Dancing Out of Bali Read online

  "And if there is a fifth born?"

  "Then they start all over again with Wayan."

  "And will you explain your names-your own and your brother's?"

  “I am Dewa Gde Putu. Dewa is my title; Gde means great, but is just a sort of honorary prefix, and Putu means a first-born Ksatriya.

  My brother the perbekel (which means "headman") is Anak Agung Gde Ngurah Mandera. Anak Agungis his title, and Gde is the same prefix as mine; Ngurah means he is the head of the family, and Mandera is his personal name. We live in Puri Kaleran, which means Puri of the North, and a puri is any house where men of the Ksatriya caste live."

  "Well, thank you, Dewa. That was quite a lecture. You spoke like a professor."

  "It is possible," he laughed, "for I have been teaching for thirty-four years and am now headmaster in the village of Mas."

  "In that case, please, here and now, both of you become our instructors and guides in everything Balinese-not only in music and dancing, but in the Balinese way of thinking and living."

  "Gladly, gladly, Tuan,” said the Anak Agung. "Then let us continue your education with some real Balinese food."

  So the four of us sat down and the food was brought in by the tall Made Lebah from the adjoining kitchen; and this food was different in some subtle way from our Rantun's.

  "It is sharper, stronger," said the Anak Agung. "This is men's cooking; Rantun's is woman's cooking. Now, here is Pliatan's speciality-bebek tutu-spiced, smoked duck."

  We ate, as usual, with our right hands, and this made the brothers happy and at ease, and finger-bowls of water were quickly brought us.

  The food continued to come in, and we were pressed to put more and more on to the slowly disappearing mounds of our rice. There were two sorts of sate, meat grilled on little sticks, of pork flesh, both, but quite differently cooked and spiced; the famous smoked duck was pungent, but its flesh flaked away delicately; there were young ferns from the hills, tenderer than asparagus; there were crisp, dry, fried chicken joints, chopped up small; then bean sprouts and bean curd in soya sauce; there was the crackling outer skin of a very aromatic pork; lastly, chillis, little onions and rock salt. On and on we ate, trying, but failing to keep up with our hosts, until, hardly able to stand, we moved from the table to drink coffee in the front of the house again.

  Then the Anak Agung shouted an order, adding to us, "I want you to see the Legong children. I wonder what you will think of them. And I've just sent a man to look round the warongs for Sampih. He should be here soon."

  In a few minutes the little girls came, entering very shyly, smiling, pulling down the ends of their jackets in their nervousness, and the three little tots sat in one chair, politely not looking at us. Their features were far more aristocratic than the three in Saba.

  "Well?” asked the Anak Agung.

  "But what do we know about Legongsr!e"plied Luce and I together. But I added, to pull his leg for a change, "You see, we are only really familiar with the Legong in Saba. But I can see three very delightful little girls here—where are they from?"

  "Heh! You children come and give your hands to the Tuan and Nyonya,” called the Anak Agung.

  They sidled forward, smiling awkwardly, utterly captivating. Each gave us a limp hand in turn, smiling sideways at us, then ran back to the chair.

  "This is Oka,” said the perbekel. “She is my own daughter and her mother was a Djanger from Kedewatan village. She is in the top class of the Lower School. And this is Anom—the child of my brother here.

  These are our two Legongs, we think. Oka is of strong character and will take the male roles in the story; Anom, as you see, is gentle and soft, with huge eyes—she will be the Princess Langkesari. And now this is Raka, who is Oka's friend and lives just over the road. She will be the important Tjondong—the Attendant on the two Legongs."

  "They look exquisite. Have they begun rehearsing?"

  "No; but if you like them, we will start tomorrow or the next day.

  Whenever they are not at school. It will be easiest with Raka—she always runs away from school."

  "You will find us living in your compound, I'm afraid."

  "Good. Then you will learn fast." He clapped both his hands to his vast stomach. "And now—if the Tuan and Nyonya are ready, the club is waiting for us."

