Evolving not Losing

We get in a taxi and we spend the day in Ubud. I have mixed anticipations. On the one hand Ubud is what everybody talks about.  And I want to 'find Bali'. Or more truthfully, find the image of Bali I happen to be personally looking for. On the other hand I want to be right. I want it to be true that where I have chosen to base us (with some travelling around if course) is more 'local' than our other choices. A village would be authentically rural. For a few days. Then you would struggle to get transport anywhere else. So that's a trip rather than a base. Kuta was always a no no. We don't want neon and bars and drunk westerners and, though there are undoubtedly parts of Kuta which are much nicer than others - we are not especially seeing an authentically touristy party area. Ubud is arty. But what we understand us that Ubud has become. In recent times, very much a tourist centred town. It's authentically arty but also authentically engineered and set up as a tourist business. That we do want to see. We want to experience that. But not as a base. As a trip. Today, essentially, is a scouting expedition.

What I find is somewhere in the middle. As expected it is choc full of yoga schools, westerners and wheatgrass shots. And though M disagrees, noting how little the town part caters for locals any more, I think that if this was a short holiday as opposed to a long travel, I could get down with the sun salutations and the smoothies and the rows of art shops and performances and the friendly lodging houses quite happily, thank you very much. The urge to learn about local life is less insistent on s two week break. And you do learn about it. It might be through ''mock ups' of village life, but there is, still, an education to be had.

Having said that, the store holders outside their art shops, all selling similar wares, pleading with you to come in, shouting to you across the street and following you around closely once you are in (being fair this is sometimes purely for information, with only a little of the hard sell at the end) and the continual calling to you of taxi drivers who cannot believe you would want to walk into the neighbouring shop without four wheeled assistance reminds me, uncomfortably, of Cambodia. We scuttle rather feverishly out of the street market, the accosting by sellers becoming a bit much. 

Perhaps if this was all I had seen of Ubud I might have shelved plans to make even a short trip to stay there. (Though I am not criticizing the sellers, I think they were authentically desperate and I was sorry for them). However, luckily we picked a museum out of a hat to tell the taxi driver to take us to, and that museum happened to be the Agung Rai Museum of Art.

Both the art and the setting is absolutely beautiful. The grounds are green and sprawling, covering a large area and encompassing a guest house, a rice paddy and beautiful buildings and statues.

"Do not look just at the walls in the gallery," advises a helpful man we encounter who we later discover to have been Agung Rai himself, "there is art everywhere." 

And there is. In the relief carvings on walls, in the roofs, even in the paving slabs.

Agung Rai's philosophy, as we discover, reading the small booklet we are given on arrival, goes further than that. Art is everywhere and in everyone. It needs to be nurtured, traditions passed down through generations but it's in every country and every people, waiting yo be discovered. The proceeds of the museum and the guest house go, after upkeep and salaries, to encouraging various artistic endeavours. Cultural exchanges with other countries, guest artists showcased in the galleries, classes for foreign visitors to learn traditional dance, palm leaf painting, batik and wood carving, to name only a few - and free dance classes for children from the village just behind the museum. 

Later, we bump into Agung Rai again in the small, friendly Kopi (coffee) house. We greet him enthusiastically this time, me especially, because I have read the booklet, been round the galleries - and fallen in love. Seated cross legged on a palm platform, coffee beside him, he waves us over.

"Come sit with me," he says, "this is my friend. He is an Artist."

He says this last sentence with the same tone one might use to say, "this is my friend. He is the King of the universe."

We sit and talk with Aging Rai. Art, he says, is important and the handing down of skills is crucial - hence the free dance classes, but he believes also that things should evolve. The crux, we agree, is to evolve without loss. To create the new without discarding the old.

We tell him our worries, that tourists are ruining Bali. That it will become a wasteland of neon, all you can drink buffets and the puked remains of cheap pizza. That the culture is being subjugated, bought and sold, the locals pressured to 'perform' for the tourists.

"No." He says firmly. "Kuta is Kuta. But the culture is being practised whether sold to tourists or not."

