Dancing Out of Bali

by John Coast

  Just when I was toying with another new idea-one which appalled the club-of taking with us two fascinating, undulating-bodied old crones to dance the Mendet, a true temple dance performed by older women with smoking braziers of holy fire held on the palms of their hands, came the news that the Barong was ready.

  And well I remember the Barong driving from Singapadu to Pliatan, spread out like a gigantic black bear rug on the roof of a small bus, with the Anak Agung beaming beside me in the respectfully attendant jeep, while Tjokorda Oka, its creator, looked solemn with pride seated at the back of the bus. At the boundary of the village, the club and the gamelan formed into a jubilant procession, and the Barong entered Pliatan in noisy triumph. That night the Anak Agung's younger cousin, the Anak Agung Gde Raka, who was both pemangku priest and balean doctor, and who was to dance the part of the Barong's front legs, performed a mysterious rite in the little temple of Gunung Sari. I stumbled there barefoot behind the Legongs, splashing through a river behind them, who tittered like birds and guided me with pushes and pulls in the unaccustomed dark. And in the temple court, beneath a hissing lamp, the pemangku recited his magic formulae while special offerings were prepared, after which he cut a small, deep hole in the Barong's forehead, burying therein a small river ruby, a little gold and I know not what besides, thus giving the Barong its djiwa, its kesaktian—its soul, its magical power for good. Kneeling demurely in a neighbouring courtyard, before their own shrine, the little Legongs were solemnly offering their own devotions.

  Every evening, and throughout the whole of each Sunday, when the entire cast assembled, I took my rehearsals. The earth of the puri compound we marked out to designate a stage, and I explained to them how a great curtain would open and close, how lights would blaze down upon them and blaze up at them, how the audience would only be seated in front of them and not on all sides, so that they would have to try to face in that direction most of the time, and how they must not be surprised by applause. We had to build a fence to keep the villagers off our stage, so interested in the lunacy of the producer did they become.

  We were just timing the Masked Dance story of the Fasting Ardjuna, which I had selected from Hindu myth because of its popularity and because it demonstrated Sampih's warrior Baris in the character of Ardjuna, and we were working on the grand finale, a comical Barong story lasting only six minutes, when once again I was summoned to Djakarta, this time to meet Mr. Schang, who was due before the middle of May from New York.

  With my head still swimming with details yet to be thought out, I handed everything over to Luce and the Anak Agung as I grudgingly boarded the plane to Java. On arriving at the Des Indes, I found our friend Suprapto waiting for me, the radio station official who had made us the tape recordings, and whom Dr. Subardjo had agreed might be the group's manager, since we had all liked this hard-working young man, who was so sympathetic to Balinese art. But his face now, behind the thick lenses of his glasses, seemed troubled.

  "Have you seen the press attack on you?" he asked, pushing a notorious gossip column under my nose. I was criticized, I read, for taking only Balinese dancers abroad—was not the Candle Dance of Sumatra also Indonesian art, asked the writer?

  "Forget it, 'Prapto," I laughed. "Those lunatics are friends of mine. I've even written for their rag of a paper. If it goes on I'll run down and explain everything to them." Suprapto, however, was still very much tied to his radio station, and in that no successor had yet been agreed upon to take over from Suwanto, it was left to me to run around finding out about American and British visa requirements, about transit visas, about Indonesian exit permits and re-entry permits, and to check on all the airline companies and their estimates, as well as sending off a Dutch tailor posthaste by air to Bali to take the measurements for suits for all the group. But most wearying of all was the universal hesitation on the part of officialdom to commit itself over the financial subsidy. In the end, on the very day before Schang was due, I tried to hurry the matter by promising to try to pay back part of the subsidy from the profits. This pleased everyone; but the men from the Finance Ministry at once wanted to know how much we could expect to pay back.

