The Midday Sun The Miracle of Bali

Specially chosen programmes from the BBC archive.

For this Collection, Sir David Attenborough

has chosen documentaries from the start of his career.

More programmes on this theme and other BBC Four Collections

are available on BBC iPlayer.

Bali is a small island, 100 miles long and 70 miles wide.

On the map, it looks no more than a tiny bead

on the necklace of islands

that stretches from west of Malaysia to New Guinea and Australia.

It is certainly one of the most beautiful islands in the world.

Like every other part of Southeast Asia,

it has rice fields, palm trees and tropical flowers,

but somehow in Bali, these things fit together so perfectly

that you feel, when you come here,

that you have arrived in an enchanted garden.

But there is one particular characteristic of Bali

which makes it one of the most remarkable places on Earth.

Bali is unique because of its people.

They are, above all, a peasant people

and, in this warm, welcoming climate

they live as close to nature as man can anywhere.

But they are also a people intoxicated by the arts.

Part of the reason for their passionate involvement

lies in their history.

500 years ago, most of what is now Indonesia was Hindu,

ruled by princes

whose courts were among the most cultured in the whole of the Orient,

famous for the dazzling skill of their musicians and artists.

In the 16th century, however,

the faith of Islam arrived in Java.

Most of the Hindu princes fled before it, travelling eastwards down Java

and, eventually, across a narrow arm of sea and into Bali.

With them travelled their entire courts,

and so Bali became a sanctuary for the flower of Hindu Javanese culture,

and here, it has flourished ever since.

Indeed, these people,

who spend their days in backbreaking work in the rice fields,

regard the arts almost as necessary to a proper and decent life

as the very grain they cultivate.

They know that the really worthwhile thing to be

is either a painter, a sculptor, a dancer

or, perhaps, above all, a musician.

Bali's music has only rarely been heard in the West,

but when it has, it has created a sensation.

Debussy heard something of it at the 1889 Paris Exhibition

and was overwhelmed.

Bartok, de Falla and, most recently, Benjamin Britten,

have all been captivated by its richness of tone

and intricacy of melody.

To hear the best music you must go into the villages,

and one of the greatest orchestras in Bali

is centred on this household in the small village of Peliatan.

Its guiding spirit has been, for nearly 50 years,

the old nobleman who is the patriarch of the household,

Anak Agung Gde Mandera.

He no longer plays, but has handed over to his son, Agung Bawa,

and another young man, Gandera,

who is now the orchestra's main composer.

The Anak Agung, as a young man in 1929,

went with his orchestra and dancers to Paris.

The visit was a triumph,

and then, in 1952, his orchestra was taken on a world tour.

This was an even greater success

and mementos of it hang round his room.

In America, their impresario was so delighted

that he presented them with a commemorative plaque.

In Brussels, they were given a full diplomatic reception.

In Paris, the little girl dancers

were rapturously received by the ballet-loving public

and ecstatically praised by Serge Lifar.

In New York, the Anak Agung discussed drumming

with the timpanist of the New York Philharmonic

and found his technique mystifyingly simple,

but was too polite to say so.

In spite of the fact that he's been entertained in palaces

and luxury hotels in all the great cities of the West,

the Anak Agung still runs his household

in the purest traditions of the Balinese nobility.

His daughter-in-law weaves silk cloth for sarongs.

The instruments of the famous orchestra, shrouded in covers,

stand in their special rehearsal veranda.

The wall facing the main gateway into the compound

is emblazoned with a great carving of the Garuda bird,

a device recommended by Balinese tradition

as a way of preventing demons from entering.

The men of the household,

like every man in Bali, nobleman or commoner,

rear fighting cocks,

and they must be exercised, massaged and cosseted daily.

From a citrus tree, famous for the marvellous sweetness of its fruit,

hangs a cockatoo,

and beyond, the Anak Agung's aged mother pounds betel nut

and, typically, does so not just anyhow,

but with a particular rhythm echoing a particular melody in her head.

And off the main courtyard, in a separate enclosure, the house temple,

where stand the shrines

which mark the great events in the life of the household,

including one erected to give thanks

for the orchestra's safe return from their world tour.

Gandera gives rehearsals to each instrumentalist separately.

He knows, and can play, the part of every instrument

in even the most complex orchestral piece.

Indeed, since there is no musical notation and no written scores,

this is the only way of teaching a composition.

HE SINGS NOTES

What is more,

because he's sitting on the opposite side of the instrument,

he has to be able to play it, literally, backwards.

HE SINGS

THEY SING

HE SINGS

And when his pupil really knows the passage,

then Gandera will play the counterpoint

on the same instrument, backwards.

This instrument is the gangsa.

It plays the same role in the Balinese orchestra as violins do

in a European orchestra.

Each bronze key has to be damped with the left hand

after it's been struck.

