Beauty an important asset for Balinese women on stage
Beauty an important asset for Balinese women on stage
By Degung Santikarma
DENPASAR, Bali (JP): With her face full of shame and
frustration, Ni Nyoman Aryani runs for her bedroom, slamming the
door behind her. From the other side of the wall comes the
muffled sounds of her sobs, heart-wrenching cries that fill the
house with their sorrow.
For days on end, Nyoman refuses to eat and refuses to speak.
Between the tears and the trembling, all she will say is that she
has been rejected.
Is this the latest episode of an Indonesian soap opera, where
the heroine loses the love of the heartless hero? Or where the
virtuous village girl is deemed unworthy by the evil in-laws? No,
this is a real life drama of beauty and the Balinese stage.
Nyoman has been rejected by a committee responsible for
choosing those lucky few who will be sent overseas as
"ambassadors of Balinese dance" to promote Bali's art and culture
to the West.
Despite her youth and strength, her ability to execute the
graceful flicks of the hands and play of the eyes that signify a
dancer with true taksu (power), Nyoman was refused a place with
the traveling troupe because, she was told, she is overweight.
Her extra kilos disqualified her, for in the eyes of the
committee, her appearance was unsuited to the image they wished
to portray of the slender, seductive, natural Balinese body.
If the old saying is true, that beauty is in the eye of the
beholder, one would expect the Balinese, with their unique
cultural heritage, to have elaborated their own esthetics of
attractiveness quite differently from those of the West. And,
indeed, in traditional Bali, a body like Nyoman's was a sign of
sensuousness, power and health.
When meeting daily subsistence needs often entailed a
struggle, a fleshy physique was the mark of someone with high
social status who could regularly command their fill.
In fact, when the first tourists set foot on the island, they
were seen not as gorgeous and god-like, but as rather grotesque,
with their thin faces and long noses, their skin frequently
mottled by freckles, and their long-legged strides strangely
awkward. These odd new beings sometimes even sported red hair,
the defining mark of demons in Balinese mythology.
What's more, these weird Westerners didn't even seem to know
how to enhance what little beauty they did possess. The men let
the hair on their face grow wild but the women shaved their legs,
ridding themselves of that contrast between light skin and dark
soft hair so tempting to Balinese tastes. And instead of
safeguarding their white skin from the harshness of the tropical
heat, they insisted on braving the waves of Bali's beaches to
achieve a color that, to the Balinese eye, would best be
described as "roast suckling pig".
But as the gaze of the West turned toward Bali in search of a
sensual paradise, and as the Balinese, in turn, set their sights
on tourism as the route to fame and fortune, images of
attractiveness began to shift.
The early expatriates who sought to capture Balinese beauty
with the camera and the paintbrush selected as their subjects
those who met their own standards for good looks: the slim young
maiden or the lanky village boy.
And as beautiful Bali became a hot item on the international
market, Balinese tastes turned away from older objects of desire
toward the "natural beauty" longed for by the West. Yet for many
of today's middle-class Balinese, entering the modern age means
that this kind of "naturalness" has become something that must be
bought.
For the village woman who must work long hours in the fields,
carry heavy loads on her head or her babies on her hip, and walk
several kilometers to bring water from the well at the edge of
the river, the slim body is a sign of her everyday struggle to
make ends meet.
But for the modern woman whose home comes equipped with
running water and a maid or two, slenderness is more often the
result of expensive sessions at the gym or at the Body
Impressions slimming center.
Her "natural Balinese grace" is less a result of genetic
serendipity that was bestowed upon her as a birthright on the
Island of the Gods than of personality classes at the John Robert
Powers School, where women are taught to walk and talk, smile and
serve with the appropriate elegance.
The pale glow of her skin and the shine of her hair are her
bonuses for buying beauty products -- from herbal cream-baths to
lulur skin treatments to massage -- marketed as ancient wisdom,
never mind that the most popular potions have Western trademarks
and the best "traditional massage" is performed by the employees
of a guru from California.
And the Balinese body has been reshaped not only by the
expectations of tourism and the emergence of a new middle-class
Balinese aesthetic, but by state efforts as well.
Through programs such as the National Discipline Movement,
which ordered civil servants out of their offices to march in the
streets in athletic unison, Balinese were taught that one's
outward appearance should mirror one's inner commitment to
control.
And initiatives especially for women, like the Family Welfare
Program, instituted, along with lessons in nutrition and hygiene,
mandatory aerobics classes for village woman, which set them
jumping and kicking to the techno beat of Indonesian pop music,
all in the name of good health. The overweight body acquired new
negative connotations as a sign of lack of discipline or, for
those more critical observers, as a symptom of a culture of
corruption, a symbol of the powerful person who gets fat eating
off the plates of the poor.
But if the search for beauty in Bali has left quite a few
enterprising entrepreneurs feasting at the five star tables of
Bali's best restaurants, it has also seen others, like Nyoman,
fall victim to the ever-thinner range of acceptable difference it
offers women. As beauty becomes a pricey product, part of a
selective process that is decided by committees and subject to
commission, it becomes increasingly unattainable for all but an
elite few.
Obviously, Nyoman cannot return to the days of her
grandmother, whose slim shape was sculpted by the labors of her
life as a peasant. But without the means to enroll in a diet
class or visit a liposuction clinic, "natural Balinese beauty"
may remain, for women like her, a postcard perfect image --
suitable for framing or for trading but impossible to duplicate.