it’s nothing. A bargain.”
We stood in front of a large covered pavilion near the entrance to Ubud Palace. “The museum covers my expenses.” I handed him the money.
He acquiesced and the three of us found seats midway in the audience with a good view so Randall could photograph the performance. The gamelan orchestra sat to either side of the stage, all men and each wearing a vivid turquoise shirt and udeng, the traditional batik hat.
“I’ve been looking forward to seeing the Barong and Rangda dance in Bali. I saw a performance here when I was a child. I remember that it was terrifying. More recently I attended one at Zellerbach Auditorium at UC Berkeley, but contained indoors on a stage it lost some of its force.”
“Terrifying? Why?” Seth asked.
“I can’t remember exactly, but I recall dozens of Barongs swarming a wide street and performers with krises that they turned on themselves.”
“And why was your family here?”
“My parents believed that you should subject your children to as much culture and difference as possible. Maybe ‘difference’ is the wrong word. My father’s a teacher, and he’s always teaching. Well, almost always.” I thought of my father’s drinking.
“Ah.”
“So each summer we went on a vacation that was intended to teach us—about a new region, a culture, history, art. Whatever. This was our most exotic vacation.” I thought for a moment. “One of our most exotic. I think they must have saved for years.”
“No Europe?”
“To Washington, D.C., one year, the Four Corners a couple of times—cheap camping—Mexico once. That was a trip. We drove, which turned out to be a bad idea. Once they took us to Europe, to the Mediterranean, from Greece over to Turkey. They encouraged us to save our earnings and travel the continent during college vacations.”
Randall interrupted. “We’ve seen the groups of men and boys in the costume of Barong. But who is Barong? He’s fierce looking, but this program says he represents good.”
“Yes, he’s fierce—he looks something like a lion. But he fights endless battles with the evil witch Rangda. For the Balinese, the battle represents the struggle between good and evil,” I said, fanning myself. I was thankful for the light breeze that blew through the open-air pavilion, but it wasn’t enough.
The many pieces listed on the program suggested abbreviated versions of the battle between Barong and Rangda as well as shortened legong dances, unless we were going to be here for four hours. I realized how much I wanted the lengthy tense and primal battle between Barong and Rangda, especially now. Hadn’t I seen evil win out just this afternoon? The murder of a man—a complicated man, not a good man according to all I’d heard, but could murder ever be for good? Still, there would be time for more dance and music during my stay; performance was an art form that permeated Balinese life.
“He has to be fierce to stand up to evil,” Seth volunteered.
“I guess.” Randall frowned.
“Quite an eclectic crowd,” said Seth.
“Yes, it is,” I replied. Around us I heard Chinese, Australian English, Spanish, Italian, but no other American accents, which surprised me, as everyone I knew back home seemed to have gone to Bali, to be in Bali, or was planning a trip.
As the music started, a man in the second row set up his tripod in the middle of the center aisle, blocking the view along either side. He raised the level of the tripod to a foot above everyone’s head and began focusing his camera. “Honestly,” I said.
“Tourists,” said Randall smiling.
The woman in front of us asked him to move the tripod out of the aisle, which he did, but he didn’t lower it. I asked him to do that, and he complied, grudgingly. Flashes went off right and left as a dancer appeared on the stage. At a performance at home, I thought, the first announcement would be to turn off your camera’s flash.
The dancer, wearing richly brocaded textiles and a headdress with two bobbling pom-poms, met the rising and falling beat of the instruments with her hands, her feet. Her eyes widened in astonishment and joy. I would have found her expression exaggerated in other circumstances, but it now reflected my own gyrating emotions. Cameras flashed, people stood, photographed, sat down. It all felt a bit surreal, an impression driven by the gongs and drums of the gamelan.
Seth laid a hand on my knee and leaned toward me. “How does it compare to the performance in the States?”
“Good. The dance is a precise series of gestures and steps, so not so different. It feels more authentic than in the States, maybe because of the setting.” I felt the warmth of his palm and his breath in my ear. I shifted my knee slightly and he withdrew.
“Can’t imagine dancing in this humidity,” Randall said. “Especially with those elaborate costumes.”
I nodded, keeping my eyes on the dancers, not wanting to engage.
Tripod man raised his tripod, again blocking my view. I closed my eyes and let myself be carried along by the rhythmic gamelan, the percussive sounds so different from Western music. The drums beat, the gongs rang out, a flute cut in, and I felt as if I had arrived. The morning’s woes receded. Tripod man was still there when I opened my eyes, but I didn’t care. Someone would ask him to sit eventually, and the dancer was now to one side of the stage. I turned my attention to the people standing along the sides of the pavilion.
I tried to guess their nationality by their dress, their haircuts, the way their mouths moved when they spoke. A man near the front looked French, but when he bent over to speak to his wife, his mouth didn’t have that little moue that the French language gives a person, and I put him down as German. The young girl next to him, with her Rasta hair, could have been from anywhere, but I guessed Australia because the two people with her clearly seemed Australian.
I looked to the opposite side of the pavilion. A man was staring at me. A tall, gangly, wild-looking man with deep-set eyes, hair run amok, and a mobile, twitching mouth. I stared back, and he abruptly turned away. I shivered, seeing that lance once again, this time imagined in this wild man’s hands, moving forward, toward me rather than Flip. I shook my head. But this man hadn’t killed anyone, he was just doing the same thing I was doing, looking at the people, guessing. It’s what we do when we travel: gauge our surroundings, the strangers, try to find our place. I looked back to the performance.
Barong entered through the middle of three doorways that led onto the stage.
“Pretty silly, if you ask me,” Randall said.
From a Western perspective, he was right. Barong’s shuddering jaw, his inability to get through the door, and the fact that there was no threat in sight to bring on his exaggerated acting combined to make him seem silly, a silliness to us because of our different relationship to time. Barong’s movement wasn’t so different from one of those long rhythmic passages in the gamelan that, to a Western ear, sounds repetitive. We want to say, get on with it, what’s the next note, the next dance step? While the Balinese is content to stay in the moment.
I tried to sink into it, to the tempo of the music, the simplicity of the action onstage, but maybe my day had been too filled with adrenaline. Maybe I
