Dancing Out of Bali

by John Coast

  So Christmas, 1951, was a most excellent day for us all, and the Legong was given in honour of the two of us, and we were all very happy together.

  ____________________

  3With the New York subsequent aid of Colin McPhee.

  8

  Enter our Impresario

  *

  The New Year of 1952 fell quickly upon us. I explained to the club that we would now have to work out a programme timed to the minute and suitable for western ears and eyes, and I was also writing reports for the Government in Djakarta, offering them the fruits of our experience during the last fourteen months, and outlining precisely the nature of the subsidy we would require. In the first week of January the Indonesian Cultural Attache in Washington, Suwanto, a soft-spoken, oblique-glancing young man, with pink cheeks to his brown face, happened to arrive in Denpasar, and since he was then mentioned as my possible "fellow impresario of Indonesian race," we journeyed together to Pliatan and the other villages where our dancers came from, so that he could begin to know the people whom later he might be directing jointly with me. And then it was time to brief our household and the club concerning their work while we went away to Java to beard the Government and get doubly married. Sampih was left in charge of the jeep. We promised to try to send them paying guests, and left them enough money for food and wages for six weeks. We asked the Anak Agung to start rehearsing the two Balinese ceremonials, a marriage and a New Year's Day celebration, which we wanted to include in the programme, but which I had so far avoided as being too complicated for handling in a theatre.

  In the middle of January we left for Djakarta, I to stay at the Des Indes, Luce with her mother. The ordeal of meeting Luce's mother had loomed rather large, for she was the widow of the Pangeran Ario Sujono who had died at the Athenaeum in London when a member of the Netherlands War Cabinet. But this lady, now living in very modest circumstances, I found easy to get on with, and our first evening together we spent learning from her about the technicalities of our weddings. It appeared that Luce would have to bring me before a penghulu, a Moslem priest, who would invite me to be married by the Moslem law; and when I declined, we would be able to apply to a magistrate for a civil ceremony. To make the marriage binding according to British law, a British consul would have to be present as a witness, and after the ceremony he would present us with a Lex Loci certificate.

  We fixed February 4th as the date, and Haji Agus Salim, a very old and respected protector of mine, was to act as my father for the day. In the meantime, while Luce looked for some clothes, I concentrated on obtaining a letter of authority to start negotiating with American and European impresarios, since the President's letter had expressed merely a wish, and was not a valid executive order. On January 23rd Foreign Minister Subardjo gave me such a letter, and immediately I wrote off to Sol Hurok and Columbia Artists Management in America, detailing the whole proposal. In London I wrote to Joan White, my actress cousin. Then I called on K.L.M. and B.O.A.C., and later on Philippine Airlines and T.O.A., to inquire about pay-loads and charter fees, and found that a four-engined plane could in fact transport forty-five persons with gamelan and costumes complete. And lastly I had time to see my old colleague, Ruslan Abdulgani, at the Ministry of Information, who looked carefully through my files and said that since this was the first orderly and competent plan to send dancers abroad that he had inspected, he would try to bring his Ministry in also to support us. An article in The New York Times at about this time, written by Tillman Durdin, who had visited us in Bali before any Government interest was assured, particularly caught the eye of both the President and the Governmental authorities.

  On February 4th, thanks to old Haji Agus Salim playing patience and telling me soothingly not to fret, while the clock in his house ticked on fifteen minutes slow, I was late for the ceremony and found a svelte tigress waiting to devour me. It was a most strange ritual performed under a glaring Coca-Cola advertisement. The Dutch Protestant service, translated into Indonesian, became a stilted oddity and obviously baffled the charming official who legally joined us. However, the forms which Consul Harcourt held out to us all for our signatures looked more normal and made me feel that at last this highly complicated marriage of ours was real. Our reception was amusing and curious, too, for in a flower-packed lounge we were honoured by usually internecine political opponents among our guests. When it was all over we spent an amusing night in the house of our friend, Willard Hanna, the head of the American Information Service, swatting mosquitoes. On the next day we left for Singapore and stayed with some more friends who had spent a week with us in Bali, and together with them we were invited to lunch with Malcolm Macdonald at Bukit Serene, in Johore, where we were able to explain and apologize in person about the cancelled tour of Malaya.

