A Chance Balinese Dance

On our way home, Steven now in his contacts, we noticed that the road to our guesthouse was blocked with a crowd of Balinese sitting in the street facing a temple. The few westerners watching from a distance had sarongs wrapped around their waists in what I deduced was a sign of respect. Leaving our bikes by the side of the road, I donned a sarong and walked forward to watch the ceremony.

From where we stood there really wasn't much to see. A man was sitting at the gate of the temple saying what we presumed were prayers and every so often the crowd would raise their hands, palms together, with a small flower petal between the tips of their fingers. The ceremony commenced within a few minutes and the crowd began to dispurse, ladies in colorful wrap skirts and white blouses with varying inlaid designs walked past us with boxes and baskets perched atop their heads. Young boys in sarongs and starched white shirts gathered in small groups with their friends. Steven and I decided to stop into an internet cafe next to where we were standing to see what it was all about.

The man in the internet cafe told us that the ceremony was a temple ceremony and that there would be a performance of the Barong Dance at sundown to honor the temple. Excited at the prospect of a cultural dance, I went ahead arranging to meet Steven when he had finished with his mail.

Reading in my Lonely Planet, I learned that the Barong Dance is a popular Balinese Dance depicting the struggle between good over evil with good represented by the Barong, a large shaggy dog and evil, represented by Rangda, an evil witch. The book said that in some renditions, Rangda wears a necklace of read animal entrails. Knowing that this wasn't a tourist production, I headed towards the dance with a little trepidation.

I walked over to the temple entrance and saw that people were gathering in a large open space across the street. The grounds held a large open room, similar to what we had seen in the temples, with no walls, just ornate columns holding up an enormous thatch roof. Instead of gathering around what I had presumed was the state, people were using the "stage" as a seat and facing the dirt space between the street and the structure. The space was lined on three sides with spectators and the fourth was rapidly filling up with Westerners, like myself, eager to see the performance.

Steven joined me just as the dance began. A person dressed in a long wig and a mask came out and begin talking to the crowd in a gravelly voice in Bahasa Indonesia, the language of Bali. He talked for a good bit, while the crowd looked around uninterested, presumably having seen this performance before. Finally the strange figure moved off and the space was filled with a figure that looked something like a Chinese dragon, but with a dogs face, with one person making the head and front feet of the beast, while another, leaning forward held up the back and rear. The mask was a wooden mask resembling a dog with big teeth that would chomp together menacingly while he danced.

The first figure reappeared with a bird in its hands and place the bird on the ground in front of the dog. With a swift movement of hands, the bird was free and flopping around on the ground in a way that look suspiciously unnatural. Straining my eyes to see better, I confirmed that the man had indeed just ripped the head of the bird and the body that was flopping around was doing so on its own. I recoiled in disgust.

After a few chomps near the dead bird the dog danced around some more and the danced off. The long haired figure was back with his long winded speech, but this time he was joined by an older Balinese woman dancing around him in circles with her hands and wrists twisting to a silent melody.

At this point, Steven noticed that the crowd had grown rapt in its attention as a man from the crowd walked over to the woman and tried to physically remove her from the "stage." She fought him off, yelling and pushing at his hands, and danced back to the center and continued her performance. Disapproving looks appeared on the faces of some of the older spectators and Steven and I wondered aloud if the woman wasn't just the village "crazy woman."

The dance continued for another 20 minutes or so and by the time it was finished, Steven and I were ready to stretch and be on our way. We claimed our bikes where we had left them on the side of the road and debated as to whether it was safe to continue down the road past the temple. People seemed to be walking past, so we figured that we could get walk our bikes through as well.

Just as Steven neared the temple, a group of men jumped in front of him shouting "No, No, No." Visibly shaken, Steven wheeled his bike back towards me and asked when we could get through. "Tomorrow," was the reply.

Disappointed at having the road blocked five minutes from our guest house and not wanting to double back and take the 30 minute route around the island in the dark, we decided to see if there was any way to walk along the coast. We rode back down the road and turned right down the first alley we came to. The alley led to the beach, but at high tide, the beach was under two feet of water. Not knowing what else to do, Steven and I hoisted the bikes above our shoulders and waded through the water to the next set of stairs. Arriving at the top, we set our bikes down and sighed as we saw that there was no way to continue without swimming, which was an unattractive option without the bikes and rendered impossible with them. We tromped back down the stairs, bikes held high and walked back through the water to the stairs from the alley. Defeated by the obstacles, we made our way back out onto the main road to find it cleared of all traffic, the men who'd barred our path nowhere to be seen. Laughing at the thought that the man who'd said "tomorrow" probably didn't know how to say "five minutes" in English, we rode back down the road to our hotel.

We decided to leave the following morning, giving up on our vision of Bali as an endless string of white sandy paradise and seek out more of "the real" Bali, in Ubud, its cultural center in the mountains.