Rethinking Balinese Dance

Abstract

How should we set about understanding dance in Bali and its relevance to the study of Indonesia and the Malay world? Is it one of the great contributions to Malay civilisation to be appreciated and studied alongside classical Indian and Japanese performance? Or, is it inextricable from religion and best considered as ritual? As a spectacle watched by hundreds of thousands of tourists a year, is it instead a culture industry? Or is it all these woven together to produce a hybrid mass pilgrimage? And what can the critical study of Balinese dance contribute to a broader understanding of cross-cultural performance?

Notes

¹Both Prunières and Fels are cited in Savarese 2001 as commentaries on the Paris Colonial Exhibition of 1931. My thanks to Richard Fox, Peter Worsley and Adrian Vickers for their comments on the draft of this article and to the two anonymous referees.

²Adumbrating the main problems precludes a detailed discussion of suggestions for future work, a task in which Balinese should be key participants. However, it would inappropriate not to indicate where inquiry might head. As we may well never retrieve more than tantalising glimpses from the pre-colonial sources without adequate context for proper historical analysis, two obvious themes for future research suggest themselves. The first continues work by recent authors (e.g. Picard 1996; Vickers 1989), namely the critical analysis of how Europeans and Americans have imagined Bali and its significance both for their own societies and for Balinese. The second is a cultural analysis of how Balinese themselves have thought about, approached and used theatre and dance. A parallel analysis of Balinese understandings of their own history has proven revelatory (Wiener 1995).

³Such synecdoche (using part to typify the whole), as Clifford has argued (1988), is an established, but problematic, method in social and cultural anthropology. Bali is a notable casualty of this method, where a single image like theatre promises to reveal the complexities of Balinese culture as a whole.

⁴Accounts of each genre can be found in Dibia and Ballinger (2004).

⁵Interestingly Moerdowo dates Topèng Pajegan to 1919 (1977: 68).

⁶The role of conservatories, especially STSI (Indonesian Academy of Arts, later ISI, the Institute of Arts) Denpasar, in codifying, standardising, promoting and determining what constituted dance is crucial.

⁷Visitors are often given a neat division of dance into Wali (offerings, ‘sacred’ dances performed in temples), Bebali (Semi-ceremonial dances, which supplement ritual) and Balih-Balihan (dance for entertainment). This classification was invented by a committee of Balinese intellectuals in 1971 in response to perceived threats to Balinese culture from tourism and even its authors now admit it does not work.

⁸Anthropologists use ritual as a residual category for whatever appears to defy rational or material explanation and is therefore deemed ‘symbolic’ (Hobart 2000: 239–49). Here, calling dance ‘ritual’ or ‘symbolic’ merely defers analysis. If anything, it is the European obsession with projecting fantasies onto Bali that is ‘ritual’ and requires study.

⁹For obvious reasons the idea that even the arts – and so culture-as-civilisation – were a product of a colonial encounter was unappealing to nationalist sentiments.

¹⁰According to Bandem and deBoer, after being shown to the king of Gèlgèl, the masks were brought back to Blahbatuh, where they ‘were then stored in the palace treasury, where they lay unused for a century’ (1995: 47). However, according to Moerdowo, the masks were stolen from the kingdom of Gèlgèl by the ancestor of Blahbatuh who fled for his life with them (1977: 67–68). Delightfully, interpretations are further complicated by the key figures all having the title I Gusti Ngurah Jelantik, which allows history to be collapsed and continuities imagined. Moerdowo, himself Javanese, established the trend for using Javanese sources to explain Balinese dance.

¹¹Similarly the earliest known reference to the dance-opera form, Arja, which remains popular, is to 1825 (Dibia and Ballinger 2004: 84). However, this was probably a variation on classical Gambuh theatre, Arja in something resembling its present form, but with an all-male cast, is recorded as first emerging in 1915. Women, who now play all the lead refined roles, only started dancing in the 1920s, according to Moerdowo, who seemingly relied on oral testimony of actors from Blahbatuh. I Wayan Dibia (personal communication) agrees to the date for the emergence of modern Arja.