  We walked over together, servants bringing the kerosene lamp and chairs for the Dewa and ourselves, and by the lamp's glaring light we saw the rehearsal place clearly—a long, stone and brick verandah, fifteen yards long, whitewashed throughout and opening on to the first courtyard. On its inside wall hung a photograph of the gamelan club in 1938, just after it had won the 1938 all-Bali gamelan competition; and also a strange, blue picture of a white man, holding a gun in his hand, seated in a rowing-boat by the lake shore, with a tiger just about to leap into the boat from the overhanging bank.

  The instruments were all arranged at one end, covering about a third of the floor space. Our chairs were placed facing them. At the very back of the gamelan we could see the great bronze gongs on a wooden stand, then some tall, heavy metallophones, played by men seated on stools, and in front of them the main metallophone section, eight of them, of which the largest, in the front row, was under the hammer of Made Lebah. On the floor nearest us sat the men who played the pair of small cymbals, with the two drummers. The leading drummer was the Anak Agung himself, who gripped the larger, female drum across his knee, and his partner was a fine-featured man, introduced to us now as Gusti Kompiang.

  For a brief minute they talked among themselves, while the children crowded in from outside, squatting all along the step. A man pumped the lamp up for the last time. The Anak Agung straightened his back a little, shouting across to us, "We are going to start with Tabuh Telu-Melody Three."

  “I think this may be a little loud," I whispered to Luce, for the verandah was low and narrow, and no less than twenty-four players sat with hammers poised before us.

  Made Lebah gripped his hammer firmly; then he and the Anak Agung exchanged a lightning glance, and drum and metallophone started on a terrific chord that I shall never forget, and straightaway we were drowned in the music—drowned, overwhelmed, carried away, submerged. For such music as this we had never heard in our lives, never heard hinted at by the dozens of gamelans which we had already listened to.

  This gamelan had a percussive attack, an electric virtuosity, a sort of appalling precision, which, as it echoed and rebounded off that long wall, almost pulsated us out of our seats, bringing tears of astonished emotion to our eyes.

  Where was the melody? I had no idea! But an incessant cascade of sound rushed through us and around us and deep down inside us. The two drums thwacked and throbbed, the deep gongs boomed, the cymbals chattered and clacked; but it was the metallophones and a battery of twelve gongs of descending size on a long, low stand, played by four men, which swept us away. The metallophones hammered out patterns of such intricacy, such crisscross elusiveness, and with such a dazzling, brilliant zeal, as was most assuredly outside my comprehension; and from that long battery of gongs came a baffling, staccato syncopation which nothing out of Africa could hope to rival. This music broke its way into us, possessed us.

  “Tabuh Telu” came to an end. It took several seconds for the quivering sound to die away. Twenty-four peasants looked impassively at me-most of them very humble, poor people, who had been working that day in their rice-fields. As the Anak Agung got to his feet, profusely sweating, and came to sit with us, the orchestra members broke into grins, reaching for their cigarettes.

  “It is still very bad,” said the Anak Agung, mopping his forehead. “I must ask pardon for allowing the Tuan to hear such imperfection." But his eyes gleamed with pure pride as he awaited my beginner's verdict.

  But for an embarrassing half minute I was speechless, moved so deeply that I dared not open my lips.
My whole Balinese horizon had been violently broadened in these few minutes. Not only did the gamelans of Denpasar now sound tame and insipid, but that such great music as this could have been devised had never entered my senses. When at last I felt I could speak, we all went and sat on the floor with the club members. I told them, I think, that this was the most wonderful music I had heard in my life, anywhere, ever: that the western world must have an opportunity to hear it: that I hoped we would date our working together from that same night.

  And then the rehearsal went on again. They practised the music of Sampih's Kebiar, which made “Tabuh Telu” sound gentle and simple. But after that first initial shock I was only aware that night of one thing, and of this both Luce and I were absolutely sure: this was the orchestra for us, and if ever we went abroad, it would be with the Pliatan club.

  When we left the puri to go home, feeling still dazed, exhausted, as if those lightning fast little hammers had been rippling up and down our spines for hours, we were conscious of the Anak Agung's voice again: "Tuan, here is Sampih."

