In Bali, art began as an offering. Dances were first performed for the gods in temple courtyards, gamelan orchestras still play to accompany ceremonies rather than concerts, and carvers, painters and weavers learned their trade making things for shrines, palaces and rituals. That is why almost every village has its own gamelan, kept in the bale banjar (village hall) and played by farmers, drivers and shopkeepers in the evenings, and why the same troupe that performs for visitors in Ubud will dance at a temple festival the next day. See the culture and etiquette guide for the religion behind it all.
Balinese arts at a glance#
Dance
Sacred temple dances, masked dance and the famous performances you can see any night: legong, barong and kecak.
Gamelan
Bronze orchestras of gongs, metallophones and drums, owned by village associations and played at every ceremony.
Theatre and puppets
Topeng masked dance, sung arja opera, big sendratari dance-dramas and wayang kulit shadow puppets.
Painting
The classical Kamasan style, the 1930s Ubud and Pita Maha movement, and the dense, dark scenes of Batuan.
Textiles
Endek ikat for everyday wear, gold-threaded songket for ceremonies, and the rare double-ikat geringsing of Tenganan.
Craft villages
Stone carving in Batubulan, silver in Celuk, woodcarving in Mas and masks and puppets around Sukawati.
Sacred and secular dance: wali, bebali and balih-balihan#
Balinese dance is usually divided into three groups, a scheme agreed by Balinese artists and scholars in 1971 and used by UNESCO when it listed nine of the island’s dances as intangible heritage in 2015. The groups follow the layout of a temple.
Wali dances are sacred and belong to the inner courtyard, where the gods are thought to be present. They are performed only as part of a ceremony, often by dancers chosen by the village, and are not staged for audiences. Bebali dances are ceremonial but tell a story, and they are performed in the middle courtyard: masked topeng, the ancient court dance-drama gambuh and wayang wong all belong here. Balih-balihan are the entertainment dances of the outer courtyard and the village stage, open to anyone and constantly reinvented. Legong, kecak, joged and most of what visitors see in Ubud are balih-balihan.
The temple dances: Rejang, Pendet, Sanghyang and Baris Gede#
Rejang is a slow, processional dance for women and girls, who move in long lines through the temple courtyard in their finest cloth and gold headdresses, welcoming the gods who have come down to attend the festival. The movements are simple, so anyone in the village can join.
Pendet began in the same way, as an offering dance in which women carry bowls of flowers and scatter petals before the shrines. In the 20th century it was reworked as a secular welcome dance, and today the stage pendet, ending with flowers thrown over the audience, is one of the first dances Balinese children learn.
Sanghyang dances are older than Bali’s Hinduism. They are trance dances, performed to protect a village from disease or misfortune, in which a spirit is believed to enter the dancer. In Sanghyang Dedari, two young girls go into trance while a chorus of men and women chants around them, and then dance with their eyes closed, sometimes carried on men’s shoulders. In Sanghyang Jaran, a man in trance rides a hobby horse through a fire of burning coconut husks, kicking the embers with bare feet. A priest ends the trance with holy water.
Baris Gede is a warrior dance performed by lines of men carrying spears or other weapons, a ceremonial guard for the gods during temple festivals. The solo Baris you see on stage, with a single young dancer flicking his eyes and fingers to the sharp accents of the gamelan, is its secular descendant and one of the hardest male dances to master.
Legong, Barong and Kecak: the dances you will see#
Legong is Bali’s most refined dance, created in the palaces of the 19th century. It is traditionally danced by three girls: a female attendant, the condong, who opens the piece, and two legong dancers in matching gold costumes who perform in near-perfect mirror image, telling a story through tightly bound bodies, darting eyes and fluttering fans. The best-known version, Legong Keraton, tells of a king who abducts a princess and of the raven that warns him of his death in battle. Girls begin training very young, and the village of Peliatan near Ubud has been famous for its legong troupes since the early 20th century.
Barong is a battle between order and chaos. The Barong Ket, a shaggy lion-like protector animated by two dancers, faces Rangda, the fanged widow-witch who leads the forces of black magic. Neither can win, because in Balinese thought good and evil must stay in balance (rwa bhineda). The story usually comes from the Calonarang tale of a widow-sorceress and the priest who defeats her. In the climax, the Barong’s followers attack Rangda with their kris daggers, fall under her spell and turn the blades on their own chests, protected by the Barong’s power; a priest then brings them out of trance with holy water. The daily morning shows in Batubulan are a shortened version for visitors, but the costumes and the kris sequence are the real thing.