A complete orchestra, or gamelan, may contain as many as 30 instruments.

It is, in fact, the biggest musical ensemble anywhere in the world,

apart from a full-scale Western symphony orchestra,

and Gandera leads it from the drum.

The chief gangsa player, who shares the leadership of the gamelan,

is Gandera's father, Made Lebah.

This is the reong,

the hardest instrument of all to play with evenness and precision,

for eight hands must play as one.

In an orchestra of this size, with 30-odd instruments,

sometimes playing interlocking parts of the same melody,

there can be no room for improvisation.

They must all play with the utmost precision,

and that can only be obtained by dedicated rehearsals,

four or five evenings a week.

HE SPEAKS

MUSIC STARTS UP

These are the jegogan, the cellos, as it were, in this bronze orchestra.

Like nearly all the instruments, they play in pairs,

each one slightly differently tuned,

so that when the pair are struck together,

they produce a pulsating note.

All the instruments of the gamelan,

which between them span seven octaves,

are tuned to a five-note scale.

But the precise pitch of those five notes

is the subject of great and careful debate among the musicians

when the gamelan is first formed and tuned.

In practice, no two gamelan are tuned exactly the same.

Each creates its own individual tonal world,

and every village echoes to splendid harmonies

that can be heard nowhere else.

Music is only one of Bali's arts.

Just as most people seem to have the ability

to play an instrument of some sort,

so everybody also seems to have the talent and the urge to carve.

The main outlet for their work is the temples.

The stone blocks are only roughly shaped

when they're first put in place.

Men from the village will later carve them as an act of piety.

The images they create

are taken from the grotesque pantheon of Hindu mythology.

But everywhere, the Balinese give full rein to their delight

in exuberant detail.

As the only stone in the island

is a very soft volcanic ash which weathers very quickly,

the carvings must be renewed every generation,

so there is ample and permanent work for sculptors.

TAPPING

Although temple carving is the main outlet for sculptors,

it's by no means the only one

for men of outstanding talent and imagination.

Ida Bagus Ketut is one of the great mask makers of Bali.

As it happens, he's also one of the great mask dancers, as well,

and the masks he carves are used

in the night-long plays that are one of the island's main entertainments.

This is a demon, in the form of a wild pig.

MEN CHAT QUIETLY

A prince, whose movements must be refined and elegant.

In the plays, he will speak only in Kawi,

an archaic form of Javanese, which is almost pure Sanskrit

and only understood by a very small proportion of Balinese.

A low, comic character, a monkey.

HE LAUGHS AT LENGTH

The job of these kinds of characters is not merely to bring laughs,

but to translate the Kawi spoken by the refined people

into low Balinese, which will be understood by all.

Here's another of them,

an old man down on his luck, begging for money,

but irrepressibly cheerful, in spite of everything.

HE LAUGHS AND CHATS

MEN CHAT

LAUGHTER

A comic and stupid attendant from a rajah's retinue,

who rather fancies himself.

With this character, Ketut can convulse the crowds

who come to watch him whenever he performs.

A deaf man.

DOG BARKS

Of all the arts of Bali,

painting perhaps was the most static and least inventive.

It was tied very strictly to traditional Hindu themes

for its subject matter,

and the colours it employed were limited to five -

red, blue, yellow, black and white.

Even the manner in which the features of these gods and demons are drawn

was strictly prescribed.

This was the only kind of painting made in Bali until some 40 years ago.

In 1923, however,

something occurred that was to bring about a profound change.

This man arrived in the island.

His name was Walter Spies,

and he was to live for 20 years in Bali

and to know the Balinese more fully than any European before him.

He had several homes,

one in the lowlands, only a mile or so from Peliatan,

and another up in the mountains.

But wherever he was, he painted.

From the veranda of his mountain house,

he looked across to the holy volcano of Bali, the Gunung Agung,

one of the most breathtaking views in all the island.

This landscape, with its luxuriant foliage,

the endless pattern of immaculately maintained rice terraces,

populated by a handsome, graceful people,

provided him with subject matter for the rest of his life.

These pictures, to a European eye,

capture not merely the stunning beauty of the island,

but also convey some of the haunted magical atmosphere

that permeates the whole of Bali.

Whether or not this dreamlike quality of Spies's pictures

was apparent to the Balinese

is difficult to say,

As far as they were concerned, the overwhelming effect of these pictures

was to draw their attention, seemingly for the first time,

to the image of their island as a subject for painting.

Suddenly, everyone in Bali was painting in a completely new way.

It was as though a dam had been broken.

Spies himself is now dead, drowned in 1942,

when a ship taking him to Ceylon was torpedoed.

But a few of those painters

who contributed to that original explosion of excitement

are still working.

Their technique and their new vision

are the only European things they wish to take from Spies

and the only thing he wished to give them

and, so, to find them, you must go

not to a European-style studio or to a gallery,

but to small, and often remote, villages

hidden away among the rice fields.

