Almost everywhere the encounter between European colonists and Asians has produced strange results. Nowhere is this truer than of Bali which, in the 1920s and 1930s, came to be imagined as Paradise, albeit a distinctly odd one. Before the island's conquest in 1906-8 when the royal families and entourage committed mass suicide, Balinese men and even women had been feared as singularly ferocious warriors. To counter the image of these atrocities, the Dutch re-branded Bali as paradise and the world's jet set and intellectuals descended on Bali from Noel Coward and Charlie Chaplin to the famous anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Exploring Balinese character, they concluded 'Balinese culture is in many ways less like our own than any other which has yet been recorded... the ordinary adjustment of the individual approximates...schizoid'. Meanwhile in Paris Artonin Artaud had seen Balinese perform at the Paris Exhibition in August 1931 and declared this 'pure theatre', 'the theatre of cruelty'. Out of such depictions, the contradictory paradise that became Bali was forged.

Rather than produce yet another Western documentary, in collaboration with Jeremy Millar, Ni Madé Pujawati is exploring through theatre how Balinese understood their curious and unequal encounter with Westerners. Working with leading Balinese actors using Balinese masks, Topèng, and film footage of Artaud, Bateson, Mead and others, Ni Madé Pujawati will use the medium that Balinese use to express themselves - theatre - to provide a quite different understanding of the complex relationship between Balinese and foreigners.

Rehearsals, performance and their filming is scheduled for December 2009 to January 2010 with choreographies, exhibitions and film showings to follow in 2010.