Bali Dance Information.

Dance and Drama, Music (Gamelan)

Music, dance and drama are all closely related in Bali – in fact drama and dance are really synonymous. While some dances are more drama and less dance, and others more dance and less drama, they can basically all be lumped in together. Just like painter or the sculptor, a dancer is almost always an ordinary person who dances in the evening or in his or her own spare time. You learn dancing by doing it and long hours may be spent practicing, usually by carefully following the movements of an expert.
There’s little of the soaring leap of western ballet or the smooth flowing movements often found in western dance. Balinese dance tends to be precise, jerky, shifting and jumpy. In fact it’s remarkably like the Balinese gamelan music which accompanies most dances, with its abrupt shifts of tempo, its dramatic changes between silence and crashing noise. There’s also virtually no contact in Balinese dancing, with each dancer moving completely independently. To the expert every movement of wrist, hand and fingers has importance; even facial expressions are carefully choreographed to convey the character of the dance.
There are dances where the story is as important as the dancing, like kecak dance. And dances like the Barong dance the forces of magic, good and evil, clash. Nor is Balinese dancing a static activity. Old dances fade out and new dances or new developments of old dances still take place. For example the Oleg Tambulilingan was developed in the 1950s as a solo female dance, but later a male part was added and the dance now mimics the flirtations of two

tambulilingan or bumblebees.
The Balinese like a blend of seriousness and slapstick and their dances show this. Basically the dances are simply straight forward ripping yarns – like vaudeville shows where you cheer on the goodies and cringe back from the stage when the baddies appear. Some dances have a comic element with clowns who counter balance the staid, noble characters. The clowns often have to put across the story to the audience, since the noble characters may use the classical Javanese kawi language while the clowns (usually servants of the noble characters) converse in everyday Balinese.
It is not hard to find dances – they’re taking place all the time, all over the island and are usually open to anyone. Dances are regular part of almost every temple festival and Bali has no shortage of these. There are also dances virtually every night at all the tourist centers; admission is usually costs from 50.000 to 80.000 rupiah for foreigners. Many of the shows put on for tourists offer a smorgasbord of Balinese dances with a little Topeng dance, a taste of Legong dance and some Baris dance to round it off. If you see one disappointing performance of a particular dance then look around for another venue as the quality and the level of drama varies. Some of the more common dances are:

Kecak Dance
Probably the best know of the many Balinese dances the Kecak dance is also unusual because it doesn’t have a gamelan accompaniment. Instead the background is provided by a chanting ‘choir’ of men who provided the ‘chak-a-chak-a-chak’ noise which distinguishes the dance. Originally this chanting group was known as the kecak dance and they were part of a Sanghyang trance dance. Than in the 1930s the modern Kecak dance developed in Bona, a village near Gianyar, where the dance is still held regularly.
The Kecak tells the tale of the Ramayana and the quest of Prince Rama to rescue his wife Sita after she had been kidnapped by Rawana, the King of Lanka. Rama is accompanied to Lanka by sugriwa the king of the monkeys, with his monkey army. Throughout the Kecak dance the circle of men, all bare cheated and wearing checked cloth around their waists, provide a non-stop accompaniment, rising to a crescendo as they play the monkey army and fight it out with Rawana and his cronies. The chanting is accompanied by the movements of the ‘monkey army’ whose members away back and forth, raise their hands in unison, flutter their fingers and lean left and right, all with an eerily exciting coordination.

Barong and Kris Dance
Barong and Kris dance like the kecak dance the Barong and Kris dance is a battle between good and evil spirit. Barong can take various forms but in this dance he takes the form of the dance Barong Keket, the most holy of the Barongs. The Barong Keket is a strange creature, half shaggy dog, half lion and is played by two men in much the same way as a circus clown-horse. His opponent is the witch Rangda.
The barong personifies good and protects the village from the witch Rangda, but he’s also mischievous and fun loving creature. He flounces into the temple courtyard, snaps his jaws at the gamelan, dances around and enjoys the acclaim of his supporters-a group of men with krises. The Rangda makes her appearance, her long tongue lolling, her pendulous breasts wobbling, human entrails draped around her neck, fangs protruding from her mouth and saber-like fingernails clawing the air.
Now Barong dance is no longer the clown, but the protector. The two duel with their magical powers and the Barong’s supporters draw their krises and rush in to attack the witch. Randa puts them in a trance and the men try to stab themselves, but the Barong also has great magical power and casts a spell which stops the krises from harming the men. This the most dramatic part of the dance – as the gamelan rings crazily the men rush back and forth, waving their krises around, all but foaming at the mouth. Sometimes even rolling on the ground in a desperate attempt to stab themselves. Finally Rangda retires defeated and good has won again. Good must always triumph over evil on Bali, and no matter how many times the spectator have seen the performance nor how well they know the outcome, the battle itself remains all important.
The end of the dance still leaves a large group of entranced Barong supporters to be brought back to the real world. This is usually done by sprinkling them with holy water, sanctified by dipping the Barong’s beard in it. Performing the Barong and Randa dance – with all that powerful magic – is an operation not to be taken lightly. Extensive ceremonies must be gone through to begin with, a temple priest must be on hand to end the dancers’ trance, and at the end a chicken has to be sacrificed to propitiate the evil spirits.

