Upon our arrival at Kloeng Kloeng I found the Controleur, who had been notified by the Resident at Singaradja of our coming, had made arrangements for an elaborate series of native dances to be given that afternoon on the lawn of the residency. It is a simple matter to arrange a dance in Bali, for every village, no matter how small, supports a ballet, and usually a troupe of actors as well, just as an American community supports a baseball team. The money for the gorgeous costumes worn by the dancers is raised by local subscription and the ballet frequently visits the neighboring towns to give exhibitions or to engage in competitions, contingents of the dancers' townspeople usually going along to root for them.
The Balinese dances require many years of arduous and constant training. A girl is scarcely out of the sling by which Balinese children are carried on the mother's back before, under the tutelage of her mother, who has herself perhaps been a dancing-girl in her time, she begins the severe course of gymnastics and muscle training which are the foundations of all Eastern dances. From infancy until, not yet in her teens, she becomes a member of the village ballet or enters the harem of a local rajah, she is as assiduously trained and groomed as a race-horse entered for the Derby. From morning until night, day after day, year after year, the muscles of her shoulders, her back, her hips, her legs, her abdomen are suppled and developed until they will respond to her wishes as readily as her slender, henna-stained fingers.
The lawn on which the dances were held sloped down, like a great green rug, from the squat white residency to an ancient Hindu temple, whose walls, of red-brown sandstone, were transformed by the setting sun into rosy coral. The Bali temples are but open courtyards enclosed within high walls, their entrances flanked by towering gate-posts, grotesquely carved. Within the courtyards, which have arrangements for the cremation of the dead as well as for the refreshment of the living, are numerous roofed platforms and small, elevated shrines, reached by steep flights of narrow steps, every square inch being covered with intricate and fantastic carvings. These carvings are for the most part beautifully colored, so that, when illuminated by the sun, they look like those porcelain bas-reliefs which one buys in Florence, or, if the colors are undimmed by age, like Persian enamel. In some of the temples which I visited, the colorings had been ruthlessly obliterated by coats of whitewash, but in those communities where Hinduism is still a living force, the inhabitants frequently impoverish themselves in order to provide the gold-leaf with which the interiors of the shrines are covered, just as the congregations of American churches praise God with carven pulpits and windows of stained glass.
The stage setting for the dances consisted of a small, portable pagoda, heavily gilded and set with mirrors—nothing more, unless you include the backdrop provided by the Indian Ocean. On either side of the pagoda, which was set in the centre of the lawn, squatted a motionless native holding a long-handled parasol of gold, known as a payong. So far as I could discover, the purpose of these parasol holders was purely ornamental, like the palms that flank a concert stage, for they never stirred throughout the four hours that the dancing lasted. The dancers themselves were extremely young—barely in their teens, I should say—but I could only guess their ages as their faces were so heavily enameled that they might as well have been wearing masks. Their costumes, faithful reproductions of those depicted in the carvings on the walls of the temples, were of a gorgeousness which made the creations of Bakst seem colorless and tame: tightly-wound kains of cloth-of-gold over which were draped silks in all the colors of the chromatic scale. Their necks and arms, which were stained a saffron yellow, were hung with jewels or near-jewels. On their heads were towering, indescribable affairs of feathers, flowers and tinsel, faintly reminiscent of those fantastic headdresses affected by the lamented Gaby. The music was furnished by a gamelan, or orchestra, of half-a-hundred musicians playing on drums, gongs and reeds, with a few xylophones thrown in for good measure. I am no judge of music, but it seemed to me that when the gamelan was working at full speed it compared very favorably with an American jazz orchestra.
All the dances illustrated episodes from the Ramayana or other Hindu mythologies localized, the story being recited in a monotonous, sing-song chant, in the old Kawi or sacred language, by a professional accompanist who sat, cross-legged, in the orchestra. As a result of constant drilling since babyhood, the Balinese dancers attain a perfection of technique unknown on the western stage, but the visitor who expects to see the verve and abandon of the Indian dances as portrayed by Ruth St. Denis is certain to be disappointed. To tell the truth, the dances of Bali, like those I saw in Java and Cambodia, are rather tedious performances, beautiful, it is true, but almost totally lacking in that fire and spirit which we associate with the East. It is probable, however, that I am not sufficiently educated in the art of Terpsichore to appreciate them. It was as though I had been given a selection from Die Niebelungen Lied when I had looked for rag-time. But the natives are passionately fond of them, it being by no means uncommon, I was told, for a dance to begin in the late afternoon and continue without interruption until daybreak. The Controleur told me that he planned to utilize his next long leave in taking a native ballet to Europe, and, perhaps, to the United States. So, should you see the Bali dancers advertised to appear on Broadway, I strongly advise you not to miss them.
Instead of going to Palm Beach next winter, or to Havana, or to the Riviera, why don't you go out to Bali and see its lovely women, its curious customs, and its superb scenery for yourself? You can get there in about eight weeks, provided you make good connections at Singapore and Surabaya. With no railways, no street-cars, no hotels, no newspapers, no theatres, no movies, it is a very restful place. You can lounge the lazy days away in the cool depths of flower-smothered verandahs, with a brown house-boy pulling at the punkah-rope and another bringing you cool drinks in tall, thin glasses—for the Volstead Act does not run west of the 160th meridian—or you can stroll in the moonlight on the long white beaches with lithe brown beauties who wear passion-flowers in their raven hair. Or, should you weary of so dolce far niente an existence, you can sail across to Java with the opium-runners in their fragile prahaus, or climb a two-mile-high volcano, or in the jungles at the western extremity of the island stalk the clouded tiger. And you can wear pajamas all day long without apologizing. Everything considered, Bali offers more inducements than any place I know to the tired business man or the absconding bank cashier.