Balinese Dance With Kids

The Family Artsplorer had a holiday to Bali earlier this year. We had our share of sun, sand between our toes, sneaky massages, and fruity drinks. Mini-Artsplorer loved the pools and I loved the breakfast buffets. Aside from the usual tropical island fare, we also carved out a few evenings for Balinese dance performances, a visual and musical feast, which elevated our trip beyond “just another beach holiday” to give us a look into a color facet of Balinese storytelling culture. If you’re headed to Bali, I so encourage you to experience Balinese dance with your kids. 

Most commonly performed for tourists is Legong. Female performers (traditionally very young girls, but now adults, as well) enact scenes from the Mahabharata in particularly detailed dances, with careful foot movements, intricate hand motions, and precise facial expressions. They perform to live music by a troupe of gamalan players. The costumes are brightly colored with gold embellishments, lush and enchanting.

P1012129 from Cristin Kelly on Vimeo.

The dances are so bright and mesmerizing, even our tough critic pre-schooler was drawn in. She loved it when the women tossed flowers. She quietly studied them, then gave a try to the structured hand movements, herself.

In addition to the striking Legong, a couple of performances we attended also featured stories from the Barong mythology. The Barong is a lion-like creature (or, a “dog,” as our young spectator preferred, I suspect because that made the massive puppet less scary), who is the leader of the good spirits. Within the dances, he battles Rangda, the demon queen. Like the Legong, the Barong dances are highly choreographed, precise, and follow a set story. Though the Barong was bit intimidating for our young one, I do think this was also her favorite part of the performances, as she was so taken in by the animal-like creatures.

P1012170 from Cristin Kelly on Vimeo.

It was no surprise that we adults loved the dance performances, but I was pleased at the strong impression they made on our little lady. I don’t know that a child much younger than her age (3-1/2) would be able to sit through a performance (the tourist shows were all about an hour long), but she found much to enthrall her, and even more to provoke streams of questions about in the ensuing hours and days.

There’s a definite quality differential between shows. The performance at our Sanur hotel was (as expected) smaller and less lush, though they catered to the tourists by inviting some on stage to dance with the performers. A little corny, yes, but was much enjoyed by the children. The performance at Puri Agung Peliatan (Peliatan Royal Palace), just outside of Ubud was one of the most mesmerizing performances I’ve seen – the dancers in perfect harmony, a lovely range of styles, costumes practically glowing, all in sync with a large gamalan orchestra filling the air. It was glorious. We didn’t attend the performances at the Ubud Palace (Puri Saren Agung), but they are also very popular with Ubud visitors, and meant to be very good.  

If you have the chance to experience Balinese dance with your young artsplorers, and they are intrigued, I’d suggest a couple of other daytime activities to further pique their interest. A few minutes outside of Ubud, you’ll find the Mask and Puppet Museum, which houses numerous rooms full of masks and puppets related both to traditional Balinese performance, as well as greater Indonesian art, and some from across the world. The grounds are beautiful, and well worth a visit. In addition, you may be able to arrange lessons for your children or family in either gamalan or Balinese dance. The Ubud library offers such classes for around the equivalent of $15, and can be arranged on site. We didn’t manage the classes this trip, though the manager did suggest to us that the gamalan would be more appropriate for older children to adults, and that the dance class would be more appropriate for younger children, along with older ones and adults.

The Balinese dance performances were such a highlight out our trip, a beautiful reminder that we were not simply on the island to sit on the sand, but to meet one of the world’s most colorful and devout cultures – an expression of Hinduism that exists nowhere else on the planet. Travel is an opportunity to artsplore well outside of our familiar aesthetic.

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