  From Singapore we flew up over the dark green jungly hills of the Malay Peninsula, nine hundred miles to Bangkok, where a waiting car of our friends brought us swiftly into the town, which was still enjoying its brief cool season. Our visit was Siamese and concentrated, for I had always determined that my wife must like Bangkok. Our hosts were of the family of the late Prince Regent, Rangsit of Chainat, who was the last surviving son of the great King Chulalongkorn. The Prince Regent had married a witty German lady, and their younger son was our host, Mom Chao Sanidh Rangsit. Sanidh in turn had married an Italian-Swiss girl of great beauty, with brooding and troubling eyes, the Mom Amelia. At times Sanidh was a Siamese Prince to the tips of his fingers; at other times he was a gourmet from his beloved Ascona. During the latter periods his branch of the family was nicknamed the "Swiss family Rangsit.” They and Luce each spoke fluently at least four languages, making me feel uncomfortably peasant.

  Though Luce was taken to meet Rhambai and her infant, who was my one Buddhist goddaughter; to Jim Thompson's shop, which had supplied the cloth for The King and I; to the Thieves Market, where you could sometimes buy back an article missing recently from your own house; to eat Szechaun duck at the Tein Hoi restaurant; to Sanidh's floating house up the broad, turgid river of Bangkok; and to the house of the Oxonian editor of Standard, Prince Prem-two things stood out from the whole visit.

  The first was our rail trip up to Chiengmai, the capital of mountainous north Siam, where we lived in a log cabin built near the top of the Doi Suthep mountain by Sanidh. Here we ate my favourite mu som, orange meat, a delectable Siamese pork fermented with oranges and packed into long sausage-like leaf sheaths, and which is correctly eaten with salted peanuts, coriander leaves, ginger and green onions.

  The second was our trip to the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, accompanied this time by my friend, Kukrit Pramoj, editor of the capital's most successful newspapers.

  We were strolling, then, through the spacious, stone-flagged courtyard of the temple (the reclining Buddha is forty-nine metres long, a figure lying on one side, whose giant toes are engraved and decorated exquisitely with mother-of-pearl), when Kukrit said to us quietly, "Don't look for a moment, but over there there's a photographer who's meant to be doing a book about Bangkok. He's staying with Prince Chula, who brought him out. His name is Baron or something."

  At which my head fairly spun around and, miracle of all miracles, Baron in person it was-Baron the prince of ballet photographers, an old friend from the days of the Press Bar at Covent Garden Opera House, and who had photographed my "Javanese Dancers" of 1946.

  "Baron—maestro!" I shouted. "This is an act of God. You must come at once to Bali and make publicity shots of my dancers there." And the rest of our days in Bangkok we spent with the Rangsits, Baron and Kukrit.

  On the day before we left, we went to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, the glittering pagodaed compound being part of the Royal Palace, and before the great stone walls we bought two cages of little birds from vendors, since the Siamese idea is that birds thus freed make merit for their benefactors, and fly away bringing luck to those who have freed them, as well
as bearing their liberators' sins away on their backs.

  Sadly, yet eagerly, we left Siam, heading back to Djakarta where so many problems awaited us. We arrived there on February 25th, from that day the tempo of our work changed, heading for a crescendo and pace that would drain the energy from my body as surely as the water was drained from the ancient battery of my brave old jeep.