¹²Evidently this relationship included adapting and using literary works and cultural practices. However the presence of, say, a Javanese text in Bali is grounds to assume neither that it was constitutive, nor that is explanatory, of cultural practices like theatre or dance.

¹³Indeed, current scholarship suggests the majority were actually written after colonisation (Vickers, personal communication). Dr Nyoman Sedana also informs me that he has evidence that this story is a recent addition to the Babad Dalem Sukawati to whom all authors trace the supposedly original account of Lègong. It would seem high time we rethought for what purposes and for whom such texts were written.

¹⁴My primary sources here are accounts from 1971 by several elderly Balinese in Gianyar who were young adults under the rajas. As their testimony substantiates recent scholarship (e.g. Wiener 1995; Vickers 2005) which has questioned romantic interpretations of Balinese kingship (e.g. Geertz 1983), prima facie they should be taken seriously.

¹⁵Collingwood 1946: 257–66. To Collingwood, scissors-and-paste was opposed to historical and cultural understanding, which involves a dialogue between scholarly analysis and appreciating events as the participants themselves did.

¹⁶Stephen Davies, who for many years has conducted research on the history of Lègong, considers the date of the late 1880s likely its inception. However, his various sources place its modern form, which includes crucially the role of the Condong, as probably dating from the late 1920s (personal communication). This would place the emergence of Lègong as we know it precisely at the time tourism was really developing.

¹⁷There was almost certainly much local variation within Bali. And the dichotomy between ‘authentic’ and tourist performances was complicated by becoming part of the singular dialogue or heteroglossia that is contemporary Bali.

¹⁸Suharto (or his wife) was often dubbed the ‘dalang’ behind New Order machinations.

¹⁹We necessarily represent something as something else (Goodman 1968). At issue are the kinds and purposes of representation.

²⁰If, as Baudrillard argued, the basic commodity that underpins consumer society is not a positivity (a particular good or service), but signs promising access to difference (1970; 1988: 125), then Bali, epitomised by Balinese dance in its exquisite, timeless, ritual, arcane Otherness, was beautifully designed to fit tourists' and aesthetes' predilections.

²¹Hitchcock and Norris (1995: 4–5) note in passing the impact on Spies of the artistic movement in Hellerau, a theme that Mike Hitchcock thinks may be crucial in pre-articulating Spies's vision of Bali (personal communication).

²²A famous example is Nehru's reported description of the island on a state visit in 1950 as ‘the morning of the world’.

²³Apart from his portrayals of Balinese bodies, dancers and other, Spies's involvement in the emergence of the Kècak dance is part of received history. This account, however, replicates the stereotype of passive Balinese. And I have been given quite different accounts by Balinese. I Sampih was later a leading dancer in John Coast's British and American tour, only to be murdered on his return. Not coincidentally, the stars of the tour were pre-pubescent girls.

²⁴Such accounts, far from being unique to Bali, appear to have been not-uncommon in Southeast Asia. Creese has explored how such practices were underwritten in Bali by literary depictions of women's sexuality (2004).

²⁵ Coast (2004: 33) recorded how the military commander of Bali abducted a 15 year old dancer with the connivance of two rajas as late as the 1950s. De Zoete and Spies note that

 The dancing life of a legong (except as a teacher) ends with her marriage, which will normally take place at thirteen or fourteen; for legongs are much in the public eye, and much sought after, and often marry into a high caste (1938: 229). This happy little account makes assumptions about the age of menstruation and what Balinese knew about their ages.

²⁶Terms for training, judging and commenting on dance and theatre remain primarily technical and aids to performance. The vocabulary of aesthetics has had to be borrowed from Europe and is supplementary, comprising dollops of the ethnic gloss and cultural marketing that westerners demand – and duly receive, for a price – of the authentic Balinese dance experience.