Kecak is younger than most visitors expect. It was developed in the early 1930s in the village of Bedulu, near Ubud, by the dancer Wayan Limbak working with the German painter and musician Walter Spies, who lived in Bali. They took the chanting male chorus of the Sanghyang trance dance, with its rhythmic “cak-cak-cak”, and set it to an episode from the Ramayana: the abduction of Sita and her rescue with the help of Hanuman’s monkey army, which the chorus becomes. Spies worked on the German film Island of Demons, released in 1933, which helped make the new dance known abroad. A kecak has no instruments at all. Dozens of bare-chested men in checked cloth sit in concentric circles around a flame, swaying, shouting and chanting interlocking rhythms while the dancers act out the story in the middle. Many shows end with a fire dance taken from Sanghyang Jaran.
Other dances on the programmes include Oleg Tamulilingan, a flirtatious bumblebee duet created by the dancer I Mario in 1952, and Joged Bumbung, a social dance in which the dancer picks men from the audience as partners.
Village rituals: Gebug Ende and Mekare-kare#
Some of the most striking performances are combat rituals. In Gebug Ende, from villages in Karangasem such as Seraya in the far east of the island, pairs of men fight with rattan canes and round rattan shields while a referee keeps order and the rest of the group sings and jokes as they wait their turn. The fights can be fierce, and blood is part of the point: the ritual was traditionally held in the dry season to call for rain.
Mekare-kare, also called the pandan war, takes place in the Bali Aga village of Tenganan during its annual festival, usually around June. Young men face each other in pairs, each armed with a bundle of spiky pandan leaves and a rattan shield, and strike at each other’s backs until a referee steps in. It honours Indra, the god of war, and is followed by turmeric-based medicine applied to the scratches and by a communal feast. Visitors are welcome to watch, but the dates follow the village calendar, so check locally.
Gamelan, jegog and Balinese song#
A gamelan is an orchestra, mostly of bronze. Its core is a row of metallophones (gangsa) with bronze keys over bamboo resonators, played with hammers, supported by gong chimes (reyong), small cymbals (ceng-ceng), bamboo flutes (suling), a pair of drums (kendang) whose players lead the ensemble, and the great hanging gongs that mark the end of each cycle. Balinese gamelan is fast and dazzling next to the stately gamelan of Java. Two signature techniques give it its sound: interlocking parts (kotekan), in which two players each play half of a rapid figure so that together they produce a stream of notes too fast for one person, and paired instruments tuned slightly apart so that they shimmer when struck together.
There are many kinds. Gong kebyar, born in north Bali in the early 20th century, is the explosive modern style heard at most performances. Semar pagulingan is a sweeter court ensemble, once played near the king’s sleeping quarters, from which the legong orchestra developed. Gender wayang, a quartet of metallophones, accompanies shadow puppets and cremations. Beleganjur is a marching gamelan that drives processions, including the ogoh-ogoh parades on the eve of Nyepi. The iron-keyed selonding is a sacred ensemble of the Bali Aga villages, including Tenganan. Most gamelans belong to a banjar or a music club (sekaa), and rehearsals in the village hall are open to anyone who stands quietly at the edge. Gongs are still forged by hand in smithing villages such as Tihingan near Semarapura.
Bamboo has its own traditions. The rindik, a bamboo xylophone, plays gentle background music in many hotels and restaurants. In west Bali, the jegog ensemble uses bamboo tubes up to about three metres long that produce a deep, booming bass, and rival groups play against each other in competitions.
Singing runs alongside the music. Groups called pesantian sing kidung, devotional songs in Middle Javanese, and kekawin, long poems in Old Javanese (Kawi): one singer chants a line in Kawi and a second explains it in Balinese, a practice you will hear over temple loudspeakers during ceremonies.
Topeng, Gambuh, Arja and Sendratari#
Topeng is masked dance theatre. In Topeng Pajegan a single dancer plays every character, changing masks behind a curtain, to tell an episode from the babad, the chronicles of Bali’s royal houses. It always ends with the white-faced, buck-toothed mask of Sidakarya, a Brahmin from Java who, according to legend, was turned away from the court of Gelgel and cursed the king’s ceremonies until he was honoured. Sidakarya’s name means “the work is complete”, and a ceremony is not considered finished until his mask has danced.
Gambuh is the oldest surviving Balinese dance-drama, with roots in the Javanese courts. It tells stories of Prince Panji to the sound of long bamboo flutes, and its slow, formal movements are the source of much later dance. It is rarely staged, but the village of Batuan is known for keeping it alive.
Arja is a sung dance-opera that developed in the 19th century, in which the characters sing their lines in Balinese verse. A comic all-male version, Arja Muani, is hugely popular at village festivals. Sendratari, from the 1960s, is a wordless dance-drama with large casts, a narrator and full gamelan, created by the choreographer I Wayan Beratha and others; the annual Bali Arts Festival in Denpasar stages huge sendratari productions of the Ramayana and Mahabharata on its open-air stage. Drama Gong, a spoken melodrama of royal intrigue and slapstick, was the village favourite of the 1970s and 1980s.
