by John Coast
6. Coast commissioned Mario to choreograph a new dance, the Tumulilingan Mengisap Sari (The Bumblebee Sips Honey), better known as the Bumblebee Dance, for the Dance Company of Pliatan village. It used two dancers, a little girl (Ni Gusti Raka), and a virile young male (Sampih), and had a simple story: the small girl would be a bumblebee flitting around a garden, sunning herself. The male bumblebee would enter, be attracted to her, be rejected, and in his frustration and despair, would be driven to flirt with the instruments in the orchestra. Here Raka and Sampih rehearse the Bumblebee Dance in Bali.
7. For its first public appearance, the Tumulilingan was danced by Raka and Sampih in front of about 150 at Pliatan to a feast followed by dancing. It was only after this that the dance entered the club's repertoire. The dance was later pruned from its original 28 minutes to half that time for the group's tour of Europe and the US. In the background is part of the 23-strong gamelan group which went on tour.
8. Mario in his prime during the 1930s, in his own creation, Kebiar Duduk (Seated Kebiar). Most of the dance is performed from the waist up from a sitting position. This photo demonstrates the astonishing suppleness of Mario's body.
9. Sampih in a photograph taken as he emerges from childhood. In the mid-1930s, when he was nine, Sampih was adopted by Colin McPhee, the American composer and author of A House in Bali (1947). He learnt to dance under the best teachers, including Mario, and was hailed as a child prodigy. He was famous for his Kebiar Duduk by the time he was ten.
10. Sampih rehearses Kebiar Duduk in Bali with Anak Agung Gde Mandera, the lead drummer and Artistic Director of the Pliatan Gamelan orchestra. Two years after the "Dancers of Bali" tour ended, the 28-year-old dancer was murdered in Bali, purportedly a victim of jealousy generated by the fame and the small wealth he had brought back from the tour.
11. The Legong, Bali's great classic, is danced only by three very young girls, who mime and dance the tale of King Lasem who seduced and abducted the daughter of an enemy with whom he was at war. It alternates pure dance with dramatic episodes. Here the girls rehearse with the Anak Agung Gde Mandera (left) in the grounds of his house temple.
12. The attendant of the two Legongs, the Chondong, dances before a typical Balinese festival audience. The three girls portray various characters and events in the story of King Lasem.
13. Ni Gusti Raka as the raven, the golden bird of ill omen, who encounters the wicked King Lasem as he prepares to do battle with his enemy.
14. The dramatic episodes of the Legong reveal the ardent king; his suit to the captured Princess Langkesari, who rebuffs him; his departure for battle, and his encounter with the fierce little raven, omen of death. Following this is his death struggle with the brother of the captive princess, both warriors impersonated by the small dancers whose fans are symbols of swords.
15. Ni Gusti Raka poses in front of the Garuda Bird, carved on a wall from local paras sandstone. The mythical Garuda became the national emblem of Indonesia, and was the name chosen for its national airline.
16. Anom, in the role of Princess Langkesari, weeps in fear as King Lasem, danced by Oka, approaches her from afar.
17. A public performance of the Djanger, a modern folk-dance. A mass flirtation between a group of girls and young men, the Djanger progresses from the provocative singing of nonsense rhymes by the young girls to the boys' excited reaction—a response matched in the orchestra by lively tempos and syncopation.
18. Djanger dancers wearing the typical headdress.
19. Anak Agung Gde Mandera directs a Djanger rehearsal in Pliatan.
20. Rehearsal from the dance-drama,"The Fasting Ardjuna", in Anak Agung Gde Mandera's palace courtyard. The tusked figure is Rangda, Queen of the Witches.
21."The Fasting Ardjuna story rehearsed by the roadside outside the palace courtyard in Pliatan, 1951.
22. An open-air rehearsal of the gamelan in Pliatan village.
23. A section of the handsome sarong-dad gamelan players from Pliatan village. The cross-sections of the orchestra skilfully blend the complex layers of decorated melodies.
