Dancing Out of Bali

by John Coast

  As far as the eye could go, up and down this immense, steep valley, bisected by its boulder-strewn river, there was nothing to see but water-filled rice terraces, irrigated so perfectly that even the fields on the crests of the hills grew good padi, and everywhere water trickled and fell, incessantly. For me, there is no more beautiful sight in the world than such terraced rice-fields, with their grey or palest yellow-green seedlings just pricked out in them, reflecting the sky or rippled by the wind, making a shimmering patchwork that slowly rises or descends, that climbs over and falls down the multitudinous volcanic chasms and valleys of this richly blessed island.

  At home in the evenings I would try, for our guests, to look under the serene-looking surface of this Bali we were living in.

  "About Balinese feudalism,” I would say. "The young nationalists are right—I think all serf or serf-like mentalities are regrettable. And the Balinese art that I admire, I believe, has been developed in spite of, not because of, the Rajas; because in Bali art springs from the ordinary people, everywhere, all the time. I would guess that Bali's handful of Rajas have grabbed off and made umpteenth wives of as many Legong dancers as they helped train or foster."

  "But what would happen to Balinese art if the castes disappeared? Would the art disappear, too?"

  "That's the great question. Of course, all the Rajas and people of high caste say that that would be the case. But I just don't yet know enough to estimate how fundamentally the Rajas and feudalism are bound up in the Hinduism of Bali. If the ending of feudalism meant a religious disintegration, two symptoms might emerge. There would be a tendency to an anarchic collapse until a new basis of society could be secured, and perhaps some of the occasions for dancing and music would vanish."

  "How do you mean—what occasions?"

  "Well, the Balinese dance at temple festivals, at tooth filings, at marriages, at the New Year, at big ceremonies after cremations. If a reformed religion meant banishing these ceremonies, then, as I say, some of the occasions for dancing would go."

  "Do you think a 'reformed' Balinese religion is possible?"

  "I don't know. It might be. The Balinese are very resilient and receptive. And I don't believe that the Balinese gods would collapse if all the castes intermarried, or if the people didn't grovel on the earth in front of their Rajas and address them as Tjokorda Dewa—don't you think it's bad for the dignity of any human being to address another mere man as a 'Limb of God?'"

  "Maybe that's only our Western way of thinking."

  "Yes—but I feel that changes are inevitable. You should read the Denpasar newspaper. And if the 'Limbs of God' do disappear, I believe, or maybe I hope, that Shiva and the Bali-theon, together with such innocent symbols of Good and Evil as Barong and Rangda, still remain—and therefore ceremonies and festivals will remain. But anyhow, Frank, the souls of these people are filled with natural music and with the desire to dance, and that doesn't only come from their religion-much of it must spring from the fantastic beauty of this island."

  "I hope you're right."

  "Sodo II! "laughed. "A week or so ago a well-known Denpasar family had a birthday party in its garden. I happened to drive by in my jeep, and I saw no Balinese decorations to speak of, heard no gamelan. But I saw Balinese men and women sitting around formally in nice 'burger' squares at tables, all in western clothes, and those of the women incredibly childishly cut, while in front of a microphone was a nice little Balinese girl of twenty years old, in pigtails, singing, in English, 'Home, Sweet Home.' I presumed that was thought to be 'modem progress'.''

  Frank, a good diplomat, made no comment.

  On the day when the sun first broke through enough to encourage us to jeep over to look for Mario, a variant of this problem occurred to me on the way.

  "Everything's so very contradictory, I find. Just listen to these two things. The balean doctor in the village of Boeg-Boeg in east Bali used his influence against vaccination, and the smallpox casualties there were among the worst in the island. That was terrible. But when the young nationalists in Karangasem started burning the Djoged gamelans in the public square in an excess of puritanical zeal (the Djoged, they said, was bad for national dignity), this same old doctor courageously led a mob of angry villagers to Karangasem in protest.

