Balinese music, dance, and traditional entertainment

In Bali no temple festival or ceremony is complete without entertainment for the gods, attending guests and local people. Temple anniversaries are occasions for all night dramatic and dance performances, with different types entertainment on each consecutive night, sometimes lasting until morning. The basic accompaniment to any such performance is provided by the local gamelan orchestra, a group of brass instruments, metal phones, tuned gongs, cymbals and hand drums, the village generally owns the instruments, as they are extremely expensive and they are stored at the village Banjar meeting hall and taken great pride in. No Balinese music has been written down or recorded until recent years. It has been passed down from generation to generation purely by memory. Each particular dance and dramatic performance has its own special combination of instruments to suit, melodious bamboo flutes, reedy two-stringed rebab violins and twanging Jew's harp like gengong are all used to provide their own special effects.

Arja and Drama Gong

A performance of Arja Balinese Folk Opera can hold an entire village engrossed from late evening until nearly sunrise. Love stories drawn from the classics of the ancient kingdoms of Java are reenacted with all the tragic, comic and romantic ingredients guaranteed to appeal. The royal characters move in a slow stylized dance and sing and talk in a high falsetto using high Balinese, which is translated into common language by the comedians. Arja has lost some of its popularity in recent years in favor of the Drama Gong, which has less music and dance and therefore is much more easily understood by the masses.

Barong and Rangda

The endless metaphysical battle between good and evil is symbolically reenacted time and time again by two weird characters, Barong and Rangda, who by their very performance reinforce the magic power of the village and restore the balance between good and evil. The Barong, representative of the right, white magic and the good forces of nature is a strange long swaybak creature that takes two strong men to animate. His adversary Rangda is Queen of the Witches, an ugly creature with long nails, tongue and fangs. The dual strength of their magic power is enough to drive men crazy as they clash. The Barong’s followers attack the terrible witch with their Kris daggers, only to find their weapons turned black against themselves by an evil spell. However the good is not to be overwhelmed, the Barong’s white magic is strong enough to protect his crazed followers from harm.