Bali 2

Here's the second instalment. The famous Kecak Dance and the Fire Dance. Unknown to most tourists, these dances are really religious dances. At the start of the dance, a priest has to sprinkle all participants with holy water.

This is the Kecak Dance. The figure dressed in finery is the Demon.

The pretty girls are good angels. One of them is a dewi which is a goddess but I'm not sure which one. They both look equally enchanting as are evidenced by the bodies strewn on the ground before them.

The good spirits or goddesses

The entire cast

The Fire Dance is an awesome dance. Again, it's religious and at the start of the dance, there is a long ceremony to purify the dancer, a young man on a toy horse. This may seem piffling to most tourists but the tradition of a toy horse used in rituals has a long history in the Malay Archipelago. A variant of this form of spiritual dance exists in neighbouring Malaysia and it's called "Kuda Kepang" or wooden horse. Dancers are reputed to go into a trance as they twirl around with the toy horse. In the Balinese version, the young man proceeds to kick the bonfire and ultimately extinguishes the flame completely. The last pic shows his charred feet. I asked him if there was any pain. He said he felt nothing. He was protected, so he claimed, by the Dewi. But it sure looked painful to me.