  "Then the breast question. They ban the photographing of breasts and urge their women to cover themselves in public, but they don't realize how much more offensively primitive it can be to see women pausing beside the roads, legs astraddle, lifting a grubby sarong with a free hand, and relieving themselves. Their ideas are in a muddle; but they've certainly got me confused, too."

  It was twenty kilometres to Tabanan, a twisty road through level rice-fields, and we found it a neat, small town. We turned down a narrow lane near the Raja's puri.

  “Mario lives in a very small hut," Sampih warned us. "He was given some money by Tuan Koke who had a hotel at Kuta before the war, but he simply was forced to spend half of it on fighting cocks."

  And it was indeed a dismal place where Bali's greatest dancer lived.

  He had one small shack, very grubby and musty, and its roof was leaking. His wife, who must have been very pretty when young and who still had charming features, received us nervously, rapidly questioning Sampih. In the end, since it was again raining hard, we sat around a sordid table while a girl went to look for Mario.

  "Bapa Mario works in the Government Office,” Sampih now told us. "He gets enough money for his rice and the work is very easy. It is mostly to open the office in the morning and to close it in the evenings; if anyone wants to send a message from the office, they look for Mario in a warong in the market." It began to seem not so bad a life for a retired dancer.

  Eventually a tall figure came cautiously up the slippery path between the neighbouring houses, wheeling a dripping bicycle beside him.

  "This is Mario,” said Sampih, laughing with pleasure as Mario jumped up the steps into the house.

  "Beh! Can it be possible? The boy Sampih grown up!" "Beh! Pa Mario-unalterable, the same as ever!" "And your friends...?"

  Grinning, Sampih introduced us all. And at once we were delighted with Mario, for we had heard so many stories of his sicknesses that we had imagined a white-haired and reprobate old skeleton. Instead, we saw a handsome man of about fifty, greying hair well brushed back from his temples, eyes that puckered easily into laughter, a good nose, firm chin, a head set nobly on a strong neck, and a personality immediately attractive by its natural charm.

  In five minutes we were talking like old friends; in half an hour Luce and I had returned from the market with some food and we were all sitting around the table drinking and eating contentedly. After the food, like two buffoons, Mario and Sampih sat cross-legged on a bamboo bed where Mario demonstrated for us the sad decline of the modem Kebiar.

  "Beh! These young fellow-" she complained. "They hold themselves like nothing-ugh! like Sampih sits now—and they think they can dance in five minutes. But dancing is hard work, Tuan;it is work."

  Again he posed Sampih in a painfully incorrect position, exclaiming and laughing. Then he turned to us again, pure tragedy in his eyes.

  "That's how they sit nowadays," he moaned. "Terrible, terrible!"

  And burst into more laughter.

  "And what sort of a pupil was Sampih, Pa Mario?"

  "Difficult, Tuan—very difficult. Always he was difficult." And he had to break off, for the two of them were now shouting at each other as reminiscence overcame them.

  "Then the best thing, Bapa" I said calmly, "is for you to come to Pliatan and show us how the Kebiar should be danced."

  An astonished face.

  "Belt!What, me?"

  He sat very still. His face became most solemn. He shook his head glumly.

  “I am old, Tuan. I never dance. I do not even take pupils any more."

&
nbsp; At once Sampih intervened and another hilarious Balinese altercation began. Frank and I argued with him for almost an hour, all of which flattered Mario immensely, and at last, with a martyr's sigh, he capitulated.

  "I will try, then. But I am old—and stiff. I cannot move. You will make me ashamed, Tuan. In front of Pliatan, too. I will attempt only the 'Pelaion'—the introduction when I play on the terompong."

  “Terompong, Pih? What's that?"

  "Oh, we don't use one generally in Pliatan. It's like a reyong, with twelve gongs in a row, but designed only for one player."

