Dancing Out of Bali
Page 2
5. Ni Gusti Raka learning the rhythmic patterns of the Bumblebee Dance. (John Coast)
6. Ni Gusti Raka and Sampih rehearsing the dance. (John Coast)
7. First public appearance of the Bumblebee Dance. (John Coast)
8. Mario in the 1930s performing Kebiar Duduk. (Photo courtesy of Melanie Arcudi)
9. The young Sampih performing Kebiar Duduk. (Photo courtesy of Melanie Arcudi)
10. Sampih rehearsing Kebiar Duduk with Anak Agung Gde Mandera. (John Coast)
11. The Legongs rehearse in Mandera's house temple. (John Coast)
12. The attendant of the two Legongs dances for a Balinese audience. (Indonesian Ministry of Information)
13. Ni Gusti Raka as the raven, the golden bird of ill omen. (John Coast)
14. A dramatic episode of the Legong. (John Coast)
15. Ni Gusti Raka in front of the carved Garuda Bird. (John Coast)
16. Anom and Oka in the Legong. (John Coast)
17. A public performance of the Djanger folk-dance. (John Coast)
18. Djanger dancers wearing the typical headdress. (John Coast)
19. Anak Agung Gde Mandera directing a rehearsal. (John Coast)
20. Rehearsal of the dance-drama, "The Fasting Ardjuna"(John Coast)
21."The Fasting Ardjuna" rehearsed by the roadside. (John Coast)
