Liminality in Balinese Dance

Abstract

Many Balinese performances take place in the outer courtyards of temples. The gamelan members are seated on either side of the temple gateway, and they are already playing when a dazzling figure appears at the top of the stone steps. For a moment or more the figure pauses on this threshold, making an entrance, we would say. But this is not Cynthia Gregory rushing out to greet her public. The Balinese dancer's act of crossing over from the ordinary world to the theatre world (which is to say the spirit world) is marked with hesitation as well as eagerness. Sometimes the performer does a little preview of his forthcoming dance. Masked characters and clowns might do a whole number, pretending to be scared by something, ducking back inside the gate, peeking out and so forth. Sometimes a curtain substitutes for the gateway when the performance isn't taking place in a temple, and then there can be a preliminary teasing, a rustling of the material, a glimpse of someone around the edge, to work up the audience's anticipation.1 And sometimes the performer simply waits in the gateway, letting us appreciate her beauty and gathering her own forces. The condong, or maidservant, in Legong classical dance makes her entrance this way, gesturing and posing. Finally, with her arms winged to the sides, palms to the audience, she spreads her trembling hands apart, symbolically opening a curtain. Only then does she come down the steps and begin her dance. Bali has fascinated researchers throughout the 20th century, perhaps because it's a place where art and life, ritual and theatre, consciousness and psychic detachment, are inextricably entwined. Balinese culture is the arena for a continual struggle between good and evil forces over the lives of individuals. Any action a Balinese takes might be spiritually harmful or efficacious because the elements of nature and of history, the spirit world and the material, are always hovering nearby, waiting to be released, by accident or by voluntary acts. The spirits can be honored or momentarily kept at bay through ritual practice such as prayers and daily offerings. From time to time they must be deliberately invoked and made to contend publicly, to demonstrate that although both sides are potent, neither ever wins conclusively. All art, perhaps even the most commercially motivated tourist performance and craftwork, is made for the gods. For a critic of Western dance, all this immediately poses problems-and possibilities. Performance in Bali is highly skilled, aesthetic, loaded with The Drama Review 35, no. 4 (T132), Winter 1991