Ubud, Bali - A Night of Dance

Legong and BarongApril 2, 2004
9pm


What a genuinely exciting night at the theater! I just came back from my first, and probably not last, Legong Dance show. Even though I've seen TV specials and film clips and photos of Balinese Dance, there's nothing like seeing it live. More impressive, these are locals that hold down other jobs and businesses, and so this in their spare time! Like their arrival, after the show, there was no big fanfare. Just a quick smoke by a few, and mostly everyone just hopped on their scooters and headed home. The musicians, the dancers, the acting... it was all superb! Most of it was pantomime, but there were times when the musicians and dancers and actors broke into highly stylized chanting and singing and conversing... much like Kabuki... but with Gamelan bells and percussion instruments.

The music was quite sophisticated, and at times rather jazz like in it's shifts and segues. The lovely ladies are in their teens, I believe, and the other actors did GREAT characterizations of various fiends, witches, comical mythical lion/dragon creatures, monkeys and wise and kingly men. Talk about wild costumes and stylized makeup!

At the end, half naked male dancers were supposedly in a trance and torn between two spells that turned the daggers they were using to defend the good guys into daggers to stab themselves. They were pushing hard enough into their flesh to make most people cringe, and a nice suburban looking woman (Balinese style) came out and sprinkled them with holy water to break the evil spell and bring them out of trance. On queue, those brave dagger carrying dancers left the stage along with the kind lion dragon. Guess the sprinkling is efficient!

After experiencing such opulent costumes and lush drama, I no longer felt overdressed in my Indian outfit with gold designs and overly starched puff sleeves. I took pictures and video most of the time, but there were moments I just had to stop and focus on the live performance's nuances. Getting swept up in the performances, ARE what it's all about anyway. I'm sure the movie clips and photos won't do the show justice, but maybe it'll entice some folks to see it for themselves sometime!

I must admit that I was rather tickled and honored to get a scooter lift from one of the musicians, who happened to be my guesthouse host. He played a wonderful stringed instrument that sounded rather like a violin.

Little did I know that he hand in mind to make me an accomplice in making off with two of the stage displays (protective palm leaf weavings). It was some trick trying to hold onto the unwieldy two foot long dangling decorations and my purse, while staying clamped to the scooter and my driver as we made our way back from the show in our fancy duds, along bumpy pitted roads and mud and wove between people conversing in narrow walkways and across the narrow cement path traversing the wattery rice fields. All without protective helmets of course!