24. Chengcheng (grounded cymbals) players from the Pliatan gamelan supply rhythmic accents.
25. An om, Raka and Oka stitch costumes of multi-coloured silks and brocades, stamped with gold-leaf decoration, for the tour abroad.
26. Tjokorda Oka, with Luce, fitting a costume for dancer Ni Oka, who was also deft with a needle. Tjokorda Oka designed and made the magnificent masks for the Barong and Rangda and other mythical creatures taken on the tour.
27. President Sukarno with the three Legongs in the palace in Djakarta prior to the tour. The President adopted the three little dancers as his wards and saw to their education. The President of Indonesia regarded the arts of Bali as one of the most important elements of Indonesian life, and one to be supported.
28. Twelve-year-old Ni Gusti Raka, the diminutive star of the show, and one of the nine girls in the group, aged from ten to fifteen. Richard Skinner, Columbia Artists' company manager for the American cross-country tour, described the girls as delicate in size and proportion, dressed always off the stage in their charming Balinese prints, with their sleek glossy black hair pulled straight back from the forehead and decorated with a single flower, their blouses pinned together with large American safety pins, and their sarongs tightly bound, all worn with simplicity and charm."
Whenever I explained the need for such work to the Anak Agung, or told him of my correspondence, he would reply, "Good! But that I leave all to you. I follow."
We were in fact already beginning to see that our vast friend, if far away from his drum, was never sure of himself. As the Legong first night had amusingly illustrated, in times of urgency he ran round in puzzled circles, leaving everything to his deep-voiced brother and ourselves. We had observed, too, that in common with most of his village, he was a Balinese on the old pattern-feudalism was deep in his bones and instincts. Though theoretically a feudal serf is as distasteful to me as is a petty Raja, in Bali this worried me little, for I had long abandoned the idea that any one way of life was either better or even desirable for all peoples. In my work ahead, though, I could sense difficulties looming.
Many foreigners have admired the integration of Balinese daily life with its religion; but since the basis of both lies on a caste system, it appeared obvious to me that the Anak Agung's loyalty would lie always in the direction of his Raja in Gianjar. We had to hope, therefore, that this young Anak Agung Gde Oka would be sympathetic to our work-while politically keeping his distance. For the Rajadoms of Gianjar and Denpasar stood at opposite poles: for the Old ideas and the New. And when, in March, 1951, Islam Salim decreed the end of his military law, the whole island was again under the rule of the twenty-eight-year-old Anak Agung Bagus Sutedja, father of nine children and of the new nationalist ideas dominating the island, the head of the Civil Government Council in Denpasar.
One morning a letter came from Djakarta telling us that our first guests were due to arrive by the afternoon plane. Frank and Martha Galbraith were of the American Embassy. Frank I had known in Djakarta as one of the few younger diplomats who spoke fluent Indonesian. Accordingly, I tried to make a final attack on our pi-dog problem, the pariahs, and Sampih assembled the entire household to discuss what could be done.
"Pih, these are our very first guests coming to stay with us They simply must get a good impression. Now—what can be done about these dogs?"
They were all silent, for on how many occasions had they seen me driven crazy by the continuous yelping and howling of these detestable curs, who crept out into the lane each night, and only stopped their banshee chorus the following dawn, in time to sleep during the day and pick up strength for the next night's ululation.
"Tuan,” said Rantun thoughtfully, "if the children throw stones, other dogs join in and make the noise louder. That is no good, then. The Tuan has put d
own poison, but only one of my chickens was killed. Both Sampih and I have tried to buy the dogs—but the people say they are useful watchdogs, who howl, perhaps, when they see leyaks that are invisible to the human eye. I think we have done all that is possible."
I turned to Sampih again.
"If we none of us can think of anything, and our guest-house becomes nicknamed a kennel, it will be difficult for us all very shortly, Pih."
"You have not heard the latest story about the black and white dog that lives opposite us?" asked Sampih, referring to one demoniac dog that I would gladly have slain with my own hands.
"No—what happened?"