  On our first morning in Djakarta I sped down to the Ministry to see what replies might have come in from America. To my delight, both Hurok and Columbia Artists had cabled interested replies, while Mr. F. C. Schang, President of the latter organization, had sent also a four-page letter setting out the financial and theatrical details of a tour of the United States, saying how he and his partner, Coppicus, had been eager to bring some Balinese to America ever since catching a glimpse of them at the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931. These replies I showed to Dr. Subardjo, and we decided to carry on negotiating in parallel with Hurok and Columbia until something definite was offered.

  Ruslan Abdulgani, meanwhile, had already brought his Information Ministry into the support of our group, and was now asking what practical help we needed. I replied simply, "We need publicity stills, some coloured movie film with sound, or at least some tape recordings; then a little cash in a Denpasar bank on which we can draw to start making new musical instruments and ordering costumes, and also for office expenses.''

  He was the ideal partner. He and the Foreign Ministry agreed to bring Baron down from Bangkok in exchange for free publicity stills, and it was Baron who had to refuse because of the death of King George VI, which necessitated his instant return to London. But during the next days I received some tape recordings, while two photographers were detailed to ·accompany me when I returned to Bali; and since I had been given another Rolleiflex as a wedding present, it at last looked as though we would get the publicity material which we had so long needed.

  To the Ministries assisting me I sent in a preliminary report concerning the subsidy needed. I was still in the midst of negotiating, I said, but at the moment I wanted about, five thousand rupiahs to start things moving in Bali, where the final budget for costumes, instruments and office cables would be not much over forty thousand rupiahs (£ I,250.0.0).Then there would be the outfitting of the company at a good but inexpensive Djakarta tailor, which would mean, I reckoned, another sixty thousand rupiahs, and abroad more clothing would be necessary for our Balinese who found 65 degrees a very cold day about eight thousand U.S. dollars, I guessed, in foreign currency, would cover second warm suits, woollen underclothes, overcoats and raincoats, which could be bought in big stores in London or New York. The major item, however, was the transportation. My requirements, I explained, were being worked out by several airlines who had offices in Djakarta, and it had been confirmed that the whole group could be lifted in one Constellation or Skymaster. A return charter was being very roughly estimated at about six hundred thousand rupiahs, and this meant that the 'total Government subsidy for a round the world tour for the forty-four of us would be in the region of about eight hundred and fifty thousand rupiahs, or just under £26,500.

  The one thing delaying my return to Bali was my personal contract. At this time, all Indonesian ministries were very wary of employing foreigners for reasons of racial sentiment and for fear of resultant criticisms in Parliament. Understanding this, I agreed to less favourable terms than in earlier political contracts given me during the revolutionary period. I hoped to be able to run my establishment in Bali, look after my own expenses when I came to Djakarta, even pay my own postage, all on about one hundred and fifteen pounds a month. The ministry would look after my Djakarta hotel bills and plane fares between Bali and Java. It was just enough. Yet in order to protect themselves, the Administration Service worried and trembled about unsuspected angles from which they might be vulnerable, until they hit upon the idea of making clause one in my contract a reference to the President's original letter of recommendation, which not only let them out neatly, but which pleased me in that it proved I had never asked for this employment. I was given the sonorous title of Technical Expert on Cultural Relations and Information for Countries Abroad, and on March 14th the document of it was formally handed to me, together with a month's salary and a letter of reference to the head of Bali's Local Government in Denpasar.

  Our last weekend in Java we spent in the Puntjak mountain home of Bill Palmer, the most hospitable American in this part of Asia, where we met Ted Smith of the Motion Picture Association, who had just returned with his wife Tudie from a second honeymoon in our Kaliungu house. They both had been enchanted with Bali and the dancing in Pliatan, but reported that the roof of my jeep had been knife-slashed right across by some vandal, unknown, at night. It sounded like a first active spasm of jealousy. When I mentioned it to Islam Salim (who had been transferred from the command of Bali and was now weekending also with Bill Palmer prior to taking up his appointment as Military Attache in Peking), he grinned, showing no surprise at all, and said, "You surely expected things like that, didn't you, John? The bigger your success and the nearer your departure, the worse it will probably get, too."

