This post was written in 2007. Some information may be out of date.
The bus tour itinerary included Kecak dance and Barong dance, two of Bali’s traditional dances. I feel like I covered pretty much all of Bali’s traditional culture on this trip.
The Kecak dance starts at 6:30 in the evening, but our group got there at 6 and grabbed seats in the very front row.
The sky at 6 p.m.
I’m not sure the twinkling star in the middle came out well. (It’s not a speck of dust.) Tropical skies really are beautiful.
Enter the main characters
The shirtless men sitting there keep singing a cappella the whole time. There weren’t that many of them, so the choral effect wasn’t huge, but it was worth seeing. With 100 or 200 people it would have been amazing.
Here come the hero, Prince Rama, an insanely gorgeous boy with a killer body, and his wife, Princess Sita, who is also an insanely beautiful girl. They’re the couple who shows up most often whenever Hindu mythology comes up. Top-notch social status, born beautiful, and on top of that Rama is a war hero (and an incarnation of a god, too). Hindu Brahmins are treated from birth as nobility of noble blood, on the grounds that they are descendants of this legendary hero. Above all, it’s a myth written in beautiful language that justifies the caste system.
This is Rama’s younger brother, Lakshmana.
This one came out a bit blurry. In lighting this dark you shouldn’t trust autofocus…
And this is Sita
Sita, captured and locked up by the enemy, is visited by the king of the monkeys.
Rama and Lakshmana in trouble!
Well… a few trials are nothing they can’t overcome. In the end Rama rescues Sita and the dance ends happily. But the original Hindu myth has a sequel to this. It’s called the ordeal of Sita: Rama doubts the chastity of Sita, who had been held by the enemy, and Sita walks on fire to prove her purity. In any world, relationships between men and women, between husbands and wives, are complicated. Even in the world of the gods..
After the Kecak dance there’s a fire show. They walk barefoot over fire, kind of like a strongman sideshow stunt. Well, Koreans are used to that kind of sideshow, so it wasn’t particularly surprising.
The next morning we went to see the Barong dance. Barong, I’m told, is a sacred lion-like creature from Balinese mythology.
This is the temple connected to the performance venue.
Anywhere with a long history has wonderful buildings. On that point it beats Guam by a mile. But no matter how many historic buildings there are, I still think lounging by the pool beats sightseeing.
This is roughly what the venue feels like.
These are the musicians playing live music.
The man playing the flute
He played the flute nonstop for the whole hour. Impressive stamina.
Kids watching the performance.
And finally, here it comes.
It’s a lion mask dance. It was so similar to the ones in China and Korea that a wave of doubt washed over me: why did I come to see this?
Mask dance
Come to think of it, Japan has kagura too, something a bit like Peking opera.. I bet the Japanese visitors felt a little let down as well.