Tomorrow I will have one last leisurely breakfast at the hotel, hop on Grohl, and wing my way south toward the airport and ultimately (and not southerly) Hawaii. So tonight I dance. Well, I didn’t dance, but I watched people dance. Yup at the end of my two weeks in the relaxation/artistic mecca of Indonesia I thought I might get me some culture. Or something like that.
I did not set out on such a mission. While I am all for museums and have an actual degree in theatre I don’t tend to run out to see a show. So when I passed the usual ticket tout I just kept walking. Then I passed the entrance as if it wasn't even there. Sometime after I turned the corner to search out a cheap little warung for dinner I said to myself, “why not”, and turned around. See people, I am capable of changing my mind.
Tonight’s bill included a Kecak dance and a fire dance. While the fire dance may in actuality be a very old traditional dance the kecak is open to more interpretation. It evolved in the ‘30’s at the suggestion of a couple American hoteliers who had opened up the very first beach resort in Kuta. So the dance was inspired by the first tourist wave. As tourism dried up a couple years later and didn’t get going again until about 30 years after that, the dance is not dependent on the tourists. Whether you chose to give it credit as a legitimate piece of their original culture or not, it is an undeniably Balinese form. The dance involves about 70 shirtless men age 20-78 sitting in a circle wearing black and white checked cloth and singing a cappella. Like a tribal version of the Warblers. Eventually 5 or 6 nymph types and a couple of hefty gentlemen enter the fray as specific characters from the Hindu stories that make up most of Bali’s religion and artistic subjects. The rest of Bali’s artistic subjects are the landscape and the landscape of topless women. Really. Check out the museums here sometime.
Between the Kecak and the fire dance there was a shorter form dance that involved a female chorus, a few of the kecak singers, and a couple of very hardworking 7 year old girls doing pretty impressive maneuvers with fans while wearing Rockettes training headgear. It was totally adorable.
The final dance of the evening was the fire dance. I have yet to decide if this is supposed to be a dance reserved for a revered talent or more of a jumping in to join the kecak chorus. You see, this dance involves a large pile of coconut husks, a liter of petrol, and a man in a straw horse costume. Seriously. While the flames burn high and bright HorseyMan dances around the fire. What the story of this is I do not know. [I am still very proud of myself for following about ¾ of the Kecak based solely on the art I saw in three of the 4 museums I visited.] Once the flames go down a bit he dances THROUGH the fire. At this point the largely tourist crowd actually said “ooohhhhh” in unison in a way that no amount of coached background would ever pull off. Once he has done the initial dance through the fire, he proceeds to dance and splash about in the embers of the fire casting sparks everywhere like a mad combination of Tinkerbell and Michael Jackson from the Billie Jean video. The sparks are very pretty, but I assure you the smoke blowing all over the place as they sweep the bigger coconut pieces into piles for him to jump through is a bit of a mood killer.
Speaking of mood killers, I have found after careful observation this last two and a half weeks of vacation, that I tend to get cranky in the afternoon in particular. This was the case today as well. Do you know what a great killer of crankiness is? A walk through a rice paddy. Ubud is a real town which is hard to come by in Bali, so let’s give it credit where credit is due. That being said, if you take just the right alley up just the right hill you find yourself in the middle of 1943. That is to say, a stone paved path through a rice paddy where people are harvesting the rice by hand while wearing conical hats and workers bath in the river after a long day. I know because I happened to come upon a bather while taking a shortcut. I think we were both pretty glad he was in the dunk portion of his routine and not the inspect myself for bug bites part.
Throw in some ribs and a pretty decent art museum and that was my day. Not bad Ubud. Not bad.
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