Indonesia: Ubud (Day 6 Superduper-cont'd, Saturday, 080109)

We're going to watch the Gunung Sari troupe perform legong, a type of dance that has religious origins, and also portrays warriors, love stories, and mythical characters.

So the evening finds us waiting for the shuttle at the unfortunately-named UTI. I spend some time lounging exhaustedly in a waiting area armchair, while the impatient, huffy, dick-possessing portion of an older French couple expels air through his mouth as if that's going to make our transport arrive any faster.

Like, dude, chill the fuck out. You's in someone else's country awaiting their services, for which you have paid, what, four or five euros. Stop being a douche-cock and relax.

Jacques/Pierre/Monsieur "Ffffff" keeps at it, and I keep ignoring him (and hating him with all the strength of my being), while one of the Balinese Tourism employees comments on my fatigue, glancing knowingly and suggestively towards Eric, sitting two seats away. I presume that he thinks E and I are some dissolute, fucking-up-a-storm, interracial couple.

If he only knew.

The shuttle drive finally arrives, about half an hour late, to take us to the Puri Agung Peliatan Palace. Monsieur "Ffffff" has already decamped with his wife in tow, and when we arrive, the show hasn't started, I dare say because the UTI had been honest when they told us the show wouldn't start without us.

Oh, well, Pepe Le Pew, hope you had a good time being a cunt and not watching legong.

There're only two, three rows of plastic chairs arranged in front of the stage area, and we watch the first set, a gamelan instrumental, with an audience of about twenty or thirty.

It's totally dope: an ensemble of metallophones, gongs, and drums, all playing in a coruscating, opaque, cataract of sound, the gongs liquid, blooming, bubbling into sound, quite unlike Western gongs, which, as I hear 'em, make more of a...tang, a metallic noise.

Dope.

My fave dance of the evening was the first, the Gabor/Pendet dance, a religious dance performed by a set of young women, each holding a tray of flowering offerings that they eventually throw as a blessing. The dancing, in general, is characterized by a lot of stylized movements, particularly in the flicking of the eyes, and every glance to the side or down or widening of the eyes is, I think, supposed to mean something. For women, there's also a curious waggling of the ring fingers that they do. And there's something very lovely about the economy of the movement, a foot carefully kicking away the long train of a sarong before the performer takes a step back.



We also see:

baris, a warrior dance performed by a single dude who spends a lot of time widening his eyes and making flourishing movements with his arms, reminding me of those old-timey villains who are constantly twirling and tightening their mustaches;
kebiar trompong, where a single, male, dancer performs primarily in a sitting position and eventually joins the orchestra by playing the trompong, the Balinese horizontal gongs, arranged in a row;
legong keraton, a historical romance based on a 12th/13th century love story;
oleg tambulilingan, a dance depicting a flirtation between two bumble bees (errr);
jauk, dude in a monkey mask loping around with some verisimilitude;
and finally, barong dance, where two mythological creatures representing good and evil, Barong and Rangda, come and...bob, rather uninterestingly, around each other.

I'll be honest, after the first three performances, I'm good to go. But that's primarily because of my lack of attention span, I think, and no fault of the production.

Ok, so maybe they could have cut the uninspiring, bobbing Snuffleupaguses at the end, but two thumbs up, nevertheless.