homogenous sound.”
Lo Mellin cites the groups invitation to a Battle of the Bands at the Balinese Summer Arts Festival in 2010 as her biggest musical accomplishment. DS was invited to be a part of the festival in the music’s country of origin as a sort of “wildcard” to the other groups based in Bali. But the Queens group impressed the crowd enough with its unique sound of Gamelon with a Western inspiration to receive another invite for the same festival in the summer of 2026.
Compared to the other Gamelon performers, DS has far less experience as its members can often only meet up twice a week to practice the complex style of music. COVID-19 even forced DS to stop meeting altogether, before reforming once again in 2022 with some familiar faces, but mostly made up of brand new members interested in joining after watching a performance.
“It’s a lot of new things all coming together,” Mellin said. “Since COVID happened, we have a few people still, but it’s basically an entirely new group.”
Mellin says it’s a challenge to play in tandem with 20 different musicians onstage, especially during the preparation of his piece and with the addition of new members, but the group is so tight-knit, they always enjoy the time together. The group is still actively workshopping the performance with Foreshadow, and while the shadow-puppet play was performed with a recorded song this time, the 2026 performance will be played lived by DS to the tune of Synesthesia, the first piece Mellin composed back in 2010.
“We didn’t know anything about Balinese music, but as soon as we heard their music we were blown away,” said Rosalind Lilly, co-founder of Foreshadow.
Lo-Mellin approached Lilly last winter with the proposal of a join performance covering the myth of Kalla Rahu, an important story in Balinese culture so much so that it can be seen in DS’s insignia. Lilly and her friend and co-founder, Gaby Febland, spent the summer building the costumes at her home when she wasn’t working her day job as a restaurant manager. A true passion project, Foremost received a grant from the Jim Hensen Foundation in 2024, which allowed the puppeteers to put on the show that impressed Lo-Mellin enough to reach out for a partnership. Lilly is both excited and nervous for the upcoming trip to Indonesia, but says it’s always been a dream of hers to be able to perform abroad.
“We thought it would be an amazing match for puppetry because it’s such percussive and energetic music,” said Lilly. “We had to do a ton of research. We looked at Balinese art and connected with professors of Balinese dance and music… we took a really deep dive into the cosmic ocean.”
DS and Foreshadow received a standing ovation after the performance, and invited the audience up to speak with any of the members and even play the instruments. According to Lo Mellin, Gamelon is an open and community oriented experience that encourages movement, to the point where some children have crawled around and on her during past performances. Lo Mellin’s only request: do not step over the instruments, which would disrespect the spirits within.