  "Gentlemen," I said, “I am willing to put in writing now that in a good week we will pay back to the Government 40 per cent of the profits, and in a bad week 20 per cent. But as to whether that will amount to one dollar or a million depends on how big a hit the Balinese are, on how long they want to stay abroad, and on whether or not we have any lucrative film and television offers. Let me say now, though, that if we're the hit I think we shall be, and I make millions of dollars worth of good-will for Indonesia, I shall regard you as soulless bureaucrats if you accept one cent from us."

  At which these officials, old colleagues of mine, grinned evasively and protested against the need for putting anything in writing yet. But they made me uneasy. I felt that they already regarded the group as their purchasable property to be used under some official heading for the purpose of exploiting their young country's name—to them a quite logical development. But I, though a foreigner, thought of our group as separate human beings, with whom Luce and I had eaten rice, and some of whom, in our days of poverty had quietly and anonymously left rice at Rantun's kitchen door for us.

  The last man out of the K.L.M. Constellation next noon was Mr. Frederick C. Schang, Jr. He wore a blue Palm Beach suit, smoked a newly lighted cigar ten inches long, was short and sturdy, with a square jaw and steely blue eyes. He was, I judged, in his late fifties, tough, fit, alert. I introduced myself and we went over to the Des Indes together. And Schang quickly turned out to be an original character. Before Bali was even mentioned he was talking about his collection of forty-eight Paul Klees and putting a Klee booklet into my hand. When he heard the plane for Bali left in two days time, he disappeared in a flash and snatched some rounds of tropical golf. At the Capitol Restaurant he personally superintended the mixing of a Dry Martini to the proportions of one in twelve, and he brushed his teeth in soda water, shouting over to me,"I start drinking water again when we reach Rome on the way home."

  Though we made one or two official calls of an introductory nature, he wanted only to get to Bali; and having arrived in our guest house he was too polite to say so if he was uncomfortable, while Sampih raced off to buy a crate of soda water. With Luce and myself he was reserved, but friendly enough, for he wanted to inspect the programme before committing himself in any way at all. So we quickly collected the whole company in Pliatan, and on three different nights played through the programme in slightly varying orders.

  We were anxious about Schang, terribly. We feared he might call for a buxom Djanger chorus and like all the wrong things. We had determined under no circumstances to cut the Legong to less than seventeen minutes, and we bristled with defensiveness. But Freddie Schang had the right stuff in him. His start in the world with Nijinsky and his forty years on Broadway helped him to get easily to the heart of the matter. He sat with a watch in one hand, perched on the edge of his bamboo chair, while the entire village of Pliatan surged curiously about two inches behind his shirt collar, and directly Raka entered in her bumblebee role, his eyes glistened, and he kept repeating to nobody in particular, "The little darling-oh, the little darling!" He was enslaved and our friend henceforth. At the end he summed up, "Those ceremonials are too hard to handle. They look like a mob scene. Unless you're very keen, cut 'em out would be my advice. That Djanger is weak-very weak. Maybe two pretty girls would stiffen it enough so as it'd get by. It's padding, though. The Monkey Dance is a knockout. It'll remind them at home of a cheering section at the Yale Bowl. The little Olegs would be winners if it weren't for the Legongs. Sampih is terrific—that boy's got the technique. But Ni Gusti Raka—there's your star! She's everything you wrote and told me and then some more. She's great. She’s so sweet I could eat her with a spoon. All the little girls are darlings—the American public will go crazy about 'em. They're terrific kids. You-you-you've g
ot together here a galaxy of talent that's going to make even Broadway blink. But what gets me is to think I come twelve thousand miles to this little mud-walled village under its coconut palms and find great art!”

  Our views, in fact, were near enough the same. So next morning he was in the Wisnu Store, buying the best kains and cloth as presents for the little girls. There remained only the terms and our signatures.