Legong Dance
Legong this is the most graceful of Balinese dances and to sophisticated Balinese connoisseurs of dancing the one of most interest. A Legong Dance, as a Legong Dancer is always know, is a young girl – often as young as eight or nine years olds and older than her early teens. Such importance is attached to the dance that even in old age a classic dancer will be remembered as a ‘great Legong’ even though her brief period of fame may have been 50 years ago.
There are various forms of Legong but the Legong Kraton, or Legong of the palace, is the one most usually performed. Peliatan’s famous dance troupe, which visitor to Ubud often gets a chance to see, is particularly noted for its Legong. A performance involves just three dancers – the two Legongs and their ‘attendant’ knows as the condong. The Legongs are identically dressed in tightly bound gold brocade, so tightly are they encased that it’s something of a mystery how they manage to move with such agility and speed. Their faces are elaborately made up, their eyebrows plucked and repainted and their hair decorated with frangipanis.
It’s a very stylized and symbolic dance – if you didn’t know the story it would be impossible to tell what was going on. The dance relates how a king takes a maiden, Rangkesari, captive. When Rangkesari’s brother comes to release her he begs the king to let her free rather than go to war. The king refuses and on his way to the battle meets a bird bringing ill omens. He ignores the bird and continues on to meet Rangkesari’s brother who kills him. The dance however, only related the lead-up to the battle and ends with the bird’s appearance. When the king leaves the stage he is going to the battle that will end in his death.
The dance starts with the condong dancing an introduction. The condong departs as the Legong come on. The Legongs dance solo, in close identical formation, and even in mirror image when they dance a nose to nose love scene. They relate the king’s sad departure from his queen, Rangkesari’s request that he release her and the king’s depature for the battle. Finally the condong reappears with tiny golden wings as the bird of ill fortune and dance comes to an end.

Kebyar Dance
Kebyar this is a male solo dance like the Baris Dance, but with greater emphasis on the performer’s individual abilities. Development of the modern kebyar is credited in large part to the famous pre war dance Mario. There are various forms of the dance including the seated Kebyar Duduk where the ‘dance’ is done from the seated position and movements of the hands, arms and torso plus, of course, facial expressions are all important. In the Kebyar Trompong the dancer actually joins the gamelan and plays an instrument called the trompong while still dancing.

Janger Dance
Janger Both Covarrubias and Hickman in their between-the-wars books on Bali comment on this strange new, almost un-Balinese, dance which suddenly popped up in the 1920s and 1930s. Today it has become part of standard repertoire and no longer looks so unusual. It has similarities to several other dances including the Sanghyang where the relaxed chanting of the women is contrasted with the violent cak-a-cak-a-cak of the men. In the Janger dance, formations of 12 girls and 12 young men do a sitting dance where the gentle swaying and chanting of the girls is contrasted with the violently choreographed movements and loud shouts of the men.

Topeng Dance
Topeng the word Topeng means ‘pressed against the face’, as with a mask. This is a mask dance where the dancers have to imitate the character their mask indicates they are playing. The Topeng Tua, for example, is a classic solo dance where the mask is that of an old man and requires the performer to dance like a creaky old gentleman. In other dances there may be a small troupe who dances various characters and types. A full collection of Topeng masks may number 30 or 40.
Another mask dance is the Jauk dance, but this is strictly a solo performance. The dancer plays an evil demon, his mask an eerie face with bulging eyes and fixed smile, long wavering fingernails complete the demonic look. Mask dances require great expertise because the dancer is not able to convey the character’s thoughts and meanings though his facial expressions, so the character of the unpleasant, frenetic, fast-moving demon has to be conveyed entirely through the dance.

Pendet Dance
Pendet this is an everyday dance of the temples, a small procedure gone through before making temple offerings which doesn’t require arduous training and practice. You may often see the Pendet dance being danced by women bringing offerings to a temple for festival, but it is also sometimes danced as an introduction and a closing for other dance performances.

