Topeng Sidha Karya: A Balinese Mask Dance - Yavanika

TOPENG: SIDHA K ARYA 177of the island. The topeng dancer’s action is primarily within the physicalrealm and, therefore, it is appropriate that he uses the elementsthat appeal to our senses—music, dance, comedy, and political commentary—togive spiritual ideas a home in the here and now.Story is potent in that it allows us to control and contain reality.Narrative creates a structure that naturalizes the alien into the familiarand recalibrates the demonic into the comic. This is the functionof the bondres (clown) scenes in topeng where performers introducenew comic characters of their own invention. The pompous officialcontrolling everyone (Bondres Senggap), the one whose seems to misspeakbut actually may be smart (Bondres Wus)—both are graftedcomfortably into the existing story’s order.The topeng dancer’s artistic control exerts a kind of sympatheticmagic over life. Humans and demons, given their limited imaginationsand short attention spans, are easily subverted by the power of narrativeand the subterfuge of art. Danger and disruption are exorcisedfrom the everyday and embedded in a narrative that diffuses theirimpact.Relations of Ruler, People, and PriestThe performance shows a triangular relationship in the Balinesesocial order. In one sense, the two poles are the ruler (WatuRenggong) and the ruled (the attendants, ministers, and clowns). It isthis second group that is beset by the problem of the plague, bomb, orother disasters. But the duo of leader and the led is triangulated by aspiritual leader who in one iteration is Sidha Karya and in another isPandita Markandya, the priest of Besakih Temple. If we pay attentionmerely to ruler and ruled, who divide authority, money, and power,society will be sterile. Humans need a third space, a spiritual space,which is represented by the Brahmana Keling/Sidha Karya and thepriest Markandya. These figures move us beyond complacency and putspirit into action. Half comedians and half teachers, Sidha Karya andMarkandya point toward an area beyond the mundane. They help thedemonic and divine realize that they are merely flip sides of the samecosmic power. They know the verdant mountain and the eruptingvolcano are one and the same. They see that the bomb is a wake-upcall to social and religious action in Bali and beyond.LanguageThe dialogue of the mask characters in a topeng performance isin Kawi, an archaic literary language associated with ritual, and someof the poetic song lyrics are in middle Javanese that is likewise imperfectlyunderstood. Listeners and performers often cannot translate the