Ramayana Ballet

Last night I joined other Indonesian students at Realia plus a couple of teachers, at the Ramayana Ballet. Pictures are here. I was curious to see the differences between this version of Ramayana and the performance I attended last year in Bangkok. Here, the dance/story is held weekly at “Prambanan”, an ancient Hindu temple near Yogya and the biggest of it's kind in Java.

When we arrived at Prambanan, the first thing we noticed was the temple, which was spectacularly powerful as it loomed over the outdoor stage. We were a bit late to the show but it didn’t matter since the performance was three hours long. The dancers were dressed in colorful costumes – often with headdresses – and true to the Ramayana story there were too many characters to keep track of. Dancing was similar to what I saw in Thailand, with women taking very small steps in long skirts, while men had bigger, bolder movements. All the dancers were very expressive with their hands, although right angles seem to be the hand style (as opposed to the perfect curves of Thai hands when doing traditional dance).

The ballet was danced to traditional Indonesian music – gamelan – played by a group of musicians sitting on an elevated stage behind the dancers. Gamelan is beautiful, though it has a very different aesthetic than western music. Often the band sounds discordant to my classical and jazz-trained ears, but somehow the total result is emotional and beautiful.

The Ramayana story is long and complicated, and you can learn more about it here if you are interested. Although most Indonesian people are not Hindu (the religion was strong here many centuries ago) the ballet which originated in India has remained an important part of Yogya culture. Perhaps the most spectacular part of the performance was when they burned two large piles of straw on the stage – although my group was sitting perhaps 200 meters from the flames, we could feel the heat from the fire. This sort of thing would never be allowed in the US because of the fear of burning down a building. For once I happy about the lack of (enforced) safety regulations in Indonesia – this country never fails to remind me how “safe” Americans can be!