  Not exactly encouraged by this realistic reply, we set off for Bali with two official photographers, but when we bumped along the Kaliungu lane all seemed serenely quiet and normal. We asked Sampih about the jeep roof, but he did not kn·ow who had slashed it or why, and otherwise our household were so elated to see us and so pleased with the oleh-oleh we brought them that it felt thoroughly good to be home. The photographers were staying at the Bali Hotel, where they would use their bathroom for developing, and for days on end we photographed the grinning, sweltering dancers posing in the sunlight. We made some colour movie shots and selected the best of our rough proofs run off in the hotel bathroom for taking back to Djakarta and mass producing and sending abroad.

  When the photographers had left I began to think about making a courtesy call on the local authorities. At this stage I knew Sutedja, the head of the Government, only by sight, and had heard little of him beyond a rumour that he disliked a white skin, but in a country just emerging from colonization this is a far from rare condition. To look at he was young, bespectacled, wavy haired, eyes close set together, well built. I asked for an interview and he gave me one. Perhaps appropriately it was ten o'clock on the morning of April 1st that I sat at a table with him in his office, in company of one Gusti Bagus Sugriwa, a man almost bald and goatee bearded, an intimate of Sutedja's and his official adviser on religious affairs. I handed over my letter from the Foreign Ministry and allowed them to read the terms of my contract, and then told them politely the history of my old idea concerning the dancers. Equally politely they listened. I left them after an hour, pursued by smiles but with no idea as to whether I had pleased or offended. But Denpasar is a tiny place, and soon one of the officials began talking to a friend outside, and this friend moved on to gossip with an ally of ours, and one evening this last man rode up to Pliatan, where in whispers he told us,"Denpasar feels that it has been by-passed by Djakarta. You are a foreigner and therefore suspect. And if that were not enough, the men who have just returned with big mouths from dancing in Colombo are urging the Denpasar government to order them to go to America. They are the official artists, they say."

  "I am sorry, very," I replied. "I only hope they will take this out on Djakarta and not on us."

  "You see, they feel also that Pliatan belongs to reactionary Gianjar, and is therefore in territory politically opposed to them."

  I said, "I can see that this thing is going to end in a sickening struggle of wits. It will be a miracle if we come through."

  "John-may I ask you one question?"

  I nodded.

  "Well—this thing, as it grows, will indeed cause jealousies. If you want to go on living in Bali, why not give the whole idea up, or at the least seek a compromise with the Denpasar people?"

  I answered slowly, watching t
he Anak Agung's face, which had become a set, plump mask.

  "Who knows what will be left in Bali twenty years from now? I know we are running risks, but, quite simply, my heart is set on showing this Balinese Legong to the western world. To Luce and me, all the rest of the programme we are devising is but a setting to the Legong jewel. What we are doing, we feel, rightly or wrongly, is important. We will help broaden just a little the horizons of European and American art.

  "And secondly, there's my pride. I won't be beaten by this handful of little people who are merely jealous and who don't care about the arts of Bali at all. Mark you, I don't blame them in the least for being suspicious of a foreigner. If my throat is cut it will be sad and ironic and just an ugly item in Indonesia's evolution from being a subject country. But stop I cannot. And as for a compromise, it would be like blackmail—without end. We have worked together a year and a half like a family. One alien official forced on us, stuffed with self-importance and half-baked political ideas, could ruin the spirit of our group. In any collection of human beings of this size, there are bound to be troublemakers-especially among artists. But we know ours and, if left alone, can control them easily. Lastly, as you know, we are only interested in Pliatan and our other dancers because they are the best we have been able to find. Compromise would mean lowering our standards. I want little Raka to mingle with ballerinas of international fame; I want the Anak Agung and Sampih to meet Serge Lifar and Youskevitch. So—on we shall go, but as inoffensively as possible."