  We saw a still boyish-looking young man, rather short, neatly, compactly built, snub nose and cheerful eyes, curly, unruly hair. Though twenty-five years old, he seemed much younger—this Sampih, whose child's face had appeared in almost every book written about Bali before the war.

  "Greetings, Sampih. We have been long looking for you. Do you think you could dance a little Kebiar for us next time we come to Pliatan?"

  "Beh! It is long since I tried to dance the Kebiar. These days I work in the rice-fields, and if I dance it is always Baris. Working in the fields is no way to keep supple for dancing the Kebiar, Tuan."

  "Well, all we've seen of the Kebiar is the Ida Bagus from Blangsinga and the ones who fumble their way round the Bali Hotel stage," I replied. "You have not much competition., "I can try, Tuan. But you must not blame me if you find me a stiff peasant."

  "I know you've been dancing the Kebiar for eighteen years, Sampih. Tuan Colin introduced you to us with his book many years ago."

  I turned happily to the Anak Agung.

  "This has been a fateful evening, Anak Agung. Within two days we will be back to see Sampih dance and the Legongs take their lessons."

  "You must regard my puri as your second home, Tuan John.,

  "And our hut in Kaliungu is yours whenever you care to visit us, Anak Agung," I replied.

  And so it began.

  Just as the rainy season set in, our first visitors from the outside world began to find their way to our compound, although the Bali Hotel office would always profess to have no knowledge of our address, since even a rumoured guest-house of two rooms was a puncture in their age-old hotel monopoly. These strangers, arriving in our garden through the garage door, would come across Luce with her mouth full of tacks, lining the guest-house walls with soft white matting, and me at my typewriter, clad in a Siamese sarong.

  Now at the hotel were two entertaining Danes, the Nielsens, who planned to stay long in Bali, taking moving pictures.

  It was these two who dropped in one evening to sip at Luce's arak and brum cocktails, and gave us the news that the luxury yacht, the Stella Polaris, was shortly due in Bali with a cargo of millionaires, and it was this that prompted us to plan for a first tourist trip to Pliatan. For we already considered that there was enough of interest there to justify taking people up to watch an evening's work.

  We had gone back to see our first Legong lesson only two nights after the gamelan started rehearsing in public, and the technique of instruction was fascinating. Further, we had seen Sampih dance his Kebiar.

  After seeing Sampih's Kebiar we began to understand some of the excitement of its first beholders in the nineteen-thirties. Sampih, however, was a pupil of Gusti Raka of Tabanan rather than of the noble and unique Mario, for, as Gusti Raka had done of old, Sampih danced a Kebiar that was brilliant technically, full of tricks and of a dash that could only have come from many years of dancing.

  His facial expression was amazing. In perfect time to the music his eyes would open and shut from pin points to saucers in size; his eyebrows he could lift on the drum's beats, fast as a butterfly's wings; so supple was he still that he could bend over sideways until his entire trunk and head was level with the ground, and with legs tucked up under his kain like steel springs, he could swoop and pirouette around the floor in a seated position, flirting with the Anak Agung at the drum, almost fighting with the cymbals player. And when first we saw it, this dance lasted sixteen exhausting minutes, with Sampih, at its end, hardly able to rise to his feet and walk off the floor.

  The old Legong teacher, we had discovered, was a dark, craggy-faced woman, her mouth red-black from the everlasting chewing of betel, with piles of thick, wavy grey hair falling about her face. She wore only an old kain. We were told to call her Gusti Biang—which means Mother Gusti. Gusti Biang's elder sister had married one Dewa Ketut Blatjing of Pliatan, a man who, forty years ago, had raised Legong dancing to its most perfect classical form, working with another great teacher of Sukawati, Anak Agung Rai Prit. She, too, in her day, had been a famous dancer, and her teaching now was in the great tradition.

  Picture, then, the Anak Agung seated on the floor of the rehearsal verandah with the other drummer, on a hot afternoon, both of them stripped to the waist with towels tied around their middles to check the flowing sweat, while behind them, perhaps, sits just one man picking out the main melody on a metallophone Then in front of them Gusti Biang holding one of the children, facing the drums, while the other children sit quietly watching, fanning themselves after their own exertions.