22. An open-air rehearsal of the gamelan in Pliatan village. (Indonesian Ministry of Information)
23. A section of the gamelan from Pliatan village. (Colin McPhee)
24. Chengcheng players from the Pliatan gamelan. (Colin McPhee)
25. Anom, Raka and Oka preparing their costumes. (John Coast)
26. Tjokorda Oka and Luce fitting a costume. (John Coast)
27. President Sukarno with the three Legongs in the palace in Djakarta.
28. Twelve-year-old Ni Gusti Raka, star of the travelling show.
29. The Pliatan Gamelan orchestra on stage at the Winter Garden Theatre in London. (Dennis de Marney)
30. The three Legongs from the wings of the Winter Garden Theatre. (Baron)
31. Sampih performing Kebiar Duduk at the Winter Garden Theatre. (Baron)
32. The warrior Ardjuna about to do batde with the wild boar sent by the god Shiva to test his prowess. (Baron)
33. The Finale: the Barong triumphs over all its adversaries. (Baron)
34. Publicity for the "Dancers of Bali" tour of the United States.
35. The “Dancers of Bali” reach Broadway.
36. John Coast directing a rehearsal at the Fulton Theater.
37. The Djanger ensemble in the US debut. (Arnold Eagle)
38. Rangda and the Barong with other characters. (Arnold Eagle)
39. Sampih performing the Baris. (Louis Faurer)
40. Sampih performing Kebiar Duduk with Anak Agung Gde Mandera. (Arnold Eagle)
41. Ni Gusti Raka as the bee in the Bumblebee Dance. (Louis Faurer)
42. The Djanger dance being performed at the Thunderbird Hotel in Las Vegas. (Hervey, Southern Pacific R.R.)
43. Serog, the clown, in the Ketjak monkey circle. (Colour Processing Laboratories Ltd.)
44. Oka and Raka sipping orange pop in their dressing room in the Fulton Theater. (Southern Pacific R.R.)
45. The Balinese dancers eating ice cream in Manhattan. (Gordon Parks)
46. The Legongs with Walt Disney in Los Angeles.
47. The Legongs with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby at Paramount Studios, Hollywood.
48. The three Legongs meeting prima ballerina Alicia Markova.
49. The three Legongs and Luce looking over an American magazine. (Los Angeles Mail)
50. A farewell picture in Miami. (Frank Boran, Miami)
51. Ni Gusti Raka in 1966 with her youngest child. (John Coast)
52. Ni Gusti Raka in a publicity shot for the 1971 Australian tour.
53. John Coast in his London office, 1981. (Laura Rosenberg)
54. Reunion in Pliatan, August 1983: Belge, John Coast, Anak Agung Gde Mandera, Raka and Anom. (Laura Rosenberg)
55. Pegil, Beige and John Coast, Iseh, Bali, 1983. (Laura Rosenberg)
56. Ni Gusti Raka teaching in Bali, 2004. (Jonathan Copeland)
Drawings by Supianti Coast
Sketch map of Bali
page 13
Author's house and compound
14
Full Balinese orchestra
136
Sketch-map of Bali showing the towns and villages mentioned in the text
Bird’s-eye view of our house and compound in Kaliungo Klod, Densapar
1
We Decide to Stay
*
We sat in two bamboo chairs, looking toward the beach, where we could hear the breakers gently pounding the white sweep of Kuta Bay. Between our grass-thatched hut and the sea lay only a shallow strip of coconut palms, beneath which the grey, sandy soil baked in the afternoon sun. The breezes blowing in steadily off the Indian Ocean made us want to sleep twelve hours a day. We had only been living in Bali for two weeks, but already we wanted to stay there indefinitely.
Kuta was a fishing village. Along the beach there stood a series of long, ragged huts, placed under trees just above the high-water mark. In these huts were the narrow boats with prows carved like fanciful masks to scare the monsters of the ocean, with their outriggers leaning drunkenly on the sand. But in these huts no Balinese lived; for according to the beliefs of the people, the low-lying sea is the habitat of demons, while always from the sea Bali's invading enemies have come. The sea, therefore, is not to be trusted, but to be placated. It is in the Great Mountain, whose vast peak dominates the whole of the island, that the gods of Bali prefer to live. The real village of Kuta, therefore, lay behind us, slightly inland.
This afternoon had been unusually warm, and we were just thinking of going to the bathhouse to cool off, for the tide was far out and the well water, if scooped over ourselves in empty halves of coconut shells, was cold and refreshing, when our temporarily adopted son, Pegil, came running up to our porch from the direction of the sea. He was a small boy of ten, permitted by his family, who were very poor hill villagers, to live with us and help in our household in return for being sent to school and a promise that we would never take him away from Bali. He was a handsome child, sturdily built, with a wonderful smile, and he lived proudly in a new pair of dark blue cotton shorts. He stood now smiling, nervous, pulling out the joints of his fingers, watching us. First he looked at me; then at Luce. Perhaps Luce looked less forbidding or the more awake, for it was to her that he spoke.
"Excuse, please," he said. "The tide is very far out today. Are you and the Tuan, perhaps, going fishing on the reef?"
Luce looked at me resignedly from her chair and Pegil turned his smile on to me, too.
"Let's all go," she said "You know you enjoy it yourself quite as much as Pegil does."
"All right, Pegil,” I said. “We’ll go in a few minutes. As soon as we've put some shoes on."
"Excuse me, Tuan, I will first tell my friends—that is, if the Tuan is going to drive the jeep?"
"Yes, we'll take the jeep."
Inside the hut we pulled on canvas shoes so that we could more safely clamber over the rocks and through the channels. Luce wore shorts and a brief blouse; I wore shorts and sunglasses. Then we were ready. As we walked over to the old wartime jeep, Pegil came forward, seven or eight of his friends from the village with him. Grinning, cheerful little brown urchins, they wore mostly rotting and patched shorts, and in their hands they carried small baskets, heavy hammers, with barbed, yard-long spikes of iron. At my "Okay!”They all scra
mbled aboard, talking excitedly, for this was a big moment for them; Pegil, however, now kept his face very calm, even slightly aloof, implying that for him it was all a most usual and boring occurrence.
There was a grass track leading to the foreshore, but as the jeep descended the slope on to the beach itself, I had to shift to low gear; then we lurched forward through the soft sand like a tank, the children whooping with pleasure, and chattering like magpies when we finally sped along the firm white sand close to the sea's edge, heading for the reef of white coral that ran out several hundred yards from Kuta Point. I left the jeep on firm sand and we jumped down. Now it was the turn of a boy smaller than Pegil to lead us. This was Baris, eight-year-old expert on the reef, nimble and wise on tides and races. We had met Baris first during a stroll along the shore at low tide, when he had shown us how to scoop out exquisite black shells living just under the wet sand where the water retreated.