²⁷See Goodman 1968. As accounts suggest pre-colonial theatre lasted for days, even the idea of a discreet performative space and time is questionable.

²⁸I take it that universalist and naturalist accounts are cultural. Even were they not, such schemes would be little use in explaining what makes Balinese dance different.

²⁹Philosophically this account draws, among other things, upon Balinese rescensions of Sāmkhya, in which material process is tripartite, comprising passion, desire (rajas), benightedness, ignorance, lust (tamas), purity, thought (sattwa). Significantly a more Indian translational manual fits quite well and is illuminating: spontaneous activity (rajas), rational ordering (sattwa) and objectification or inertia (tamas) (cf. Larson 1987).

³⁰That gamelan and costumes might have been loaned to client villagers for practice does not transform the relations of power.

³¹Vickers (2005) offers a fascinating analysis of how Balinese articulated this period through the idealised figure of the desiring, bellicose and artistic prince.

³²The timing of quite new forms of theatre and dance – modern Arja in 1915 and almost simultaneously Kebyar in North Bali – does raise fascinating questions as to whether the old political order, far from fostering the performing arts, might not have inhibited them. Theatre in Bali has long been a privileged, if risky, forum for social and political commentary. It might be that we shall have to rethink the role of the Balinese rajas as patrons of the arts.

³³These included Mergapati, Demang Miring, Candra Metu Panji Semirang. According to Moerdowo, it was the conquering Japanese commander in Bali who ‘summoned I Nyoman Kaler a famous dancer in Denpasar to create new dances for entertainment purposes, and so the solo dances were created (1977: 108). It would seem that, in significant part, bebancihan emerged out of an engagement of Balinese with Japanese military needs or imaginings at the time. At each turn, the history of Balinese dance grows curiouser and curiouser.

³⁴This critical study of absolute presuppositions Collingwood (1940) argued to be the study of metaphysics proper. A serious study of Balinese theatre should perhaps start with how Balinese judge performance. For example, actor-dancers listen to the angkiang, literally ‘the breath’ of the music and, conversely, musicians work to the angkiang of the dance. The dialogic quality also emerges in how dancers talk of the necessary condition for extemporising, saling enyuhin, to make a path for your fellow actors, without which performance dies on stage. The most fascinating is taksu, what makes a particular performance come to life, what makes an audience forget they are watching theatre and become absorbed, what imbues an actor with something special.

³⁵So another aspect of Balinese engagement with foreigners might have been the opportunity to explore possibilities relatively closed to them within their own society.

³⁶Perhaps we should speak of the state between crises as ‘normal arts’, by parallel with Kuhn's depiction of the periods between scientific revolutions as ‘normal science’ (1970).

³⁷On complex agency, see Inden (1990).

³⁸Under the New Order, actors I know who attempted to address modern themes, were threatened with grave sanctions. Recycling a domesticated and sanitised past through pageants, competitions and arts festivals suited the regime well.

³⁹While Kebyar might suffer from involution, is it really more insular and inward-looking than the closed worlds of western ballet and contemporary dance?

⁴⁰In private, several leading figures of the arts world have expressed their serious concern to me, but are themselves largely trapped by processes beyond their control. One problem that several distinguished choreographers and composers highlighted was the deep conservatism of Balinese audiences, who they felt were uninterested in exploring the new and just wanted more of the same. The intensity and constructiveness of discussion generated when this piece was presented to senior Balinese thinkers, performers and also academics from the Institute of Arts in July 2006 suggests the arguments resonated with its immediate subjects.

⁴¹What might have contributed to this flowering, if indeed it was, is inevitably disputable. I would certainly include a loosening of feudal power, remarkable personal physical and group discipline, a tradition which valued technical mastery and the rare opportunities opened up to a mostly very poor people to better themselves through performance. Those Balinese who make a living through performing in the tourist sector and on the international circuit have neatly turned others' projections onto them of exoticism and difference into a way of providing themselves and their families with a living.