  At the very beginning the little girl's body would be tucked into the enveloping form of Gusti Biang behind her. The child's head would fit under the teacher's chin, and that chin and the guiding palms of the teacher's hands would indicate the head movements. Arms pointed out warningly before the child's eyes would anticipate the side glances of the eyes. The whole body would be precisely fitted into the teacher's, the child's back stemming from the teacher's belly. The teacher's arms would outline the child's arms, her hands holding and manipulating the child's hands and fingers; behind the child's legs would be the teacher's legs, which would shuffle, push and firmly kick the child's legs and feet into the right positions and sequences.

  Though the drums gave the tempo and the metallophone the tune, from the teacher would flow a procession of noises quite impossible to reproduce accurately, but these sounds would underline and represent every instrument in the gamelan. Gusti Biang was famous for her musicality. Fifteen seconds of such instruction might sound a little like this, with the music starting and the teacher pushing and guiding the little girl's body, speaking to her all the time.

  "Now, go! That's it-like that. Sink your body lower-lower but gently. Your hands! Hands! To the south that upper hand! South! South! That is better. Now-ready for those eye glances... tju-dèt... tju-dèt... tju-dèt... Yes, yes, there is hope. Now listen to the drum beating... ready... yes! tju-dèt... tju-dèt... gu-pak-u-pak-upak: tu-tjèng! So, you can follow it. Keep moving! Keep moving! step, step, step: Pong! march, march, march; Pong! stamp, stamp, stamp: Pong!... there, the kempli is clear enough to guide you isn't it? Now to the end of this section. Watch that foot-turn it out, out, OUT! More, to the east a little.· Here is the last phrase coming: Gu-pak-u-pak: tjeng! Gu-pak-u-pak, tu-tjurrrr!”

  And the little girls, with their fragile bodies, would work till the sweat coursed down from their necks, their faces miraculously expressionless and patient in spite of angry commands from the perfectionist drummers, never answering back, never complaining, meek and slender like reeds, six hours of instruction every single day.

  But even after such training their work was not over. The Legong had to possess them body and soul. If not at school or at work, we would come across them in some quiet corner of the puri being loosened up by Gusti Biang, their bodies being ma
ssaged every day, so that their every joint should be softly supple. And as they were massaged they would be lectured about the dance.

  "Now, Raka, you are the Tjondong, the attendant on the two Legongs. That is very suitable, for you are a Wesya and they are Ksatriya, although your friends. It is very cleverly chosen by the Anak Agung. But you have no need to think your dancing is less important. Any good attendant can steal the dance. It is the most vital role. And at the end of the dance it is you who become the Bird of III Omen. Then you must try to feel that you really are a great black raven attacking the Raja of Lasem, many hundreds of years ago, in far-off Java. When you put on your wings of painted buffalo hide, you must fly! And you must look fierce. Your eyes, little Raka, must glare like a hawk's. You must feel, feel, forgetting altogether that you are Ni Gusti Raka... for then you are no longer Raka but a great black bird attacking a Raja!"

  And then she would talk to Oka and Anom, telling them how in Bali, where everything went in pairs, male and female (from drums and metallophones to gods and humans), so, in the Legong, one dancer must be more masculine, and one more feminine, thus making a complete and harmonious dance. Then into little Oka she would instil a mood of arrogant pride suitable to her role of an evil Raja who kidnaps the daughter of the neighbouring Raja of Daha; and into the gentle Anom she would implant the feelings of despair, pathos and all-pervading sweetness, so important in the kidnapped Princess Langkesari.

  Whenever it was humanly possible Luce and I were in Pliatan during these next four months of creation. By day, eating the great pink-fleshed pomelo limes and watching the Legong being built up section by section; at night, lying on mats drowning again and again in the immense music, but now surfacing occasionally to sit up and try to take a more intelligent interest in how the music was put together and controlled. And during this entranced period we found that Sampih seemed to have been living with us for about a month already, so we borrowed two metallophones to add to the drum we had been given in Saba, and brought them to Kaliungu for Sampih to instruct us with them.