"Well, knowing that our guests were coming I went to see the dog's owner. I told him that I sorely needed the liver of just such a black and white dog to make medicine. I asked to buy it. The man looked at me, perhaps not believing my tale, and he said I could have the dog—he would give it me, cheerfully, only I must catch it myself." He paused, grinning at the memory, and all the children laughed with glee, for Bli Sampih was a favourite of theirs.
"Well—I called all the children and we chased that dog till we were all nearly dead. The dog just laughed at us—he is a real devil—we could not even touch him. So, Bli, we don't know what to do. I admit I am beaten."
"Perhaps it will go on raining,” said Rantun, with solemn face.
"Then the dogs will stay inside and not come out into our lane."
So, with only this problem unsolved, and knowing that under Luce's hands the guest-house was looking very attractive and full of flowers,
Sampih and I set out in the jeep for the airport that evening. As we brought the Galbraiths back into Denpasar, they told us how exhausted they were, that they could hardly keep awake, that they wanted to sleep for a week.
On their first evening we sat talking together in our front house, rather shamefully drinking the bourbon our guests had brought with them.
"What do you both most want to see? I mean, we can easily show you lots of dancing, in Pliatan, in Saba, in many other places-even here in the Bali Hotel. But what else do you want to see?"
"Oh, we thought some wood carvers and painters, and maybe some festival or cremation or something. Anything that seems to be happening."
"That should be easy, though, in this wet season it's unlikely you'll see any cremations. But our jeep is terrific at ploughing its way right into tiny villages. We can take you right to the mud-wall door of painters' and carvers' houses and let you see them at work."
"That's just the thing we want. Oh yes—we want to see some of Thea Meier's pictures; and—we want to see Mario dance."
"What! See Mario dance!"
"Is it impossible?"
"Well, just a minute. We've long wanted to meet Mario, but we never thought he'd dance for us. He's too old.” Again I turned to Sampih. "What do you think, Pih? Would Mario be able to dance again? Do you know his house?"
"I know his house, Bli. It's in Tabanan. But as to whether Papa Mario would dance—that is another matter. Doubtless he is old. He has not danced since the japanese time, that is certain."
"We'll try it then, Frank. But we'll choose a day when it's not raining for that trip."
That night Frank and Martha christened our new bathroom. And it worked, except that Agung had tidily thrown half a broken bottle down the closet, not having come across a swan neck before, and Nyoman Regog had to be summoned hastily on the morrow to remove it. But it rained steadily, and they slept well.
Next morning it so happened that we had a visit from one of our hill-village carver friends, a cunning old fellow named Pan Bedil. He sat damply on our floor, for he always refused our offered chairs, and we offered him cigarettes and coffee while he slowly emptied the coconut-leaf bags he brought with him, spreading out over our floor the most truly astonishing collection of carvings, such as only he and his friends made in the hill-villages of Pudjong and Sebatu.
I went over to fetch Frank and Martha, explaining that this was odd, but unique work, which we generally considered true "primitives," and which were very reasonably priced. On that particular morning old Pan Bedil displayed for us: a rampaging leyak, with long teeth, about to devour an infant in arms; a minute human head, of sphinx-like expression, with an arm and hand growing straight out on the top of its skull; four very primitive monkeys on a tree stump; a woman lying in childbirth, two attendants squatting by her, pressing her sides, all with faceless Henry Moore faces; a delightful, simple figure of a child sanghyang dancer, her body bent over backwards in a perfect arc, long hair touching the ground; a seated figure, cross-legged, doubled over and hiding his face in cubistic hands; a very ancient old man, each rib showing, hobbling along with a stick, his sireh pouch at his waistband, and every sort of peasant figure of the countryside with which the carvers were familiar—but all caricatured, all made grotesque.
"What incredible thing" said Frank, and down we both sat and started haggling.
During the next few days the rain fell steadily and our stepping-stones were no longer laughed at by our neighbours. In between the storms we took the Galbraiths down to Renon village, near Sanur, where Theo Meier's wife was building herself a modem brick box of a house and there we also introduced them to Rudin, a young painter whose delightful India ink and water-colour paintings of dancing figures were made, we had discovered, not from life but from the series of sketches by the Mexican Covarrubias in his famous book.