  On our return to Djakarta we went our rounds in search of official blessing on the contract. At the Foreign and Information Ministries all went well, but when we called at the Education Ministry we received a shock. We went in together, but Schang was at once ushered out again to kick his heels very audibly just outside: and I was left face to face with the Secretary-General and a couple of Denpasar officials, together with Indrosugondho, the official from this Ministry who had headed the dance-group which had gone to Colombo. Without preamble they tried to force me to accept Indrosugondho as my "fellow impresario," while I protested it was not in my competency to do so and disturbed them by saying that I knew other Ministries had other candidates. Then they, excited, perhaps, or plainly threatening, said that the present state of affairs might lead to the breakdown of law and order in Bali! But all I would, or could, do was agree to talk with Indrosugondho later, for I had heard pleasant things about him. This whole move I regarded as an attempt at ajait accompli, an attempt at a checkmate without enough strength being there to back it up.

  Then Schang entered, and for fifteen awkward minutes I became translator between them.

  The key figure, however, was the Minister of Finance, Dr. Sumitro, without whose prior signature mine would be worthless. He not only had to approve the contract, but he had to sign a transportation guarantee appended to it. But Sumitro, who had lived four years in New York and had known me since 1945, such a tour, and had agreed to sign. We actually overtook his car on our way to his house, he taking his children for an airing; and forthwith he stopped and scrawled his signature to the latest draft which I held against the dashboard. This further baffled Freddie Schang in his appreciation of Indonesian officialdom. That evening we both signed, too, and thenceforward the Balinese were due to open in New York on September 15th, after a short tryout in London.

  After dinner we went to the house of the Subardjo family, where a programme of Javanese and Sumatran dancing was being arranged, for the idea had always been that if this first Balinese trip was a success, in the following years other groups should go out from other Indonesian islands. It therefore seemed a good idea to show Schang some dancing other than Balinese.

  Very late that night at the hotel a boy brought me round a fat envelope, the contents of which purported to explain the curious incident at the Ministry of Education that morning. Enclosed was a copy of a so-called Letter of Protest, signed by the Sumatran journalist in Denpasar, together with a Balinese who had recently come to my house, I thought as a friend, and whom I had helped seek contacts in Singapore where he said he wished to take his own group of dancers.

  These two, in the name of one defunct and one moribund dance club in Denpasar, demanded the right to inspect and control all dancers who left Bali to go abroad. They used much of racial sentiment, and warned that the contract which their Finance Minister had just witnessed could only enrich "one person.” My informant added that this libellous concoction had been officially handed on to the Palace Secretary.

  Copies of this charming document, I was to observe, had been sent not only to the President, but to the Parliament and Students' Association, as well as to the thirteen toughest young nationalists in Bali. The signatories hoped, quite clearly, that one or other of the latter would stop me in a manner that they themselves did not dare.

  I sighed loudly and read the thing out to Schang.

  "Just a couple of boys who want to go along, too," he commented with a grin. And then: "I sit serious? D'you want to tear the contract up? Can you push it through? I've got to lay out tens of thousands of dollars, don't forget-better for me to know now."

  "It'll go through. This effusion stems from about half a dozen people only—but one of them, I'm afraid, is highly placed. I'm up against a noisy and very unscrupulous little clique. Fortunately the President and most of the people who count are on our side."

  And next morning early, when I saw him off, he said, "This project is going to die another thousand deaths—!feel it."

  "Perhaps I shall be one of them, Freddie."

  "You'll pull it through, as I said last night. See you in New York September 8th. Good Luck!"

  And he was off on his way to drinking water again, to his Paul Klees and his New York.

  9

  Preparations and Politics

  *

  My own overwhelming desire now was to rush back to Bali, because the threats being made in Denpasar might as easily be directed against Luce as myself; but first I had to attend a somewhat comical meeting of the no less than five Secretaries-General interested in us at this stage. The meeting was presided over by a jumpy Palace Secretary, who seemed honestly convinced that bloody murder was about to flare up in Bali, and more particularly in my compound in Kaliungu.

  He handed me first a letter he intended sending to the Denpasar Government, suggesting pacifically that since conditions were so critical there, it might indeed be better for representatives of Denpasar's cultural organisations to accompany us abroad.