Wayang kulit and wayang wong#
Wayang kulit is shadow theatre, and in Bali it is as much ritual as entertainment. The puppets are cut from buffalo hide, pierced with fine patterns and painted, with jointed arms worked by thin rods. A single puppeteer, the dalang, sits behind a cotton screen lit by a flickering coconut-oil lamp and performs every character, voices, songs and fights included, while tapping out cues with a wooden knocker and leading a small gender wayang ensemble. Stories come mostly from the Mahabharata and Ramayana. The nobles speak in Kawi, and the clown-servants Tualen, Merdah, Delem and Sangut translate for the audience and make jokes, giving the dalang room for satire and moral teaching.
Not every wayang is meant for an audience. Wayang lemah, the “daytime” wayang, is performed during ceremonies without a screen or lamp, the puppets propped against a thread strung between branches, because it is aimed at the gods rather than people. The dalang is treated almost as a priest and can make holy water. Sukawati is known for its dalang families and its puppet-makers.
Wayang wong turns the puppets into people: masked dancers perform episodes of the Ramayana, with Rama, Sita and an army of monkey and demon masks. It is sacred in many places and performed only at certain temple festivals by dancers chosen for the role, in villages such as Tejakula in north Bali.
Painting: Kamasan, Ubud and Batuan#
The classical style is named after Kamasan, a village near Semarapura whose painters worked for the court of Gelgel and later Klungkung. Kamasan paintings look like wayang puppets laid flat: figures in profile, set in rows of episodes from the epics, drawn in black outline and filled with natural earth and plant colours. They were made for temples and palaces as ceiling panels, long hangings and astrological calendars. The best place to see them is the ceiling of the Kertha Gosa pavilion at Klungkung Palace, and Kamasan painters still work in the village today.
In the 1920s and 1930s painting changed fast. Foreign artists who settled near Ubud, above all Walter Spies and the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet, encouraged local artists to paint everyday life, landscapes and the rice harvest as well as myth, and to experiment with perspective and shading. In 1936 they founded Pita Maha with the Ubud prince Tjokorda Gde Agung Sukawati, an artists’ association that set standards and sold work abroad; the sculptor and painter I Gusti Nyoman Lempad was among its leading members. The result, the Ubud style, is still the most recognisable Balinese painting. The Puri Lukisan Museum, founded by the same circle, the Neka Art Museum and the Agung Rai Museum of Art in Ubud hold the finest collections, and Lempad’s House keeps his studio. In the 1960s the Dutch painter Arie Smit started the Young Artists of Penestanan, who paint village scenes in flat, bright colours.
Batuan went its own way. Its painters fill every inch of the canvas with tiny figures in dark ink washes: crowded scenes of ceremonies, markets, witches and demons, and more recently tourists with cameras and surfers on the waves. Batuan’s workshops are the place to see it being painted.
Carving and silver: Mas, Batubulan and Celuk#
Woodcarving is centred on Mas, south of Ubud, a village of Brahmin families where carvers such as Ida Bagus Nyana and his son Ida Bagus Tilem developed new, expressive styles of figure carving in the mid-20th century. Workshops along the main road turn out everything from small animals to life-size figures, and Mas is one of the main sources of the masks used in topeng and wayang wong. Ask to see carvers at work behind the showroom.
Stone carving is the speciality of Batubulan, on the road from Denpasar to Ubud. Its carvers work the soft grey volcanic tuff called paras into temple guardians, demons, Ganesha figures and the decorative panels on gates and shrines, and their yards spill onto the roadside. Kapal, near Mengwi, makes the shrines and gates you see in house compounds all over the island.
Silver and gold work is concentrated in Celuk, next to Batubulan. Family workshops make jewellery and ceremonial objects with fine filigree and granulation, techniques traditionally associated with Bali’s smith clans (pande). The large showrooms on the main road have fixed prices; the smaller workshops in the lanes behind are where you can watch the work and order pieces.
Endek, songket and geringsing: Balinese textiles#
Endek is Bali’s everyday ikat, woven on hand or treadle looms. Before weaving, sections of the weft threads are tied off and dyed, so that the pattern appears as the cloth is woven, with slightly blurred edges that are the mark of ikat. Endek is everywhere, from temple wear to office uniforms and fashion. Songket is the luxury cloth: silk or cotton brocaded with gold and silver supplementary threads in patterns of flowers, birds and wayang figures, worn for weddings, tooth-filing and major ceremonies. The hill village of Sidemen in East Bali is one of the best places to watch both being woven. Kain prada is cloth decorated with gold leaf or gold paint, used for dance costumes, temple hangings and umbrellas.