  "Agreed, then. Perfect. And perhaps you will find some child in Pliatan whom you may think worthy of teaching the Kebiar. Now can you find our house in Kaliungu? Good. You come by bus to Kaliungu, and we'll drive you up in the jeep to Pliatan. You can sleep on the couch in our front house if you like."

  "Good, Tuan. So be it then." When left him looking mournful a little.

  But when he danced in Pliatan we learned that the old books about Bali were still right. There is no Kebiar dancer like the man who created it some twenty-five years ago.

  Though he danced only for five minutes in an old costume borrowed from Sampih, and though he sat behind the terompong and only reached from one end of it to the other with his long arms, his quality remained. Technically, perhaps, Mario was never as brilliant or as full of fireworks as his first pupils. But his quality was not to be stolen: for it was Mario himself.

  He had taken the Kebiar music of North Bali, and made this sitting dance that was ideally suited to his own physique. His expression is infinitely subtle and serene; his body is long and straight, so are his arms and fingers, too; and his head is set on his neck and shoulders with the perfection of a Roman statue.

  He sat, then, behind this terompong, two slender white batons in his hand, and behind him the gamelan started a quiet, floating introduction to a Kebiar. Then he played that terompong with superb and nonchalant gestures; on his face, as he twirled the batons which descended in perfectly elegant yet in sometimes almost hesitant timing, was an expression of fastidiousness, of aloofness, of nobility. At a break in the music he would drop the batons and draw back, and with arms and body dance a fraction of his old Kebiar. Mario's eyebrows did not flutter with great speed—he hinted, rather, that he was raising them, very gently and with the most subtle innuendo; and a split second after his eyes had started out of his head they relaxed back into a suggestion of quite urchin humour—but only a suggestion.

  Without that supremely mobile face and its quality of unconscious greatness, no other dancer could hope to compare with Mario.

  When it was over he sat there fanning himself, panting, laughing and shouting at us all, "I told you so. I told you. I am old. I cannot dance any more. I cannot!"

  But clearly he could; and he did, many times sleeping in our front house, before continuing on his way home by the dawn bus to Tabanan from Denpasar.

  When we eventually said good-bye to these Galbraiths at the airport is was we who felt indebted to them. Not only had we discovered Mario together, but they had proved to us that a guest-house could be a pleasant way of looking for a living in Bali.

  5

  Shaping a Programme

  *

  One of the most delightful things about living in Bali is the way the servants become part of your family. For our relations with Rantun and her children were of this nature, just as we felt Sampih to be our younger brother and Kusti our adopted son. To talk with Rantun, and to ask her questions about her Bali, was to reveal that we lived in the same yet utterly apart worlds, seeing and evaluating the same things quite differently, and her account of the now imminent solar Day of Nyepi illustrated this perfectly.

  To me Nyepi was a nuisance. Either I had to go to the Raja's office and queue up with all the local Chinese to pay the customary fines; or else, for twenty-four hours I must light no fire, burn no electricity, use no typewriter, eat no food cooked that day, and under no circumstances go out in my jeep. It was an irritation, merely.

  But to Rantun it was quite otherwise. She told us her story of Nyepi with that mixture of seriousness and laughing incredulity which colours and makes sane so much of the Balinese religion.

  "They say it is like this, Tuan. On the day before Nyepi the gods drive out all the devils from the outer worlds. And alas, we fear they may fall on Bali and plague us. So, at the time of the spring equinox, we make special offerings to attract all the devils that are already here. And of an evening, when they have collected at the crossroads where we have laid out the offerings, we all go out and make a fearful noise, the children banging and shouting, beating old tins and striking the kulkul drums, and thus the devils are driven out—either to another land, or to . . . well, that does not matter. And then the next day all our villages keep silent. Nobody shouts or makes a noise; no cars are allowed on the roads to show that Bali is inhabited; no smoke from cooking fires. All is still. And the devils are deceived—for luckily for us, Tuan, these devils seem generally to be rather stupid—and they think that our Bali is empty, deserted, with no people to annoy and with no people from whom to receive offerings. And in this way we get rid of our devils each year."

