Good and evil are balanced in the 'Barong'

Good and evil are balanced in the 'Barong'

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): All human anxieties are traced back to birth,
for birth is believed to be beautiful and bewildering. It is a
cause for celebration and a reason to cry. Birth is creation but
it is also a painful split from the whole.

Human beings rejoice at the thought of being alive but they also
spend a good part of their life wandering from pillar to post in
their quest to become whole again. And each time a Balinese is
asked to console the lost souls in this world, the seeker is
invariably led straight to the Barong (traditional dance).

For Barong, the gigantic, mythological lord of the jungle who
was covered with fur and colorful decorations and whose nine-foot
frame is brought to life by two men, is not just a wild dancer.
His mask is decorated with leather strips, mirrors and flowers
and his magical power lies in his beard, which is made from human
hair.

He might be the most popular of entertainers for tourists
today but his main job is to restore order with his dances each
time chaos threatens to strike. He is the mediator between the
strong forces of good and evil. In the traditional Barong dance,
evil forces are not so much defeated as calmed, making sure that
both good and evil coexist harmoniously in life.

There is no winner or loser in the view of the world. No hero
or villain nor slayer or slain. There is a place for both evil
and good to exist side by side in perfect balance. What has to be
made sure is that evil does not dominate good. And this is what
the Barong is all about.

Without the Barong, life would become a living hell, swinging
from moments of ecstasy to those of agony. And this is the
greatest lesson that Helen Hughes, an American ethnomusicologist
at Jakarta International School, has learned during her study of
the famous Balinese character and from her decade-long
association with I Made Widartha Rame, a teacher at the same
school and a great Barong dancer.

"For me the Barong tradition has changed not just my life, but
my entire view of the world," says Helen, whose Western
background taught her that evil has to be rejected. She feels
more comfortable living with the thought that evil does exist and
that life is to explore ways that will prevent the dark forces of
life from getting the better of her. Now she wants to share this
experience with the whole world. After visiting Bangkok to
deliver a talk about the Barong, she and Rame will give a lecture
on Dec. 8 at the invitation of Jakarta's Heritage Society in
Erasmus Huis, Jl.Rasuna Said, South Jakarta.

Helen will talk about how she discovered the Barong and the
lessons she learned from her intimacy with the legend she
described for The Jakarta Post as "the outward manifestation of
an inner strength". Rame, a Balinese from the famous neighborhood
of Kuta beach, will lay bare his personal experiences with the
Barong and also perform for the audience.

Rame ran away from his home in Kuta to stay with his American
friends in Jakarta in the 1970s. The third son of a fisherman,
Rame preferred swimming to fishing. When tourists started to
flood into Kuta, Rame surfed with the beach bums for a few years.

Then he got restless and migrated to Jakarta where he brought
with him all his skills, including singing and dancing. Although
he is a swimming instructor at the school, he remains a member of
a Balinese banjar (subdistrict), practicing the arts more as a
way of life rather than as a profession.

For Rame, the Barong is holy. Although he comes from a lower
caste family of Sudra, his younger brother converted to the
higher caste of a priest and is the one responsible for taking
care of the Barong when it is stored in a temple and the mask is
covered with a white veil. Before the Barong is taken out for a
performance, offerings are given to the priest who also blesses
the giant gong in the gamelan and the energetic orchestra.

Rame's late father was the village elder who was consulted by
everyone in times of good and bad. On his part, he always went to
the Barong for council. His father was blessed with the gift of
being able to shed his own ego and make a place in his
consciousness for alternative beings to enter and communicate
with the living. "I used to be fascinated watching him go into a
trance. I have tried to go into a trance myself but I am unable
to do so," regrets Rame. He recalls his father retreating into a
world of his own once to find out why his village was inflicted
with a mysterious plague that killed several people within a
few days.

"Offerings of yellow rice were made according to the
information brought back by my father from those who are
invisible and health was once more restored to our banjar,"
remembers Rame who constantly consults with the Barong when he is
of two minds. The Barong dancers also work themselves into a
trance and are able to bring back news from a world that may not
exist for most people.

"This is the change that has taken place in my life. Before
that, seeing was believing for me. That things that I do not see
with my own naked eye can also exist was beyond my
comprehension," says Helen who grew up defining trance, like all
westerners, as psychotic behavior.

On her ongoing love affair with Eastern mysticism, she
concludes that a fascinating part of human experience is probably
lost to most of the Western world where life is divided up into
compartments like science and arts, office and home, work and
pleasure, to further split personalities.

However, in the East, Helen discovered that each aspect of
life blends into the other, helping the inner self become whole
again. She has learned a lot from Rame who does not differentiate
the arts from religion and worship from life. It is one
continuous activity, a way of life that is practiced and not just
preached or intellectualized.

"How else can the Balinese preserve their cultural identity in
the face of aggressive tourism and so much change?" she
questions, convinced that it is the important role rituals play
in the life of the Balinese that helps to sustain a cultural
identity and to promote oneness.

She feels that for people to find anything more than a tourist
experience in the Barong dance, they will have to stop being
passive spectators during the trance ritual. Her own experience
has shown that if she is able to conquer her conditioning and
participate in a ritual, she is transported to a different kind
of reality which she is not quite able to explain.

Perhaps a sense of oneness with oneself, if not, with the
supreme being?