Among the most talented of these painters is Ida Bagus Made.

He paints continuously

and yet he hates to part with any of his finished canvases.

Whenever anyone shows any sign of wanting to buy one,

he puts an impossibly high price upon it.

As a result, his paintings lie in great piles at the back of his hut,

tragically vulnerable to rats, termites and fungus.

The rest of the villagers say that he's mildly eccentric.

He says that his paintings are his children.

Why should he get rid of them?

Since Spies's death, there have been new generations of painters,

for the new style which he brought has flourished and spread,

so that it seems now that everybody paints.

Their pictures still owe something to Spies,

for it was he, after all, who first introduced a full range of colours

and Western-style brushes and canvas.

But now all of these painters

are undeniably and characteristically Balinese,

painting not imitations of Spies landscapes,

but fantasies entirely of their own invention.

They are, for the most part, men

who, for most of their days, labour in the fields or fish in the sea.

They paint when they have time,

because of that passionate artistic curiosity

that seems to possess all Balinese.

This is another of Spies's pictures

and one which was influential, not so much with painters as with sculptors,

for these grotesque distortions fascinated Balinese carvers

and soon they, too, were involved in a visual revolution

quite as profound as that taking place in painting.

One of the first to carve in this new way was Ida Bagus Nyana,

who is now generally agreed to be Bali's greatest sculptor.

His first carvings after meeting Spies

were very like those spindly, contorted figures

that appeared in Spies's paintings.

Soon afterwards, however, he began to explore new styles and new images.

Today, he carves only rarely,

for he has withdrawn from the world to become a Brahman high priest.

But his last sculptures remain to bear witness

not to the precise images created by Spies,

but to the great freedom of vision which Spies first showed Nyana.

But if there is one art which is paramount in Bali,

it is the twin art of music and dancing.

Just as Peliatan has one of the greatest orchestras,

so also its dancers have an island-wide reputation.

However, that reputation will rest to a surprising extent

on the shoulders of this tiny child.

She's training to dance the greatest of Bali's classical dances,

the legong.

It may only be danced by little children,

and the three Peliatan girls

who have danced it so perfectly for the past four years

are now adolescent and too old to continue.

A new trio must be trained.

Their teacher is Gusti Made Sengok,

an old lady who, in her time, was a celebrated legong,

famous throughout the island for the suppleness of her young body

and the disciplined fire of her performance.

Now, as she nears the end of her life,

she is a deeply respected and much sought-after teacher.

According to the Anak Agung,

she is the last living receptacle

of the great classical tradition of the legong.

But she's old. No-one knows how old.

And she no longer has the strength to teach all who want to learn from her.

So, now she concentrates only on the three little girls

who are to become Peliatan's new legong.

They will certainly be her last pupils.

LAUGHTER

Training like this has already been going on

every day for many weeks.

Again and again, the children must repeat the movements,

being nudged, coaxed,

and sometimes almost wrenched into the correct position by old Sengok

until, at last, the legong - to use the Balinese phrase -

has gone into their bodies.

The extraordinary richness of artistic talent

in this one household

is apparent in this group.

The music is played by Made Lebah,

the co-leader of the gamelan.

This child is his granddaughter, Gandera's child,

and the child being held by Gusti Made Sengok

is seven-year-old Suvi,

the Anak Agung's youngest daughter by his third wife.

SHE GIVES INSTRUCTIONS

If the children are to dance the legong properly,

they must know the story it tells.

It concerns the arrogant King of Lasem,

who kidnaps the daughter of a rival king

with whom he is at war.

If she will not marry him, he says, then he will kill her father.

But she still refuses,

so the King of Lasem goes into battle with her father

and is himself killed.

The Anak Agung tells the story

prompted without any compunction by old Sengok.

The tale comes from an ancient collection of Javanese legends.

It's the Balinese equivalent of the Arabian Nights.

TEACHERS TALK

Gusti Made Sengok may be old,

but she still has the knack of massaging,

to make a child's body really supple.

She still knows the precise movements

that will painfully stretch a tight muscle

and so loosen it that the child

will become almost double-jointed.

Without this massage,

it will be impossible for a legong

to assume the correct postures.

Indeed, this treatment

is just as essential to a Balinese dancer

as is really early training in class and at the barre

to a young ballet dancer in Europe.

Day after day, the Anak Agung and Made Lebah play for rehearsals.

MUSIC PLAYS

The child who plays the prologue at the beginning of the dance

changes roles later, to become a bird of ill omen,

which flies in front of the King of Lasem during the battle

and, thus, foretells his death.

Her appearance is the dramatic finale to the whole dance,

which, in its complete version, takes over an hour to perform.

