The 28th Bali Arts Festival, Week One
By Gawain
This arts festival thing keeps getting bigger and bigger, like an alien plankton bloom swallowing everything in its path.
This year it is not just visible from space, but from Mars, and with a naked eye, too. Soon it will begin to spread all over the archipelago, and then the whole planet, until, in just a few years, the whole human race will rise at dawn to beat gongs and dance all day and then late into the night, until, exhausted with pleasure, we all simply collapse in the happy sleep of the exuberantly sinful.
(The economy will collapse, GDP will decline by 80% overnight, there will be a crash in housing prices, packages will no longer be delivered by UPS and the MacDonald’s opening hours will become extremely erratic (the sign on the locked door might say: “gone to ceremony, be back whenever its over. Or maybe not.”) But none of this will matter, because, we are all going to have — oh! — such fun!)
To give you an idea of the growth here: 4 years ago there were nightly events and some on some mornings. Now there are events (often multiple ones) daily at 10, 12, 6 and 8, plus, on Saturdays, there are all night performances; plus a part of the festival was kicked out from Denpasar to other regency capitals; plus this year we have swallowed (or rather, made into a tail for our draco selves) the International Ramayana Festival (which had failed to materialize in Phnom Penh last December), with great stuff from Thailand and Cambodia (and much less great stuff from elsewhere); plus there are all those groups from outlying islands hoping to impress us with their lame folk art. (Doo-goo Doo-goo go the Flores drums, wiggle wiggle go the Flores girls in a two-step which can’t have taken more than 3 minutes to master, puzzling the Balinese audience. (”What the heck?”) And the people from Rial in Sumatra come and sing Muslim devotional songs karaoke-style — good thing they couldn’t afford to bring the laser lights machine — puzzling us even more.)
But that’s OK, we can be magnanimous. All of this just confirms us in our already firmly held belief that nobody else can dance. (Well, except the Javanese and Cambodians and Thais, maybe, but that only on a Sunday — and with full moon and good wind in the back). Here are some of the more memorable things from this extremely busy week one.
1
The festival opened with a performance by SMKI Denpasar and SMKI Sukawati (two leading government schools for traditional arts), especially commissioned by the festival to be performed before the President and the First Lady (who made a special trip from Java for the opening ceremony). In the end, only the First Lady made it to the evening performance, and that 90 minutes late. (No doubt because the 22 cars of her retinue took that long to snake their way through the Denpasar traffic). For her efforts she got an earful: the drama was taken from the Mahabharata, and was the story of a prince not ready to step into his father’s kingly shoes and sent instead for long and hard meditation in the Himalayas.
(There, take that, and be on time next time around).
This is a modern concept, sometimes referred to in Indonesian as Kolosal: a new drama using traditional Balinese techniques (dance, costume, music, singing) and combining them with some new elements, new music, new dance steps, new stories, but with the idea that it will all seamlessly fit together and make a sensible whole – that the new items will be of a piece with the old, and that the new work will remain in the spirit of the great tradition, its next logical development, another fruit off the tree of the great art.
But, like all mucking with the traditional arts, the concept flirts with trouble, and in this case the trouble was… the budget. Faced with a daunting amount of money to spend, the choreographer spent it on stage props, which traditional Balinese drama haughtily eschews (unless it be a withered tree in the corner someplace).
The chief conceptual nail of the Balinese drama — and all classical Asian theater in general — is to portray the inner events — the feelings and passions and thoughts and attitudes and character of the heroes — not the external ones. Fittingly, the stage language is one of extreme economy: imagine a great palace, imagine a vast plane, imagine the bridge to Lanka, imagine the Great Himalayas. (”This is the great Himalayas”, announces the actor. Surely, that is all that is necessary for our imagination to fill out the picture better than any backdrop ever could).
When props appear, suddenly everything looks a bit garish, a bit like a cheap vaudeville. And a bit — ahem — Western? Here, Vishnu on a lotus, defending himself against a demon with a circle of blooming flowers, in the background stage smoke. (Luckily there were no laser lights, but only just. Maybe next year they and the people from Rial can pitch in together to get the machine? Gad, I hope not).
(Blah. Off to Hollywood wit’ya, baby. Right?)
There was another bad consequence of the presidential visit: Presidents, take over in ceremonial roles from erstwhile divine kings, and thus are expected to assure plentiful rain and abundant harvests. In the First Lady’s wake came the rains and – unlike the first lady — stayed a week. (Which suggests that she and the First Gentleman must be doing something right and still hold the mandate of heaven).
Careful with the presidents, is all I can say.
2
Every day, there have been several tari-tabuhs, or variety shows, in which an ensemble presents a number of new compositions for the gamelan and a number of dances, some established choreographies, some new; sometimes this is part of a competition between 2 different bands.