Baris led the way. Luce and I moved cumbersomely after the quickly scattering and light-footed boys. As we walked through pools and over the low rocks, forward to the main reef's edge, where now tame-looking waves lapped at and caressed it, we had to guard all the time against spiky and poisonous sea urchins, amber, black and pale pink, which lay in holes and under ledges everywhere, so that when we stepped or lifted a rock to peer under it, we had always to beware that a groping foot or levering hand did not light upon us.
At first we found only a few clams and some giant, rubbery starfish, bright blue in colour, but presently we caught up with the children busily chipping and prodding for cat's-eyes. These stones, we had learned, were plugs, or stoppers, attached to the bases of certain small molluscs, which, when frightened, retired into their shells, thus sealing themselves in, leaving the glaring green and black eye on a white background to frighten off any enemy. The small boys, however, gathered up the shells complete, for they would eat the fish and try to sell the stones to any tourists who came down to bathe. Luce was having one mounted by a Kuta silversmith in a filigree silver ring.
Sometimes, in holes in the rocks, the boys would plunge in their barbed spikes and one would pull out a small octopus, a greatly prized delicacy, or from under the ledges fat eels would wriggle through the shallows to be speared and captured also. In deeper pools shoals of tiny fish of a kingfisher blue would flash and turn, while at the reef's farthest point, where the rocks were crumbling soft, huge and glistening cowries, some brown-black, some fawn-coloured and speckled, were prised away before the turning tide forced us to withdraw to the beach. There we would compare catches with the fishermen, who would try to sell us their too salt crayfish, or huge sea fleas, which they had trapped on the sand ledges between high and low tides. And then we would jeep back to the village.
On the evening of this same day, old Wo Ketut (which means Uncle Fourth-Born) our servant, came to us bursting with excitement.
"Tuan," he said, "there is good news. Lotring has come at last. Tonight the Music Club will be rehearsing in Kuta. The Tuan will certainly want to be present. Lotring is my old friend. Let me take the Tuan and the Tuan's wife there after they have eaten."
"This is good news indeed, Wo. Do you know what they will be rehearsing tonight—or is it just a meeting?"
"I do not yet know, Tuan, but later I will find out."
He bustled back to the kitchen, content in his own new-found importance.
For us this really was most valuable information. Lotring had long been one of Bali's most famous musicians, and his home was in Kuta; but so much was he in demand as a teacher that he was being continually called all over the island, and never yet had we found him in his own house. So far the only dancing we had seen had been at the Bali Hotel in Denpasar, where the little girls encased in their cloths of gold, the clowns and masked monsters who fooled and ranted, had begun to work their spell on us. But the dancing had not as yet pleased us as much as the music, that most gentle, hypnotic music of the Belaluan orchestra, hammered out by a percussion of gongs and gilded metallophones-xylophone-shaped, but with keys of metal-played by some five and twenty men. The music fascinated me because I could not see which players so precisely and perfectly controlled it and I was baffled by the way a piece ended always unexpectedly, as if in mid-phrase, still in mid-air.
After we had eaten that night we went on foot together to the village. The rehearsal was taking place in a small bale, or open-air hall, on the earth floor of which the instruments were arranged on three sides of a square. Surrounding the space were crude bamboo slatted shelves on which sat a few casual spectators, the one oil lamp smoked foully, and, as we watched, a fierce argument seemed to be taking place in the thick near-darkness. The men squatted cross-legged behind their metallophones, most of them inscrutable, scratching themselves occasionally, clad only in their workaday sarongs. In the centre of the square two drummers sat leaning across their drums, which they held lengthwise across their knees. One of the drummers, who seemed to be leading the argument, was a well-featured man of some fifty years. Repeatedly he would shout what sounded like: "Sing! Sing! Sing nyak!” (No! No! I don't want that!) At last, after some throaty grumbles, the dissidents sulkily eyeing the floor, the rehearsal jerked into life again.
Close by my side old Wo Ketut's voice informed me: "That is Lotring who has been speaking, Tuan. The men of the village say that they are rehearsing for a small festival in three days’ time.”
