DANCES INVITE THE GOD

Barong - Rangda Dances

           

         Most Balinese dance-dramas have evolved from sacred rituals, and are still performed at religious events, with full attention given to the offertory and devotional aspects. Before the show begins, a pemangku ( village priest ) will always bless the players and the performance area with sprinklings of holy water, and many performances open with a pendet or welcome dance intended for the gods. The exorcist Barong -  Rangda dramas continue to play a vital function in the spiritual practices of every village and the baris dance reenacts the traditional offering up of weapons by village warriors to the gods to invest them with supernatural power. Some of the more secular dance-dramas tell ancient and legendary stories, many of them adapted from the epic Hindu morality tales, the Ramayana and the Mahabarata, that came from India more than a thousand years ago. Others are based on historical events, embellishing the romances and battles that characterized the royal courts of Java and Bali between the tenth and the fourteenth centuries.
           With the advent of mass tourism however, it's becoming less and less easy to see a traditional performance staged in its natural environment, at a temple festival or village event for example, rather than as a commercial performance. Nonetheless, some of the tourist shows are very good, performed by expert local troupes with traditional finesse.
           There are few professional dancers in Bali; most performers spend their days working in the fields or in shops, donning costumers and make-up only at festival times or for the regular tourist shows. Almost every Balinese boy and girl is taught to dance - small boys learn the most adept are then chosen to perform at community function, as part of the established local troupe. Dancers learn by imitation and repetition, the instructor often holding the pupil against his or her body and manipulating limbs until the exact angles and tensions are reproduced to perfection. Personal expression has no place in the Balinese theater, but the skillful execution of traditional moves is always much admired and trained dancers enjoy a high status within the village.
           Female dancers keep their feet firmly planted on the ground their legs and hips encased in restrictive sarongs that give them a distinctive forward-angled posture. They express themselves through a vocabulary of controlled angular movement of the arms, the wrists, the fingers, the neck and, most beguilingly, the eyes. Each pose and gesture derives from a movement observed in the natural rather than the human world. Thus a certain type of flutter of the hand may be a bird in flight, a vigorous rotation of the forearms the shaking of water from an animal's coat. Dressed in pantaloons or hitched-up sarongs, the male dancers are much more energetic, and whirl about a lot, emphasizing their manliness by opening shoulders and limbs outwards, keeping their knees bent and their heads high.
         Most dramas are performed in superb natural settings, either within a temple compound, or in the outer courtyard of a noble family's palace. Because the stories are so familiar to the islanders, the costumes and masks give immediate clues to the identity of each character-and to the action which is to follow. Some dramas are performed in a combination of contemporary Bahasa Bali and the ancient poetic Language known as Kawi, while others stick to modern speech - perhaps with a few humorous English phrases thrown in for the tourists.
          Although most of the dances and nearly all the dances and nearly all the dance movements have long-established histories and traditions, Balinese dance is by no means a dead or stultified art form. In the last fifty years the repertoire has expanded quite considerably, not least because of the efforts of the island's most famous performer, the late I Ketut Mario, this superb dancer was also highly imaginative choreographer, adapting old forms to suit the modern mood, and most famously to fit the modern gamelan style, known as kebyar, in the 1920s. Thirty years later, he was commissioned by a British entrepreneur to create a new " boy-meets-girl" dance - The resukting piece was the oleg tambulilingan or bumblebee dance.

 Oleg Tambulilingan Dance

BARIS DANCE

Baris Tombak Dance

             The baris or warrior dance can be performed either as a solo or in a group of five or more, and either by a young woman, or more commonly a young man. Strutting on stage with knees and feet turned out, his centre of gravity kept low, the baris cuts an impressive figure in  a gilded brocade cloak of ribboned pennants which which fly out dramatically at every turn. In his performance, he enacts a young warrior's preparation for battle, goading himself into courageous mood, trying out his martial skills, showing pride at his calling and then expressing a whole series of emotions - ferocity, passion, tenderness, rage - much of it through the arresting movements of his eyes.

            Traditionally, the solo baris has always improvised a lot, leading the gamelan rather than following it. In its original sacred form, known as the baris gede, this was a devotional dance in which soldiers dedicated themselves and their weapons to the gods. ( To be continued.... ) 

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