All these dances are “choreographed”, that is they have been designed from scratch. This is part of a movement which began after about 1930, when the “cultural tourism” (that is, the concept that western tourists may come to Bali to gawk at the natives in native garb) really took off. These choreographies use the vocabulary of the traditional art, but are composed for performance in a secular setting, in non-sacred costumes, and were originally a compromise between the dancers (who refused to perform sacred dances for tourists, outside of the temple context) and the tourist industry (which needed something to show to their paying guests).
Today, these dances are as popular with the Balinese as the sacred stuff, perhaps more so because they can be danced anytime and anywhere, for the pure joy of life. New dances are being composed every year and some make it into the canon and become part of school curriculum.
The variety shows range from so-so, to solid B, to absolutely fabulous.
On day three, Semeton Raka Rai Arts, an ensemble from Bangli (a regency up in the mountains, in the center of the island, the abode of the gods — and it clearly showed in their dance) gave a fantastic performance, a part of which was this dance, called Baris Kincang Kincung, or “Baris for the closing of a ceremony”, Baris being a sort of presentation of weapons by men in front of the inner sanctum. These men danced a powerful, athletic dance, holding up smoking (and flaming) offerings, and singing enchantments in rasping guttural voices and giving off martial shouts. Though I am not given to mystical thought, the dance gave me the shiver of mystery. It was very effective.
It illustrated, I think, how it is gradually becoming more acceptable to perform at a cultural venue dances ever closer to the real thing. (Though still not for tourists and not for pay).
3
On day 4 there was a Gambuh, from Pedungan, a village in South Denpasar.
Gambuh is my favorite Balinese art form. It is 14th century drama from the Majapahit kingdom in Java, brought to Bali following the Majapahit conquest of the island.
This drama form follows very strict rules as to types of scenes and types and of characters, prescribes the precise order of scenes and character appearances and precise types of dance steps for each character type. Like all ancient Asian theater — Keralan Kathakali, Japanese Noh – it has elements no longer comprehensible to its performers, but nevertheless meticulously preserved. It is performed partly in Kawi and partly in classical Balinese, the equivalent of staging something on Broadway in a mixture of Latin and Chaucerian English.
Gambuh is, in a sense, an ichtiosaurus, a relic of times past: even its orchestra lacks metallophones (gongs) — perhaps because, as a dramatic form, it predates the invention of the gamelan. Its all drums and flutes and bells.
Some people like it that way — archaically authentic. Christina, an Italian woman who dances Gambuh in Batuan, was very severe with me when I expressed admiration for a Gambuh performed with a full gamelan orchestra. “But it was a very beautiful performance”, I said in lame self-defence, at which point she decided, I think, that I was a fool and just strode off. It’s a huge issue which dogs Balinese art all the time: just how much innovation is permissible?
Gambuh usually tells some story from the Panji Cycle, the great Javanese epic about Prince Panji, a prince, a knight, a lady’s man, and… an itinerant dance teacher, who is the embodiment of the concept of being alus, or refined: gentle, soft-spoken, slow to anger, reluctant to fight, decorous, wise, considerate (yet chivalrous, resolute, brave, and a heck of a warrior when push comes to shove). The structure of the play can often be read as a sort of meditation on the virtue of alus-ness and its opposite vice, kras-ness, or roughness, as the super-refined and gentle Panji beats off or kills successive rough and uncouth kings of the “strong type”, who are often demons or ogres, and who happen to be importuning one or another damsel-in-distress.
This production was quite unusual in that the army of the left (that is, that of Panji’s opponents) was led by an alus prince, a dark refined prince facing the light refined prince. There are interesting ideological implications to this, but no one seems to have noticed — in light of the unexpected developments. (Read on).
And I nearly missed what actually happened because the first dance — the entrance of the princess, preceded by her maids (and led by her chief attendant, in red, in front), a rather dullish, long scene in which one is meant to submit mindlessly to the slow undulation of the flutes, was really bad. I mean, these girls were clunky; they danced with the grace of mechanical egg-beaters. Were this not Gambuh, an art form I love, and one so very hard to see, I would have left and gone to another venue.
Fortunately, things got better with the entrance of the men: first the army of the left, in stages: first the odd, monstrous attendants, then the prime minister — a king of strong type, then the dark prince himself; then the army of the right, first the glorious aryas, then the fools, then the Clark-Gable look-alike prince Panji himself in all his glory, with flowers and burning incense sticks in his headgear. These guys — by and large — knew how to dance. And we were soon in the thick of things. Below is Panji (right) drawing his squiggly sword in order to chastise the ueber-kras prime minister of the left (left).
But then there was an unexpected switch.
The kras prime minister of the left appears to have had some demonic blood for, suddenly, he turned into Rangda, a demoness worshipped at the unclean end of each village in Bali, and equated by theologians with the Hindu Kali, goddess of destruction and death. (”No man dies by the hand of man, but by the will of Kali”). In her terrifying mask and long fur she stomped on stage, roarin
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July 25th, 2006 17:08
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