Geringsing is the rarest. It is made only in Tenganan (Tenganan Pegeringsingan), one of the very few places in the world where weavers practise double ikat, in which both the warp and the weft threads are tied and dyed before weaving, so that the patterns line up only when the two meet on the loom. The colours come from natural dyes, with the threads soaked in oil and dyed in stages over many months, and a single cloth can take years to finish. Geringsing is believed to protect the wearer from illness and evil, the name is often explained as “without sickness”, and the cloths are used in ceremonies across Bali. Only a few families still make it. In Ubud, Threads of Life works with weavers across Indonesia and explains how natural-dye textiles are made.
The Balinese house compound#
Traditional Balinese building follows the Asta Kosala Kosali, a set of rules written on palm-leaf manuscripts (lontar). A master builder, the undagi, applies them, and measurements are taken from the owner’s own body, from the span of the outstretched arms down to the width of a finger joint, so that the house fits the family that lives in it.
A family home is not one building but a walled compound of separate pavilions arranged around an open courtyard (natah). The layout follows the same sacred geography as a temple. The holiest corner, facing Mount Agung (kaja) and the sunrise, holds the family temple (sanggah or merajan) with its shrines to the ancestors. The least pure end, towards the sea (kelod), holds the kitchen (paon), the pigsty and the rubbish. In between are the pavilions: a closed sleeping house for the head of the family (meten), an open ceremonial pavilion (bale dangin) where tooth-filings are held and the dead are laid before cremation, quarters for the rest of the family, and a rice barn raised on posts (jineng).
You enter through a narrow gate in the wall (angkul-angkul), often roofed and flanked by small guardian statues, and immediately meet a short wall, the aling-aling, which forces you to turn. Evil spirits are believed to travel only in straight lines, so they cannot get in.
The Bali Aga villages that kept their pre-Majapahit customs build differently. In Tenganan, identical walled compounds line both sides of a broad, terraced central avenue with communal pavilions down the middle, and the village plan, not the individual house, carries the sacred order. Trunyan on Lake Batur keeps its own traditions too, and the village of Penglipuran near Bangli is known for its neat, uniform street of compounds.
The best way to see real Balinese performance is at an odalan, a temple anniversary. Ask your guesthouse whether one is coming up nearby, dress in sarong and sash, and you are usually welcome to watch from the outer courtyard. The dancing, gamelan and wayang at night are for the village, not for tourists.
Where to see dance and performance#
Ubud has the widest choice, with performances every night by village troupes. The courtyard of Ubud Palace is the most atmospheric setting for legong and other classical programmes, and stages at Pura Taman Saraswati, Pura Dalem Ubud and nearby villages such as Peliatan rotate kecak, barong, legong and wayang shows through the week. Weekly programmes are posted at the tourist information office on the main street.
Uluwatu Temple stages the island’s most famous kecak at sunset on a cliff-top amphitheatre above the Indian Ocean. It is spectacular and very busy, so arrive early.
Batubulan puts on the Barong and Kris dance every morning, convenient for a day trip that continues to the craft villages of Celuk, Mas and Batuan.
Denpasar hosts the Bali Arts Festival each year from about mid-June to mid-July at the Taman Werdhi Budaya arts centre: a month of parades, sendratari, gamelan competitions and village troupes from every regency, mostly free. The Bali Museum nearby displays masks, puppets, costumes and textiles.
Arts and crafts places in Bali#
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Balinese arts and crafts FAQs#
What is the difference between kecak and barong?
Kecak is a chant-dance with no instruments: a chorus of men sits in circles around a flame and provides the rhythm while dancers act out the Ramayana. It was developed in the 1930s. Barong is an older dance-drama with full gamelan, in which the lion-like Barong battles the witch Rangda, ending with entranced men turning their kris daggers on themselves.
Can tourists watch sacred Balinese dances?
Some, but not as shows. Sacred wali dances such as rejang happen only during temple ceremonies; you can often watch respectfully from the outer courtyard in sarong and sash if you happen to be at an odalan. The nightly performances for visitors are entertainment dances, often adapted from sacred ones.
Where can I see legong in Bali?
Ubud is the best place, with legong programmes most evenings at Ubud Palace and other village stages, many performed by troupes from Peliatan and nearby villages. The Bali Arts Festival in Denpasar each June and July also features legong.
What is geringsing?
Geringsing is a double-ikat cloth woven only in the Bali Aga village of Tenganan in East Bali. Both the warp and weft threads are tie-dyed before weaving, using natural dyes, and one cloth can take years to make. It is believed to protect against illness and is used in ceremonies across Bali.
Which craft villages are worth visiting?
The road from Denpasar to Ubud passes the main ones: Batubulan for stone carving, Celuk for silver, Sukawati for its art market, Batuan for painting and Mas for woodcarving. Sidemen and Tenganan in East Bali are the places to watch weaving.