But so that they should see a very different sort of wood carving from Pan Bedil's, we took them to Mas, the village just to the south of Pliatan where Dewa Gde Putu was headmaster at the school, into the compounds of two Brahmana artists, Ida Bagus Ketut and Ida Bagus Nyana.
The elder of these two, Ketut, was the puppet master of the local Shadow Play, the leader of the nearly extinct wayang wong Theatre, a topeng (masked) dancer who made his own masks, as well as a wood carver. His masks were good, and seldom could a visitor resist buying one when old Ketut wore one to demonstrate the character it represented. He would don the mask, say, of a deaf man, and with head cocked to one side he would look up at his visitors, his eyes, though seen through slits, somehow pathetic, and he would quaver: ''I'm a very poor man, Tuan."
Nyana, his cousin, was not only the antithesis of Pan Bedil, but he was also an artist as opposed to the slick craftsmen who chipped out, year after year, those soulless "Bali Heads" for Denpasar's tourists. He was the son of an aged pedanda, and had a finely featured Hindu face; his son, twelve years old, was already working under his father and had bought a bicycle from the sale of his own carvings. On the morning we visited him, Nyana was slowly chiselling at a tall, elongated figure of a fasting man, made from hard ebony wood that came from Borneo. He rose to his feet to greet us, but we slipped quickly in and sat on the edge of his bate, asking him to go on working. "How long does it take you to make a carving, Ida Bagus?" asked Galbraith.
The Ida Bagus laid down his work, thinking, then answered in his soft voice, "If it is made from this iron-tree wood it takes twice as long as when I work with what we call crocodile-tooth wood, which is white and soft. But it is like this, Tuan. I cut the wood first to roughly the size I will use, and I let it dry out for two or three months. And at one time I may be working on several pieces. So I cannot tell how long each carving takes—but for a big one, in soft wood, I should guess at least one month."
"And for how much will you sell the one that you are carving now?" "For about four hundred rupiahs," he answered, as if that were unimportant.
"Isn't that very expensive?"
"I don’t know, Tuan. People seem gladly to pay my prices." He smiled. "There are more than twenty mouths to feed in this compound."
As we left I told Frank that we so admired Nyana's work that we never bargained with him. Once, in the past, he had made two small pieces which Luce and I had greatly coveted, and we had asked h
im, apologetically, if he could lower his prices a little. And at once his young son, Tilem, before Nyana could open his mouth, had replied, "Sing bisa!” Impossible! So that, rebuffed and amused, we had nicknamed the boy Singbisa—but we never attempted to haggle with him again.
We went also to Tjampuang, the place where two rivers meet, above Ubud, and we pointed out the site of Walter Spies' house, built toward the top of a gorge and facing an unreally perfect small temple, its courts laid out under a wairingin tree on the very point below which the two streams rushed together. Spies was a German painter and musician who had lived in Bali before the war, and who had greatly influenced both Balinese painting and dancing. He, in fact, with an American dancer, Katharane Mershon, had been responsible for selecting the trance chants and movements of the now famous Ketjak, or Monkey Dance, where a hundred and fifty men seated in brown concentric circles by night, chant and dance with their hands, while, by the light of a branched jungle torch in the circle's centre, parts of the Ramayana story are enacted, telling the tale of Hanuman, Prince of the Monkeys, who brings his hordes of monkeys to help Prince Rama rescue his wife, Sita, who has been kidnapped by the Demon King, Ravana.
Then journeying on past Tjampuang we reached Sayan and walked to the edge of the great cliff where Colin McPhee's house had stood. Here, pointing downward, Sampih said, "You can almost see my house from here—it's just around the corner where the river disappears. Beh! Those black dots-you can just see them? I think that is my sister and her husband." And he shouted with all his strength, till the tiny figures looked up, waving vaguely at us.