  I replied: "If things in Bali are as bad as you think, I want to get on a plane at once and go to my wife, who is now alone there. And if things remain bad, I could perhaps agree to taking with us one troublemaker from Denpasar. With all respect, though, I believe it is a long way from Denpasar to Djakarta and this threat is very largely a bluff."

  To which the Palace Secretary replied: "There have been one hundred and eighty murders reported officially in Bali during the last year. They were not in bluff.” He was genuinely a very worried man.

  The letter, therefore, was sent. But since the intrusion of even one of our Denpasar enemies could disrupt entirely the spirit of family which governed our group, I resolved to fight this solution up to the point of actually risking my neck. So, since the Palace Secretary had no constitutional authority, I determined to visit at the earliest opportunity the Ministry of the Interior, whose proper concern all law and order was, and whose Minister was a very old friend, Dr. Rum.

  Meanwhile, some steps forward were taken at this high-level gathering. The office of Ruslan Abdulgani was made my one channel for operations, and would disburse all the money we needed. This would avoid struggling for the impossible: a joint and unanimous decision of five Indonesian Ministries. Then the Ministry of Education put forward their candidate to be my fellow-impresario, and the Ministry of Information countered with theirs. Here complete deadlock occurred. So, hoping to squeeze one official out of our budget, and one more dancer in, I suggested that national sentiment would surely be happier still if I went abroad with two Indonesian chaperones—and added that I hoped that both the candidates mentioned would go with me—but as Government "Directors-General" on behalf of their respective Ministries, and therefore outside our group's budget.

  Finally, these eminent officials decided that I must fly back to Bali in an Indonesian Air Force Dakota with a top priority: and I was given two escorts. These were Suprapto, who was excused from his radio station for a few days, and a certain Balinese student who had formerly represented in Djakarta two Denpasar cultural organisations, and who had no respect at all for the signatories of the notorious Letter of Protest.

  But in the day or so before the next Air Force plane left, I found time to call on lndrosugondho, with whom I had a most cordial talk, for to my delight it turned out that he was a dancer, musician and painter, and only most reluctantly an official. He was soon to leave for Bali himself, to "test the atmosphere" there; so I told him briefly that I thought Denpasar was trying out a mos
t unpleasant bluff on the Palace Secretary and all of us.

  Lastly, I went round to see Dr. Rum at his Ministry, and when he heard our difficulties he wrote out a most lucid letter, which he addressed to the Governor in Singaradja, with a copy to Denpasar, giving me his fullest support. In my eyes, (taking a correct official view for once), this letter was a valid order, whereas the Palace Secretary's note of compromise was well-meant, but irregular.

  Islam Salim, who was hard at work in Djakarta learning Mandarin and now expecting to leave for Peking very soon, wrote me one final letter of recommendation to Lieutenant Tantra, at present an officer in the Indonesian Army, but formerly the most feared and active nationalist in Bali's resistance to the Dutch. I then felt fairly well armed.

  But on arriving home, so far from finding a desolate compound, I found Luce sitting safely and peacefully in our open house, sewing and stitching while she chatted with Rantun and Budai, a young girl who had succeeded Agung as our laundryman, Luce with her own skilled hands sewing on the hundreds of sequins of many colours to the velvet collar of Raka's Legong costume.

  So first we went to see the acting police chief for the whole of Bali, and a younger officer, commanding the police in Denpasar alone. But both these men said confidently, indeed somewhat indignantly, that law and order were being easily maintained.

  Next, we drove to Singaradja in the north, up eighty kilometres of rutted, mountainous road, zigzagging and sliding around bends over a surface buried in inches of soft, silent dust, passing through tall forests and ragged coffee plantations, till we dropped abruptly down past unbelievable rice terraces into the hot sea plain around Singaradja. We called on the Governor, a Javanese, on the Resident, a Balinese, and when they had listened to our tale, the Governor, a handsome and gentle man with grey, curling hair, commented dryly, "But surely this sort of thing is quite normal. Human beings are always jealous of one another. Here it is much more explosive, perhaps, because we still have our colonial experiences in mind.,