Barong Dance

The Barong is a guardian creature of Balinese religion, most often in the lion form called Barong Ket, worn by two men under a great mane of fibre with a hinged wooden jaw that clacks. Rangda is his opposite, a widow figure with pendulous breasts, protruding tusks and a long tongue, associated with the practice of harmful magic and with the Calonarang story in which a slighted widow brings plague on a kingdom. Both masks are consecrated, kept in the village temple, and treated as containing power in their own right, which is why they are given offerings and are not simply props.

The dance stages their meeting and does not resolve it. Rangda is not destroyed, the Barong does not triumph, and the piece ends in a standoff and a restoration of balance. That is the theological content: Balinese religion sets its problem as the maintenance of equilibrium between opposed forces rather than the elimination of one. A village that destroyed Rangda would have destroyed something necessary. The dance is performed at temple anniversaries and at other calendrical occasions, and in some villages it is performed when the community judges it needs performing, after illness or misfortune. The masks are re-consecrated on a set cycle, and a village that lets that lapse is held to have let something more than an object lapse.

In the ritual form the confrontation ends with the entry of the kris dancers, men of the village carrying the wavy bladed dagger. Rangda's power turns them, and they attack her; she turns their own weapons back on them, and they fall into trance and press the daggers against their chests, straining with their full weight and not breaking the skin. The Barong's protection is understood to be what holds. Priests then move among them with holy water and, in many villages, with a sacrificed chicken, and bring them out of the state one by one. The dancers are frequently unable to recall it afterward, and a man who does not come out cleanly is attended to until he does.

There is also a shortened barong performance staged daily for visitors in the tourist areas of the island. The Balinese distinction between the two is straightforward and is not a matter of purism: the masks used in a temple ceremony are consecrated and the ones used for a paid performance are generally not, and a village will keep them separately. Jane Belo's fieldwork in the 1930s recorded the ritual form before mass tourism, which is why her account is still cited, though the Balinese practice of the same dance has continued to develop for ninety years since and is not frozen at that point.