Live in Ubud
We first stayed in Ubud on our arrival in Indonesia, and loved it. So we were excited to arrive here again on our way back from Gili. We even stayed at the same hotel, Ubud Terraces.
When we arrived we met Tracy, a friend from San Francisco whom we arranged to meet here. She’s just arriving in Indonesia from Thailand, and we’re leaving soon for Korea. But for the next six days we’ll have company that not only speaks our language but also shares our accent and our general frame of reference about the world. It’s surprising what a relief that can be after months of travelling.
One of my still-unfulfilled hopes for Bali was to see some traditional dancing here, and our timing was great. The night of our arrival there was a performance of Legong, generally considered the most refined of the Balinese dances. It tells a story from the Mahabharata, an epic poem originating from India. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata can be considered as the Indian equivalent of the Odyssey and the Iliad. The Ramayana tells primarily the story of a warrior’s adventures returning to his lost love, while the Mahabharata tells the story of warring kingdoms. However, the Mahabharata alone weighs in at ten times the length of both Iliad and Odyssey combined, and is a palimpsest of centuries’ worth of stories overlaid in a complex story-within-a-story structure. So one could probably find analogues of almost any other story within it.
In the story told by the traditional Legong, a princess is kidnapped by the king of a neighboring kingdom. Her brother tells the king he will go to war to get her back. The princess begs the king to release her and avoid a war. The king is even visited by a bird of ill omen, but he refuses to release her. There is a war, the king loses, and the princess is freed.
Legong tells this story in a very abstract way, and without reading the program I would have had no idea what was going on. Even having read the program I was often confused. Roxane and I were frequently whispering to each other “Is that the bird of ill omen? The things on her arms look kind of like small wings.” “But that other guy had bird feathers in his headdress!”
The stars of the show are three women – two legong and one condong. They arrive on stage intricately bedecked with gold brocade and with heavily kohled eyes. They dance mostly with their arms and hands and eyes. They will flutter their pinky fingers sideways with an incomprehensible delicacy or wave fans. But what I felt was most fascinating about this dance was the way the dancers held their eyes dramatically wide open and flicked their attention first left, then right. With their wide eyes so heavily outlined, this gesture was clearly visible even from the audience, and conveyed a surprisingly delicate range of emotions.
Meanwhile a gamelan orchestra played the score. I had been introduced to gamelan in college and found it dull to the point of falling asleep during a concert, but tonight’s performance was lively, even frenetic. About ten men on each side of the stage played solely percussive instruments. One side played small gongs while the other played xylophone. They played quickly and intricately, whirling their hammers in hand during the occasional space between beats. It was as much fun to watch as listen to. Even so, gamelan by its nature is very repetitive, and even though I found the performance lively, interesting and at times deafening, at times I felt hypnotized by the rhythm and had to yank myself back to full consciousness.
Another night Tracy and I went to see a wayang kulit performance. Wayang in general means a puppet show, and wayang kulit is shadow puppetry. It’s performed with a white screen backlit by an oil lamp, and the puppets are made of buffalo hide elaborately perforated to illustrate the finer features of the characters. The more important ones have articulated arms, and a very few have a movable mouth.
The performance we saw was another Mahabharata tale, this time about a king whose people are being killed by a monster who demands a human sacrifice to stop his killing. A mighty prince from the neighboring kingdom volunteers to be the sacrifice, but when the time comes he fights the monster and his horde of demons. With help from his friends he kills them all. It’s a simple story, and we were briefed on it before the performance, but even so I often did not understand what was going on. In this, though, I was not at such a large disadvantage over the Balinese, since wayang is performed in Kawi, an old and elaborate dialect that hardly any modern Balinese know.
In wayang there is a clear division between good characters and evil characters, and also between the refined (heads upturned) and the crude (heads downturned). But as our guide at the wayang museum in Jakarta was quick to point out, there are crude characters who are good, and refined ones who are bad, just as in life.
Each side also has two clowns. The older of the two good clowns is known as a source of wisdom and truth. He is also known for his enthusiastic farting. Besides farting to advising the royal characters, the clowns come on during interludes and speak in Indonesian and English, so we understood many of their antics.
The music was not as good as two nights before at the royal palace, and the screen was a bit grimy, but it was a fun performance anyhow.
The last performance we saw was back at the palace, this time a Barong dance. The Barong is a huge doglike creature that represents good and protects people. In the Barong dance, the evil with Rangda, who eats children, with the coterie of girls who help her perform spells, faces off against a good wizard. After he defeats her in a test of magic, she turns herself into a monster. In response the wizard becomes the Barong and kills her.
This probably would have been my favorite performance if I wasn’t half asleep from climbing a volcano all night (more on that in my next post). The Barong is played by two men in a large costume like a Chinese dragon. The head is a wooden mask that opens its fanged mouth and clops dramatically. The dramatic range they conveyed through such a simple mask was really amazing, and by the end of the show I felt a real affection for this gentle beast. The fight scenes were dramatic, the music was good and the scene where a half-dozen young girls perform a spell in the woods was downright eerie. But I was running on fumes, and several times I found myself waking abruptly from a ten-second micro-sleep when the music changed or a character did something different or my head intercepted my neighbors shoulder.
All in all, some great performances, and I was glad I got the chance to see them before we left. Ubud is a great place to see dance and music, with seven or eight shows every night of the week. I only wish we could have seen more of them.
on August 8, 2009 at 12:41 pm
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[...] After an epic overnight climbing Mt. Agung and a boneshaking scooter ride back to Ubud and a bleary-eyed visit to the Ubud Palace for Barong dancing, it was time to leave Indonesia behind. Roxane and I loved it and we’re planning to come back [...]