Bali Bali Bali...

Thursday, August 4th 8:35pm

Today is the first day where I have had free time to write, with internet, and the will power not to fall asleep as soon as reaching my room. Yay!

I have been in Bali for 4 days and so much has happened already I feel as if it has been 2 weeks. So I arrived Sunday night and began classes Monday morning at 9 am. We took a quick tour around the campus and then began had a lecture class on the introduction to Balinese dance, music and drama forms. In the afternoon Ainhoa, Ankita, Martijn and I arranged for new accommodation closer to the beach and for a cheaper rate, which is where I am at currently. We went to some local stores and bought some traditional clothes which we could wear to temple. It was good we got it quickly because we were invited to an event by Professor Dibia in his home town of Singpadu to watch a Barong Dance competition. The Barong dance consists to two dancers (traditionally men) inside of a dragon costume similar to ones you would see on Chinese New Year but painted and decorated very differently. There were 10 groups competing the night we went and they each had 15 minutes to show the judges all there skillz. The dances all had a similar structure and elements but the dancers threw in their own moves and variations to impress the crowd. It was fascinating to watch, but in all honesty I started to fall asleep after about the 5th performer went up. The music accompanying the dancers is called gamelan and it is performed by a band of about (in this case) 20 musicians, all playing instruments that look similar to a marimba, small flutes and of course drums. This music was enough to put my jet lagged body to sleep faster than a tranquilizer. Luckily I was not the only one who felt this way and during a break between dances we snuck out and as soon as I was back at the hotel I crashed.

Class started at 9am again Tuesday morning, but we had to wake up much before then in order to move to our new hotel and get to school before the allotted time. This done, I met my new love interest. His name is Dr. I. Nyoman Catra. This man is amazing. He is a topeng (masked theatre) master and has worked with Julie Taymore, Eugenio Barba and Bill Irwin just to name a few of my personal heroes. We spent 2 hours learning some basic Topend moves and at the end of it I was sweating like a pig. It was fabulous, my favorite part might have been at the end when we were taught the voices of the characters. Catra spoke in the voice in Balinese and we tried to imitate the voice while also trying to copy the sounds of Balinese. The result was ridiculous, I loved it. Next we met a group of students at the school of performing arts in Denpasar mostly studying puppetry but also some dance and music students. It seemed they all did everything though. We introduced ourselves and then talked about ways in which we can work together over the next 3 weeks. But mostly we got invited to tons of events the students were involved in around Sanur and Ubud. All of a sudden our calendars were full. After class we went to the house of a friend of Professor Sedanas to rent a car from him! We were promised a 6 seater and when we showed up it was a 5 seater with a pillow in the trunk, golden. We were so pleased with our new freedom we got in it and immediately left for Kuta, a close by town that would have taken us ages to get to otherwise. Kuta was so busy (and this was only on a Tuesday) but we found some parking and walked out towards the beach. I was asked by a few people to get my picture taken with them, what can I say, the Asians could not resist the scary whiteness of my skin in a bikini. After posing for a few shots I made my way to the beach and swam happily in the water for the first time since I left California in September! We went and got dinner and then walked to a local night market for some drinks and to meet up with some friends Ankita had made the weekend before I arrived. We played some music and sang (poorly)and talked until all of us started to droop with sleepiness. We decided it was time for bed and said goodbye to our friends. Once in the car we realized it would not start. Awesome. There was a problem with the battery so we had to push start it... in Balinese traffic...at night. It was the scene from Little Miss Sunshine almost exactly with the addition of swarms of motorcyclists and cars trying to run us down as we jumped into the now moving car. We got lost on the way home, but eventually made it and went right to bed.

Wednesday started with a Balinese culture and history class. This was taught by a man of obviously high education and status, unfortunately it was nearly impossible to understand him. Also, a trend I am noticing amongst the Balinese is a way to answer a question with an answer from a completely different topic and somehow relate one piece of it back to your original question leaving you with more questions than when you started. The talk was good and there was a highly informative handout, and a goody box of food which I took for lunch, so all in all, the morning was a win. After the talk, we went directly to the house of a master mask maker in Singpadu. We were all presented with a block of wood, a mallet and a chisel. The mask maker spoke very little English. He had his own block of wood and started to whack at it, we all followed suit pretending we had any idea what we were doing. He made 2 or 3 whacks and said 'start nose', all of a sudden a nose was on his block, then 'eyes next' boom, boom, 2 eye holes, then 'make mouth' and in less than 5 minutes there was an outline of a beautiful mask sitting in front of him. Urged on by the his results we began to hack at our blocks more furiously with little to no change appearing on our block. After an hour 3 people had cut themselves badly, a few others had blisters, and our masks looked nowhere near as good as the mask he produced in the first 5 minutes. Over the next hour one by one we all gave up and handed our mask over to the master for 'fixing' where he really just undid everything we had worked for for the past hour and made a new beautiful mask outline. In order to make the mask you place the wood between your feet, holding it with your toes as you use both hands to chisel away. Standing at the end of 2 hours after having been in this position was extremely painful. My hips and knees especially felt it, not to mention the pain in my lower back. It must be something you have to get use to, but I can't imagine sitting like that for hours and hours every day of my life and still being able to stand up. My amazement for the mask maker grew.

After mask making it was off to Sut's house where he had prepared a traditional Balinese meal for us. First we went to the temple where a rehearsal for a performance was going on. It was a small village temple. Two women were practicing a dance, one teaching the other the part, there were musicians providing music for them, and then there was the guy in the trance... Now trance dancing is something I have read about, but never experienced until last night. The Balinese believe that the gods come to you when you dance and inform you how to move, and in some cases can completely embody you putting you in a trance state. That was the case with the man wiggling his butt at me now. Apparently the gods were telling him to act like a flirtatious woman cat calling every man in the immediate vicinity. He was waving and wiggling his butt as he giggled like a school girl at the mens embarrassment. He danced back and forth singing in a high pitched tone in between his cat calls. The rest of the men stood and watched, some playing along with his game, some just acting as if this was totally normal behavior. I watched with delight. We had a dance lesson at the temple led by Sedana and his wife. We finally learned some woman dances and holy mother are they hard! Much harder than the man dances, I hurt in places I didn't know existed on my body. We sat around and talked at the temple to Sut and his friends and then went to his house for dinner. Balinese houses are set up in a very specific way according to a North, East, South, West model corresponding to certain gods and religious traditions. They live in family compounds with many generations living in one location. Sut showed us his house and laid out a wonderful meal. By this time it was 10pm and we were all starved. I took a bit of everything, wanting to try it all. It was delicious! I started in on a dish I believed to be chicken but after the first bite was confused about the number of bones in it. I spit out the bones only to realize that they were teeth. I examined my piece of meat more closely and discovered prickly hairs covering one side of it and more teeth in the middle of it. I turned it over and was met with the distinct outline of a pig snout. I didn't want to be rude by making any noise about it, but couldn't help but start to laugh. I had been so confident in my food choices and all of it was suddenly taken away. I inspected the rest of my food... all normal... and continued to eat. After dinner we relaxed and talked and looked at Sut's puppet collection. They were beautiful with so much detail painted on them. However, by this point it was getting late and we still had to make it home through some pretty crazy winding streets. We left and without fail got lost on the car ride home, fortunately the company was good and we laughed the entire way making it seem shorter.