There is a ceremony, he tells us, which is unique to the village he is part of, for 3 days starting from Tuesday. If we can be in Ubud then, he can show us. (Later, because Cambodia has ruined my trusting instinct, I check this. No one in town knows about it, but they don't live in the village. When we ask someone who lives there they know it instantly, confirming the timings.)

"Bali is complex" he says, "there us Kuta. There is Ubud. But even in Ubud there are villages and villages. Each one has its own laws and us governed by its own chief. Yes. There will be progress. Cars and modernisation. But you can't stop it. It will happen naturally. But you work with it."

Evolving without losing. It's a difficult balance. But Kuta, which seems to have found itself the butt if everything that M and I, in our great wisdom, have decided is wrong with Bali, was agriculturally barren before the tourist industry took off. What else was it going yo to? How else to prosper? Progress is not always evil. Evolve without losing.

"Art," he proclaims, "is not about standing still.'

As if to underline this we attend one of the nightly traditional dance performances put on at the Art institute of Agung Rai. And it's amazing. Fill of colour and life these dancers, are, to my eyes, rather sexier than the Apsara dancers of Cambodia. The traditional Legong dance involves shoulder shimmies, and a lot of hip swaying. It's remarkably athletic - the female dancers perform nearly all of the long dances in a semi squat position, pelvis back, shoulders back, accentuating curves, bottom and hips. It's beautiful but their thighs must be burning. By far the most impressive thing though, is the sheer expressiveness of it. The dancers use their eyes to accentuate movement, looking from side to side and widening in time with peaks in the music, but also to act. A woman expresses her fear through fluttering arms (she has small wings attached to her wrists to show that she is fleeing) and widened eyes while the music dashes and rushes around her. A young mam dons the mask of an old and staggers around the stage managing both to dance and to express, even through the static mask, his bewilderment and pain at finding himself old and enfeebled.

"That was stunning," I say to M as he leaves the stage. M, looking out for the rather more technical aspects of the dance as opposed to the expression, agrees generally, but can't imagine why I would so particularly choose that dance. But I have not seen such dance drama for a long time. The man did not rely on a wide range of movement but told us his story in a few steps, moving all of his body so effectively I am ready to believe he is really an old man.

On the way home, after a slight scuffle for a reliable taxi, we discuss Ubud. M is still not sure.

"The dancing at the art centre was amazing," he admits, "and I want to see others there. But like Agung Rai said, if you miss one there's a dance every night somewhere in Ubud town. But it's all for the tourists. It isn't real."

I disagree. If people are putting on a fake religious ceremony for the tourists, that's one thing. But art is something which us designed to be shown. A dance is designed to be performed, and not just at religious festivals. 

"We don't go to art galleries,"  I point out, "and say we don't like it because the art has just been out on the wall for the punters and isn't occurring naturally. Should we insist on visiting people's home to look at murals they made on their wall for their own satisfaction before we can call it real art?"

M laughs, and takes my point but tells me that in the seventies there was a movement in Europe away from the art scene as it was, with people trying to travel and find 'real art' from remote tribes and villages, 'real' being defined by its lack of commercialism.

Until of course, that became commercial.

For me it's OK. I don't mind if art is commercial. Why shouldn't people turn what they do into something they can make a living from? It isn't bad to sell your art.

M agrees with this point, though we both also agree that the sense of desperation we could feel from the market sellers, not, themselves, the original artist, was a shame. We reflect in silence.

So, have I now 'found' Bali? 

No. I have not.

I cannot. It was a patronising idea in the first place.

Bali, like art, is complex. Not much that we do retains its original purpose. Art in the UK began, largely, to be used for worship. Eventually it evolved into something for its own sake, or for commercial purposes.

There is no 'real' Bali. that would be like saying that for sonething to be art it must be done in watercolour, or to be poetry it must be written as haiku. 

We will, while we are here, explore many Bali's. And sure, maybe some are not to our taste. But that's OK. They're not the ones we're going to be putting on our wall.