In training for this character, Peliatan is particularly lucky,

for they have as teacher Gusti Ayu Raka,

who, during the world tour, danced the part in New York

with such electrifying effect

that she became, at the age of 11, the toast of Broadway.

TEACHER HUMS TUNE

Raka still dances

and is famous in Bali

for the refinement and personality of her style.

But her performance as a tiny child of the bird of ill omen

is still vividly remembered

and used as an ideal against which

other, newer characterisations are measured.

Now, she passes on that insight and technique to another generation.

Dancing, like music, sculpture and painting, is rooted in religion.

Indeed, in Balinese terms,

all acts of artistic expression, are, in a sense, religious acts.

But this, perhaps, is less remarkable here than in most parts of the world

for, in truth, Hinduism permeates every aspect of life

and every hour of the day.

Every morning and every evening,

small offerings of rice and flowers

are made to the ever-present gods.

Some are placed before the shrines in the house temple.

Others must be put in doorways and on lintels and niches,

in places where paths cross

and in corners which have special magical significance.

These daily offerings are small and modest.

In fact, they're more in the nature of tactful reminders to the gods

of the piety of the household than substantial gifts.

But for important festivals,

and there seems to be one every few weeks in most villages,

really imposing and substantial offerings must be made,

and here, the Balinese love of ornament and decoration

has full scope.

This particular offering is being constructed around a central spine

made from the soft spongy stem of a banana tree.

Into it are stuck frangipani blossoms,

each mounted on a long pin of bamboo.

THEY CHAT

The streets of the village have been lined

with betasselled masts, from which hang penor -

decorations marvellously constructed

in hundreds of different shapes and designs,

from bamboo and coconut palm leaves.

The festival is to take place in the big temple

at the other end of the village.

For the Anak Agung's household, this day is particularly important,

one for which they have all been preparing for months,

for they decided long ago that this festival should be the occasion

on which the new legong

would perform in public for the very first time.

Other orchestras from Peliatan are also going up to the temple,

for every festival must be full of rame -

exuberant noise and festive crowds,

so that the gods will be entertained.

All day long, offerings are carried up to the temple.

Some are of flowers, others of pink rice cakes, fruit or roast chickens.

All are meticulously arranged,

to look as elegant and as decorative as possible.

The offerings are laid in hundreds before the priest,

who will take them one by one

and offer them at the shrines.

The gods will partake of their essence,

after which, the simpler, smaller ones

will be left in the temple to be scavenged by the dogs and birds.

The more substantial and elaborate

will be taken back to be eaten at home.

HE SINGS

There are no images in a Balinese temple.

The gods are invisible entities

who reside in wooden box-like shrines

or on small stone thrones.

Peliatan's temple is one of several founded by gods

whose normal home is high up on the sacred mountain of Batur.

This festival is to celebrate the visit

of the parent divinities,

for within their shrines, they have been brought down in procession

by men from the mountains,

to tour all their daughter temples.

Now, the mountain men themselves begin the gods' entertainment,

with an ancient spear dance, called a baris.

MUSIC AND CHANTING

To the people of Peliatan,

this performance is, to be candid, a little naive, not to say uncouth.

The sophisticated subtleties of the lowland music and dance

have never penetrated into the mountains.

A dance like this, Gandera said,

was acceptable and appropriate on such a ritual occasion

because of its antiquity.

But he said so with the tolerance of piety.

To his composer's ear, the music alone was obvious and crude.

The Anak Agung's gamelan is next to play.

Their first contribution is also ancient ritual music

and employs a type of instrument

that is seldom heard these days in other contexts.

Even so, they manage to play it

with their characteristic attack and brilliance.

As night draws on, offerings are still being made before the shrines.

Outside the temple,

another group from Peliatan is preparing to perform the kecak -

the monkey dance.

The men, in a five-part chorus,

act as a vocal background to a story from Hindu mythology,

in which King Rama's bride is kidnapped by a giant

and then rescued by Hanuman, the king of the monkeys,

and his monkey horde.

WHOOSHING AND SINGING

CHANTING

MAN SINGS

MAN SHOUTS OUT

LOUD CHANTING

SINGING

THEY SHOUT OUT

CHANTING

VOICES HARMONISE

RAPID CHANTING

VOICES HARMONISE

CHANTING

HIGH-PITCHED YELL

CHANTING

YELL

CHANTING

YELL

The three children are already preparing for their legong.

SINGING AND CHANTING CONTINUE

THEY CHAT

Their headdresses are made from gilded leather

and decorated with freshly gathered frangipani blossom.

They're very hard and extremely heavy,

and the children must wear them for over an hour.

Their bodies are tightly bound in gold-painted cloth.

Their faces are whitened and carefully made up.

It has fallen to them to provide the final episode in the temple festival,

to present their skills as an offering to the gods,

for that, indeed, is the ultimate nature

of all artistic creation in Bali.

Their moment has arrived.

MUSIC PLAYS