Bali Third Third: Ubud

Our final stop in Bali was in Ubud, which is a bit inland, therefore no beaches. Despite lack of beaches, however, Ubud was probably the best part of the trip. It's the arts area, with stuff like dance shows, woodcarving, and gold and silversmithing, and a lot of nature going on. Unfortunately, I messed up with the timing of this part of the trip. Our flight was at 1:20am on September 1, but for some reason I was thinking we were leaving the next day, so I actually ended up booking three days at the hotel, when we only had two nights in Ubud. Oops. In the end it was better that I booked the extra day, though, since we were able to go out and do things all day, and then have the room to come home to and take showers and naps and get ready to leave late at night.

After we arrived at the hotel from Gili T, we managed to catch a traditional Balinese dance show in town after supper. It was about an hour long and had one dance that lasted about 45 minutes called the Kecak (keh-chahk) Dance, which consisted of a lot of dudes (the gamelan suara, the group is called) singing a capella and chanting and such and providing the general audiovisual background for the main part of the dance, which is a part of a Hindu epic called Ramayana. This part of the story is about the heir to a throne and his beautiful wife and their bad luck at staying together without people lusting after the wife and kidnapping her and stuff. The second dance still featured the singing dudes, but it was a Fire Trance Dance that featured one guy dancing around on hot embers, riding a hobby horse. Strange.

The performances we saw are done cooperatively by a small desa (village) of about 140 families near Ubud, and according to the pamphlet, almost all the adult members of the desa are somehow involved in the production, be it through dancing or singing in the show, working on the costumes or makeup, choreography, writing, etc. There are tons of other places around town to see these things, so I imagine each one has its own village or other kind of group that does the show in their own way.

This is the venue for the dance.

Someone came out to light some torches before the dance started.

 

I took a lot of videos and photos of the dances, which featured a lot of slow movements and Spiderman hands. Because it was dark and my camera is crappy and can't focus on anything moving, my photos didn't really come out. The video is also poor, but the audio is fine, and that for me was the best part of these dances by far. I didn't really like the style of dancing. It didn't look like it took much talent, except for the patience and strain of moving so slowly.

I like that one guy's job was to just call out Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! for long periods of time. I was wondering if they switched roles periodically so as not to get bored, or if he had hones his Ho! Skillz for many a year.

You can catch a bit of the Spiderman hands in this picture.

Here is a part where there's no singing, just dialogue that we didn't understand. You kind of got the gist of it if you read the story in the pamphlet and really paid attention to what was going on with the characters in the show. Sometimes it was funny. Oddly, there was a moment when the younger-sounding one of these guys turned to the audience and spoke a bit of English to us, making jokes, like You need transport?, which is something tourists hear a hundred times a day in Bali. I think the main point of the English part, though, was to check in and say they hoped we were enjoying the show.

So after the end of the Kecak Dance, the thing that held all the mini torches was burned into this big fire, and when that burned down sufficiently, this dude on a hobbyhorse came out and danced all over it barefoot.

While he was dancing, he kicked all the embers around and spread them out quite a bit, so these other guys with brooms would sweep them all back into a big pile again, and it would start again. The sweeps wore shoes, though.

This is what the pamphlet had to say about this dance:

Trance Dance (Sanghyan Djaran): The Sanghyang is a god-inspired trance-dance the function of which is to protect society against evil forces and epidemics. It can take several forms and the version here presented is the Sanghyang Djaran, djaran meaning horse. In Java as well as on Bali the hobby-hourse is associated with trance and is also seen in the Kuda Kepang of West Java in a similar function. The horse rider is lulled into trance by the repetitive sounds of the gamelan suara and in his tranced state he walks on a bed of burning coconut husks responding to the rising and falling of the sounds of the gamelan suara.

Here is the end of the show.

Seeing one of these dance shows is apparently one of the major Things To Do in Bali, so it was good to be able to see one. The next day, we did a bicycle tour of some villages and stuff.