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Dance and Drama
Sacred Temple Dances
Tourism, many Balinese claim,
has brought a renaissance to the Balinese arts, especially
to dance and dramatic performance. Encouraged by a steady
stream of Western guests eager to witness Bali’s famed
traditional spectacles, and supported materially by their
patronage, Bali’s dance troupes are flourishing like never
before. Yet this foreign sponsorship of the Balinese arts
has not come without a cost. Troubled by the extent to which
tourism was leading to a commercialization of sacred arts -
with holy dances like the stately rejang created to
welcome the gods to the temple performed to welcome a
busload of beer-swilling tourists to a hotel ballroom - a
group of dance scholars and religious experts met in the
1970s to try to address the problem. They decided upon a
classification system for dances: those sacred dances that
should be performed only in the inner temple, those
ceremonial dances and dramas that could be performed at
festivals in the outer temple courtyard, and those secular
dances that could be performed outside the religious
setting. Of course, like most things Balinese, these
categories have become quite flexible in practice, and
tourists are now permitted to watch many dances deemed to be
holy. But the visitor lucky enough to witness one of these
powerful performances should remember that these are not
mere entertainments created for worldly consumption, but are
highly spiritual art forms designed to please the gods with
their beauty and grace. The Balinese feel their
participation in such dances to be far more than just a job
or a chance to display their skill for public acclaim, but
to be a religious service, a way of offering the grace and
passion of their bodies up to the heavens.
One of the most powerful of
these ritual dances is the Baris, or the warrior
dance, which is a familiar sight at many temple anniversary
festivals and cremations. In this performance, men armed
with ancient weapons, including wavy-bladed keris
daggers and sharply pointed spears, act as the guard of the
visiting gods. The Baris often involves a dramatic mock
battle between dozens of men adorned with gold headdresses
and elaborate costumes, a spellbinding sight which has
earned the Baris a reputation as one of the most ferocious,
passionate and masculine dance forms in the world.
The Pendet or Mendet
is a sacred processional which, depending on the custom of
the village in which it is being held, is danced either to
welcome the gods who have come to visit their earthly
shrines in the temple or to send them on their sacred
journey back to their home at the close of a ceremony. It is
performed by the younger women of a temple congregation, who
carry flower and incense offerings as they dance in a
stately line around the shrines, stopping to present their
gifts to the gods.
The Rejang is perhaps
the most egalitarian of Balinese dances. Anyone can join in,
from little toddlers who have just learned to walk to
white-haired old grandmothers. No special training is
required to perform it, for it is learned by watching and
participating. Like the Pendet, it is a processional, where
women carry offerings, performing slow, spellbinding,
trance-like movements backed by the mellow tones of a gamelan
orchestra.
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