Bali: Legong Dance
In Ubud, you can go to a different dance performance every night of the week. They’re given in the public spaces of the temples, and are sacred, but that doesn’t mean they object to selling tourists tickets. The dances seem to be generally concerned with retelling the Ramayana, or parts of it, so they’re intimately tied to religion. The styles of dance seem to be part and parcel of Bali Hindu culture (that is, 90% of the population does it on a regular basis), and we saw some boys practicing some of the moves in a space adjacent to the library. Anyway, we only had 2 nights in Ubud to sample the dance offerings, and the first one was the North Ubud Women’s Association Legong-style ballet of the Ramayana. This took place in the lotus garden of the Saraswati Temple (which if you recall we were staying in, or adjacent to). The orchestra, unusually for a gamelan performance, was mostly women:
They’re wearing matching formal traditional dress for the performance, complete with similar-styled earrings, flowers and hairpieces. The music itself is nearly entirely percussive: drums, gongs, and gamelans, with one or two flutes. Gamelans are xylophones with hand-forged keys set to precise tones, and those in turn are set in elaborately carved and gilded boxes, behind which the players sit. The players use metal hammers to hit the keys with amazing precision and immediately damp the reverberations with their left hands.
Note that the stage, in front of the gate to the inner temple, is set with flowers and cut-and-folded coconut leaf decorations. These are offerings to the gods, more indications of the show’s sacredness. Below, some gamelan players working in amazing unity.
Here are Rama on the left and Sita on the right. It’s hard to get a good still shot of a dance, but at least you can see Sita’s glorious costume and get an idea of the crowns. The bigger the crown the more important the character, so Rama wins, but Sita’s no slouch. Her dance movements included most of Rama’s, but with train management added – she had to find ways to fit gently nudging it to the side or rear to the rhythms. Both dancers had their fingers curved backwards, gently fluttering, for almost the whole show. I’ve tried that for about 30 seconds – it’s not easy.
Here the couple is chatting together affectionately at the beginning of the story. The Rama dancer’s eyes were wide and staring the whole time. It’s a fine story, including a bad guy, magic, children dancing as monkeys, golden deer and demons, and my favorite dancer of the evening, the monkey Hanuman (in Bali, Hanoman).
That’s him in the center, with his own version of a crown, right next to the drummer, and behind a couple of black-clad monkey kids, his henchmen and army. This dancer was electrifying, to me at least, both as the evil magician and as Hanoman. (I know he was the same guy because Hanoman turned up for the final bow but the magician didn’t.) I think the drummer here is actually the leader of the whole thing – he had to go through the ranks of the orchestra and learn all the other instruments before they let him touch the drums, and he sets the rhythms and keeps everything going. It makes a lot of sense to have the dancers so close to the orchestra. Here’s the ensemble at the end; they don’t bow, just place their palms together in the prayer and greeting gesture. They stayed put for a while so we could take pictures, then just walked off into the wings.
Little monkeys and demons in the front, slightly older golden deer in the middle, and human/godly characters in the rear. The costumes are gorgeous. Rama, the big crown on the left, turned up at a different dance the next night at a different temple, the same actor wearing the same costume. He was running late, and showed up 2 minutes before the dance began, riding a scooter in full regalia – probably got a late start at the central costume depot. My spouse says he looked regal, even on a scooter. I hoped I’d see him riding home from the dance that second night, but no luck. I did, however, see the man who’d been firewalking in a horse costume ten minutes previously, zipping along on his scooter through the center of town. What a cool place.