  Nonsense, do I hear you say, gentle reader? Well, one day we told Rantun the story of the Gadarene Swine. But she and her children were embarrassed at the end of it, silent, because they were far too polite to tell us that this sounded a very naive and childish tale.

  Nyepi came at about the end of March, and thereafter, thanks in part to the Galbraiths and in part to the end of the wet season, our guest house often came to have one or two guests staying in it, while yet other people, who came to Denpasar but preferred the more certain comforts of a hotel, would come to our house and ask to be taken around the villages to meet the Balinese in their own houses. And this, together with the English lessons we started to give in the dry weather, five evenings a week, meant that we had plenty to occupy us outside our work in Pliatan. With our guests we had to develop two techniques. If we liked the look of them we invited them to use our front house as theirs, too; but if we only took them in from dire economic necessity, I would lead them to the second house, say firmly to them, "This is your house," and walk off down the passage-way again, by mental suggestion contriving to slam an invisible barrier at the end of that connecting passage so that we would not be bothered too often.

  As the hot season approached—and in Bali only April and May can be considered at all uncomfortably hot—we received a visit from two Belgians, one Henri Fast and his wife. He was the head of U.N. Information work in the Far East; and his dry Gallic intelligence was a refreshing thing to encounter after the superficial and ill-founded ecstasies which we heard so often.

  Henri Fast was very perceptive. He saw our collection of primitive carvings and asked us at once:

  "Do the Balinese themselves use such carvings and paintings in their own homes, or are they purely a tourist commodity?" Very few people asked us that question, because it was generally presumed that since the Balinese carved and painted, their houses must be full of such things.

  "They all work for the tourist trade," I answered.

  "Then where do the artists find their place in their own culture?" "Oh, they can still do work in traditional style if the village requires it. The painters make friezes in the old Hindu style around temple altars; the wood carvers make magnificently carved doors and screens, they carve the frames for the gamelan instruments, they decorate the pillars and beams of the village meeting halls, and make ornamental wooden figures for the temples As for the sculptors who work in the soft paras stone, just look at the temple gateways and walls or at the guardian figures and gargoyles outside the temples. That's their real work."

  Later we drove them over to watch the men sculpting a new temple in Ubud, under the eye of the old Tjokorda Ngurah; and afterwards we visited the Halls
of Justice in Klungkung, where some fine artists had painted around the inside of the roofs friezes which began their story in Hindu mythology, and ended with a Japanese soldier falling into the sea with his rising sun flag right into the mouth of an attendant shark of the year I 945.

  On our way home we saw a cremation just finishing on the outskirts of the village of Batuan.

  "May we watch a moment?” asked the Fasts.

  So we walked over to the burial ground, where the Temple of the Dead was, and near which we could see a few people still standing and gossiping while the flames licked sluggishly at the blackened frames of the tall wooden towers which had held the bull-shaped sarcophagi.

  The corpses had long ago become ashes.

  "Greetings," I said to one of the bystanders. "Was there a fine cremation today?"

  "It was nothing," came the reply. "Of seven persons only."

  "Of high caste, perhaps?"

  "No. Ordinary folk who had been sick."

  So we guessed that this was one of the many quick cremations following on death from smallpox. Often the Balinese wait months and years before disinterring the bodies to cremate them, waiting for an auspicious day and a time when they have money to spare.

  “What a pity we just missed it," said Henri Fast.

  "I'm rather glad," said Luce.

  "Oh, but why? Is it not very interesting?" He turned to Luce in surprise.

  "It's very interesting-once. But although I know a corpse to the Balinese is only an empty shell, an 'earthly encumbrance 'which, until it's burnt, merely prevents the soul's liberation, I just don't like to see bits of bodies being tossed about by laughing relatives; nor do I much care for the stink of putrefaction."