We watched Lotring using his drum, his eyes remote, flat palms and beringed fingers alternately caressing, flicking, coaxing and thumping the two end skins. Then suddenly, with no warning, yet all together, they would stop again. Leaning over his drum, Lotring would reach forward toward one of the metallophones, take the light wooden hammer from the player's hand, and, from the reverse side of the keys, beat out the next, unlearned phrase of the melody. Then straight at it they would fly again. If the metallophones hesitated, from Lotring's throat an unearthly, whining sound would issue, his voice thus giving them the lost melody, while his hands continued to punctuate the phrases with the drum.
Amidst laughter and imprecation the rehearsal went on for two hours more. Every half hour or so they would rest. A distinctly musky, fetid atmosphere, purely masculine, clogged the air of the ball. During a rest, men would stroll out to relieve themselves, squatting by the edge of the lane. Some of them lit acrid cigarettes flavoured with carnations, but Lotring would always be politely offered a shallow wooden tray whose partitions contained leaves of the sireh vine, some betel nut, lime paste and a coarse black tobacco. Automatically the teacher would fold himself a chew of betel, wrapping the nut and paste in the sireh leaf, putting it well back into his mouth, after which he would rub around his gums with a wad of tobacco, finally leaving the quid between his lips, grotesquely protruding. Presently, as the saliva began to circulate, he would begin chewing; a minute later he would be looking round for a few open inches of floor where he might spit out his first red betel jet.
When it was all over and we were walking home, Wo Ketut, savouring our pleasure, said casually, "Tomorrow perhaps I will ask Lotring to come and meet the Tuan at the house."
And in the morning, when we came out on to the porch to sip our morning coffee, we found Lotring there waiting for us, sitting in one of our chairs, wearing a new khaki shirt and batik headcloth. We greeted him, offered him coffee, but he refused it; out of politeness he allowed us to bring him the milk of a young coconut, but he hardly touched it.
We asked him about the performance in three days’ time. Oh, it was nothing-some Baris dancers were coming over from Sanur, maybe, and there would be a little music. But it was of no account.
"How is it," I asked him, "that in your own village there are no dancers, and that this is the first time we've heard music in Kuta?"
"Well, there used to be a club. A Legong club. But the men broke always into factions and squabbled about money. That happens often. But in Kuta the people are very
difficult. Beh! very difficult," He repeated. "I have tried several times to hold them together—in vain always. There is nothing to be done about it."
He smiled at us, very unperturbed, his hands lightly thrumming the sides of his chair, as if impatient to be at his drum again.
"Uncle Lotring, we came to Bali to look for dancers and the finest of orchestras. Could you not persuade the men to work with you once more?"
He laughed at us quietly, pointing to his betel-stained, gaping mouth.
"You see, Tuan, I have no teeth. It is hard for me to eat, and I cannot chew betel on my gums with pleasure. But even if you promised together. It is too difficult, Tuan: too difficult."
"You know, we could look for false teeth for you at the hospital in Denpasar, Uncle."
"Still not possible, Tuan," he grinned. Then a moment later, hands politely clasped, "Titiang pamit,” he said, “I go now.” And in Balinese fashion, very simply, he was gone.
It was a Japanese mortar shell exploding in my platoon truck during the battle of Singapore that had led me thus to be looking for dancers in Bali. On that far-off day all my glasses had perished in the gutted vehicle, so that later, when I was taken prisoner by the Japanese, I lived for more than three years in a dim, half-seen world. When, in 1944, our main slave task of building a railway from Siam into Burma through hundreds of miles of monsoon jungle and mountains had been completed, we were reassembled for a brief period in vast base camps. There, with our native ingenuity, we built theatres from bamboo and palm thatch and matting, and put on plays and musicals, and I, in order to be able to see these shows, volunteered to prompt. Soon afterwards, in order further to occupy my mind, I had started to learn a foreign language—Malay. By a most singular and far-reaching coincidence, on the day of my first Malay lesson, my teacher introduced me to a young Javanese dancer, a fellow prisoner, whose brown chest was tattooed with the head of a blue tiger and with powerful magic writing.1