lecture/demonstration on Balinese theatre by Enrico Masseroli

Where is Bali? Where its original culture comes from? The introduction, accompanied by the vision of original images,provides geographical and historical information, the frame and the context of such an extraordinary performing and aesthetic society.
An ancient background of animism and ancestor’s cult, is integrated in Agama Hindu Dharma, the religion of Bali, by which music dance and theatre are the very core of ritual and social life.
Such a reach kaleidoscope of old dramatic genres and modern creations is the heritage and the development of an original scenic language, which moulds the tensions in the body, the gestures and the choreographic units.
The demonstration proceeds with Baris, the vigorous warrior dance, which is the hard training of the Balinese children. Its movements may seem quite asymmetric, but their frame is composed of a refined interlocking between hard (keras) and sweet (manis) tensions.It’s necessary to build a body dancer and to know movements and poses, before to face the masks of Topeng, mostly the refined and stylised noble characters of the court. Afterward the impact with the grotesquefools is very free and needs improvisation skills as by “Commedia dell’Arte”. Actually Topeng, as an expression of Balinese culture, is characteristically a play between polar opposites, presenting the sacred and profane, great sophistication and gross caricature alternately.
Mask is one of the more universal elements in the theatre all over the world.
"When a Westerner puts on a mask he pretends that he is someone else. When a Balinese puts on a mask he becomes someone else" (Fred B. Eiseman).
Such a remark remind to the gleaming review made by Antonin Artuad in 1931, as he saw the balinese dances in Paris, and to the organic ties which in Bali link the performing arts to the whole life. Its traditional forms, based on the creative articulation of a clear code of movements and gestures, which the performer plays in a "structural improvisation" and those of many other traditional theaters of Asia, have been the source of illuminating insights to the great reformers of the European scene, from Stanislavski to Grotowski, Brook and Barba.