Sanghyang Dances
Sanghyang Dances the Sanghyang trance dancea originally developed as a means of driving out evil spirits from a village. The Sanghyang is a divine spirit which temporarily inhabits an entranced dancer.
The Sanghyang Dedari is performed by two young girls who dance a dream-like version of the Legong. The dancers are said to be untrained in the intricate pattern of the dance and, furthermore, the dance in perfect harmony but with their eyes firmly shut. A female choir and a male Kecak choir provide a background chant but when the chant stops the dancers’ slump to the ground in a faint. Two women bring them round and at the finish a priest blesses them with holy water and brings them out of the trance. The modern Kecak dance developed from the Sanghyan.
In the Sanghyang Jaran a boy in a trance dances round and through a fire of coconut husks riding a coconut-palm hobby horse-it’s labeled the fire dance’ for the benefit of tourist. Once again the priest must be on hand to break the trance at the close of the dance.

The Gamelan
As in Sumatra and Java, Balinese music is based around the gamelan orchestra. The whole gamelan orchestra is known as a gong – an old fashioned gong gede or a more modern gong kebyar. There are even more ancient forms of gamelan such as the gong selunding, still occasionally played in Bali Aga village like Tenganan.
Though the instruments used are much the same, Balinese gamelan is very different from the form you’ll hear in Java. The Yogyakarta style, for example, is the most reserved, fomal and probably the gentlest and most ‘refined’ of gamelan – while Balinese gamelan often sounds like everyone going for it full pelt. Perhaps a more telling point is that Javanese gamelan music is rarely heard except at special performance, Where as in Bali you seem to hear gamelans playing all the time everywhere you go.

Other Bali Information
	Bali Behaviour There are a couple of rules for visiting temples. Except on rare occasions anyone can enter, anytime; there’s nothing like the attitude found in some temples in India where non-Hindus are firmly barred from entry. Now do you have to go barefoot like in many Buddhist shrines, but you are expected to be politely dressed. You should always wear a temple scarf – a sash tied loosely around your waist
	Bali Architecture Balinese temples usually consist of a series of courtyards entered from the sea side. In a large temple the outer gateway will generally be a candi bentar, modeled on the old Hindu temple of Java. These gateways resemble a tower cut in the halves and moved apart, courtyard is used for less important ceremonies,
	Bali Religion The Balinese are nominally Hindus but Balinese Hinduism is half a world away from that India. When the Majapahits evacuated to Bali they took with them their religion and its rituals as well as their art, literature, music and culture.
	Bali Economy Bali’s economy is basically agrarian. The vast majority of Balinese are peasants working in the fields. Coffee, copra and cattle are major agricultural exports, while most of the rice grown goes to feed the island’s own teeming population.Unlike most island people, the Balinese are not great seafarers.........
	Bali Festival Festivals for much of the year Balinese temples are deserted, empty spaces. But on holy days, the deities and ancestral spirits descend from heaven to visit their devotees and the temples come alive with days of frenetic activity and nights of drama and dance. Temple festivals come at least once a Balinese year of 210 days.
	Bali Geography Bali is a tiny, extremely fertile and dramatically mountainous island. It has an area of 5620 square km, is only 140 km by 80 km and is just 8^ south of the equator. Bali’s central mountain chain, which runs east-west the whole length of the island, includes several peaks over 2000 meters and many active volcanoes
	Bali Compound The smallest unit in the Balinese community is not the individual but the family. In the strictest sense of the word a family is a married couple with children and the broader sense a family is all the people who live in one compound, family compound. In one such compound there can live brothers, cousins and second cousins with all their children and all relatives who worship in one common house temple.
	Bali Households Despite the strong communal nature of Balinese society, their traditional houses are designed to divide the family from the outside world. Traditional houses (many of which can be seen in Ubud) are like houses in ancient Rome, they look inward and are surrounded by a high wall.....
	Bali Temple The number of temple in Bali is simply astonishing they’re everywhere, in fact since every village has several and every home at least a simple house-temple; there are actually more temples than homes. The word for temple in Bali is pura
	Bali Village Organisation Village organization one of the important element of the village government is the Subak. Each individual rice field is known as a Sawah and each farmer who owns even one Sawah must be a member of his local Subak. The rice paddies must have a steady supply of water and it is the job of Subak to ensure that the water supply gets to everybody.
	Bali Society Balinese society is an intensely communal one; the organization of villages, the cultivation of farmlands and even the creative arts are communal efforts – a person belongs to their family, clan, caste and the village as a whole. Religion permeates all aspects of life so each stage of existence from soon after conception until after the final cremation is marked by ceremonies and ritual.....

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