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About the Bali Arts Festival
 The Bali Arts Festival is a full month of daily performances, handicraft exhibitions
and other related cultural and commercial activities
during which literally the whole of Bali comes to the city to present its
offerings of dance, music and beauty. On display are trances from remote
mountain slopes, forgotten or recently revived village dances, food and
offering contests, classical palace dances, stars of Balinese stage, odd
musical performances, "kreasi baru" (new creations) from the dance
schools of Denpasar, as well as contemporary choreography and dance
companies from other islands and from abroad.
It is a month
long revelry that perhaps no other place in the world can put up on such a
low budget as the Balinese. Not only is their traditional culture alive and
well, but they have a tremendous pride in it.
It begins in
the villages, where the seka or cultural groups are selected and organized
at the regency level, vie with each other to perform the Arts Festival
and thus display in front of a large audience the uniqueness of their
village of birth and resting place of their ancestors.
The Bali Arts Festival is the Denpasar
cultural event of the year, perhaps it would no be too far fetched to suggest
that it is the cultural event of Indonesia. The festival is thus a unique opportunity to see local village
culture both "live" and at first hand. Tourists are warmly welcomed.
The History of the Bali Arts
Festival
 When tourism took off after 1965, the Balinese insisted that it
followed cultural guidelines: if tourism was to be accepted, it was to be a
cultural tourism, or "pariwisata budaya".
As the Balinese
put it: "Tourism should be for Bali instead of Bali for tourism."
In time, this idea become national policy, as part of a larger revping of
regional cultures for national purposes. The policy owes much to the former
Director General of Culture (1968-1978) and Governor of Bali (1978-1988),
Ida Bagus Mantra, an Indian-educed Balinese. It led, on the one side, to
the creation of enclave resorts such as Nusa Dua to limit the direct impact
of tourism, and on the other, to a long haul cultural policy aimed at
nurturing and preserving the traditional agrarian culture while adapting it
to the demands of modernity, and in particular of "cultural
tourism".
At the village
level, local music groups, dances and other cultural events were
inventoried, then supported by a series of contests at the district and
regency level. The ensuing competition energized the cultural life of
villages, whose "young blood" was already being drained to the
city by the process of economic change and urbanization.
Schools of
dance and art were created, in particular the Kokar conservatory and the STSI School of Dance and Music. Beside research, these schools replaced the
traditional master/disciple relationship by modern methods of teaching;
standardized the dance movements, produced new types of Balinese dances for
tourism and modern village entertainment. Most important, it enabled former
students to return to the villages as teachers, where they diffused, beside
the creed of cultural resilience and renewal, new dances and standardized
versions of old ones.
Many of the performances
are held at the amphitheater which can hold up to 6,000 spectators, in a temple-like stage.
 Each year, the Bali
Arts Festival, beside the fed classical dances of the island, such as the legong, gambuh, kecak, barong, baris, mask dances and the like, is based on
the theme around which new "dance choreography" is produced and
old village dances and activities revived. Over the years, the whole range
of classical Balinese stories - Ramayana, Mahabharata, Sutasoma, Panji -
have thus been turned into "colossal" Sendratari Ballets.
The main challenge to
the Arts Festival is obviously economic in nature. As village life is
increasingly feeling the strains of monetary considerations, dancers,
musicians and others cannot be expected to continue participating simply for
the sake and the pleasure of it. As costs soar, new sources of financing
have to be found. The obvious answer is the private sector and in particular
the tourism industry. The greater task then is to convince the hotels,
travel agencies and tourist guides to be more participatory in the Arts
Festival rather than to their own sponsored events.
Considering the
pride the Balinese have in their culture, and the adaptability and dynism
they have always demonstrated, this little hurdle can be overcome. Trust the
Balinese. They will eventually succeed to transform their tradition into a
modern, Balinese culture of their
own.
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