A masterpiece of nature, Bali has tirelessly and for centuries offered dazzling spectacles to those who walk through it.
Beauty calling beauty, art calling art, it was normal that in the midst of such splendor, Balinese life should be permeated in every nook and cranny and in many forms. Theatre, dances, music, paintings, sculptures, architectural jewels populate, in harmony with the majesty of the natural setting, the daily life of the Balinese where aesthetics and the spiritual often supplant the materiality of existence.
Wayang Kulit, leather puppets and sacred knowledge
Puppet theatre, Wayang Kulit, is one of the oldest forms of artistic expression in Bali. The Dalang, a man of great learning, is the only master of this shadow theatre. He stages and animates alone the leather figurines elaborated with art by himself. Bearer of morality and sacredness, Wayang Kulit, beyond the very popular entertainment it provides at all levels of society, dispenses with joy of life and truculence the spiritual teachings of Hindu culture and has been inscribed by UNESCO among the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
Ubud, arts and culture center
If art is inseparable from Balinese life, it holds a particularly prominent place in Ubud, an inland village nestled between mountains and sea northeast of Denpasar, where museums of works of art, palaces and gardens with refined and refined architecture are concentrated and where dances and music inhabit the space even more than elsewhere. The Neka Museum exhibits more than a century of works, pure splendours, which, like those of the Agung Rai Museum and those of the Puri Lukisan Museum, give the measure of the density and depth of Balinese culture and imagination. Every evening, in the streets or in the enclosure of one of the sumptuous palaces, the magic of music and dance shows is renewed and lifts souls between earth and sky, close to the gods.
Music
Omnipresent in Balinese life, music and dance accompany and animate the ceremonies, rites, dances and theatrical performances that punctuate Balinese life on a daily basis.
Transmitted orally to children from an early age, music is played in "gamelans", orchestras of very varied percussion instruments, often in bronze, on which are sometimes superimposed sounds of string and wind instruments such as zither and bamboo flutes. There are no less than twenty-five types of percussion instruments in Bali, gamelans, which gave their name to the orchestra and among which are fixed sound drums and melodic instruments such as metallophones, cymbals, xylophones that are played together and are manufactured in such a way as to match each other in order to create complex ensembles with singular tones and rhythms that make up echoes those of nature. Appearing in Bali in the thirteenth century under the influence of the Java empire, gamelans have survived the centuries and the quality of their musicality has not escaped many Western composers including Claude Debussy, Eric Sati and many others since who have enriched their own compositions.
Traditional dances of Bali
The Legong Dance
It is to the sound of gamelans that the different forms of Balinese dance theaters are played. The most represented is surely that of Legong, a dance of great refinement that often features very young dancers dressed in sumptuous gold and silk costumes. Through a very graceful and coded gesture, they tell a story with a happy outcome where the forces of evil succumb to the power of love and good.
The Barong Dance
The Barong dance, remarkable for its costumes and masks, expresses the universal conflict between the forces of good and evil. Good, embodied by the Barong, mythical animal with a lion's head, and evil, personified by the witch Rangda, are opposed in an endless struggle of which neither one nor the other ever triumphs and which often ends with the dancers exorcising the eternal duel through trance.
Island of the Gods
A tiny emergence in the heart of the Indian Ocean, Bali seems to be the prodigal son of these gods from which it has been said to come, and touched by grace, the life it generates, more truly terrestrial, hovering weightlessly in the inspired and magical universe of imagination and beauty.
