Bali Island
Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east. It is one of the country's 33 provinces with the provincial capital at Denpasar towards the south of the island.
With a population recorded as 3,891,000 in 2010, the island is home to most of Indonesia's small Hindu minority. In the 2000 census about 92.29% of Bali's population adhered to Balinese Hinduism while most of the remainder follow Islam. It is also the largest tourist destination in the country and is renowned for its highly developed arts, including dance, sculpture, painting, leather, metalworking, and music. Bali, despite being a tourist haven for decades, has seen a surge in tourist numbers in recent years.
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| Bali |
Bali
is renowned for its diverse and sophisticated art forms, such as
painting, sculpture, woodcarving, handcrafts, and performing arts.
Balinese percussion orchestra music, known as gamelan, is highly developed and varied. Balinese performing arts often portray stories from Hindu epics such as the Ramayana but with heavy Balinese influence. Famous Balinese dances include pendet, legong, baris, topeng, barong, gong keybar, and kecak
(the monkey dance). Bali boasts one of the most diverse and innovative
performing arts cultures in the world, with paid performances at
thousands of temple festivals, private ceremonies, or public shows.
The Hindu New Year, Nyepi,
is celebrated in the spring by a day of silence. On this day everyone
stays at home and tourists are encouraged to remain in their hotels. But
the day before that large, colourful sculptures of ogoh-ogoh
monsters are paraded and finally burned in the evening to drive away
evil spirits. Other festivals throughout the year are specified by the
Balinese pawukon calendrical system.
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| Bali Island |
Celebrations are held for many occasions such as a tooth-filing (coming-of-age ritual), cremation or odalan (temple festival). One of the most important concepts that Balinese ceremonies have in common is that of désa kala patra,
which refers to how ritual performances must be appropriate in both the
specific and general social context. Many of the ceremonial art forms
such as wayang kulit and topeng
are highly improvisatory, providing flexibility for the performer to
adapt the performance to the current situation. Many celebrations call
for a loud, boisterous atmosphere with lots of activity and the
resulting aesthetic, ramé, is distinctively Balinese. Oftentimes two or more gamelan
ensembles will be performing well within earshot, and sometimes compete
with each other in order to be heard. Likewise, the audience members
talk amongst themselves, get up and walk around, or even cheer on the performance, which adds to the many layers of activity and the liveliness typical of ramé.
Kaja and kelod
are the Balinese equivalents of North and South, which refer to ones
orientation between the island’s largest mountain Gunung Agung (kaja), and the sea (kelod). In addition to spatial orientation, kaja and kelod
have the connotation of good and evil; gods and ancestors are believed
to live on the mountain whereas demons live in the sea. Buildings such
as temples and residential homes are spatially oriented by having the
most sacred spaces closest to the mountain and the unclean places
nearest to the sea.
Most temples have an inner courtyard and an outer courtyard which are arranged with the inner courtyard furthest kaja.
These spaces serve as performance venues since most Balinese rituals
are accompanied by any combination of music, dance and drama. The
performances that take place in the inner courtyard are classified as wali, the most sacred rituals which are offerings exclusively for the gods, while the outer courtyard is where bebali
ceremonies are held, which are intended for gods and people. Lastly,
performances meant solely for the entertainment of humans take place
outside the walls of the temple and are called bali-balihan. This
three-tiered system of classification was standardized in 1971 by a
committee of Balinese officials and artists in order to better protect
the sanctity of the oldest and most sacred Balinese rituals from being
performed for a paying audience.
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Tourism,
Bali’s chief industry, has provided the island with a foreign audience
that is eager to pay for entertainment, thus creating new performance
opportunities and more demand for performers. The impact of tourism
is controversial since before it became integrated into the economy,
the Balinese performing arts did not exist as a capitalist venture, and
were not performed for entertainment outside of their respective ritual
context. Since the 1930s sacred rituals such as the barong
dance have been performed both in their original contexts, as well as
exclusively for paying tourists. This has led to new versions of many of
these performances which have developed according to the preferences of
foreign audiences; some villages have a barong mask specifically for non-ritual performances as well as an older mask which is only used for sacred performances.
source : http://tourist-attractions-17.blogspot.com
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