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.