I sat down at the first row. I was not the kind of student who used to sit right next to the teacher in class but after all, it’s not everyday that I’ll be able to see a traditional Balinese show. And after the few first notes of the Gamelan resonated in the big room, I knew it was probably be the last time!

I passed on my scooter this majestic building a thousand times without knowing it was hosting a dance show twice a week.

I took my tickets outside, to this man who was sometimes standing in front of the theater in the morning and promised to come back late afternoon for an experience I was expecting to be, radical.

I don’t really have nice cloth to put on in my dirty backpack except the longyi I bought at the bottom of a temple in Bagan in Myanmar. I’ll pretend it will be my princess skirt tonight.

I don’t really know what to expect. Will it take the entire evening? How many dancers? What are the traditional instruments? What will be the story?

Men wearing a sarong and a rolled udeng on their forehead sat down in two rows, facing each other. Some of them looked like teenagers, some looked more experienced. The Gamelan is learned at a very young age…

First the drums, then the strings. My occidental ears were not used to this particular sound and after few minutes I started to understand the rhythm but the constant high pitched notes made me wince a little bit…

Then the dancers came on stage. What shocked me straight away was the obvious heaviness and thickness of the luxurious fabric of the costumes. I was hot just sitting on this chair, how could they breath under their mask and robes?

The story seemed to be told with the moves of their body on stage and nuanced with their hands and the rolling of their eyes… It was like the sentences were told by their body but the adjectives and the ornaments by the expression of their faces. A real dialogue started between the dancers and the music.

All focused on the beauty of the dancers and their intricate body langage, I forgot that I was “annoyed” by the music and I just let go.

At the end, I woke up like from a dream and it made sense: the entire room went on a trance. Nobody could tell how long we have been hypnotized, it was a moment out of time and space. We were not in a theater, we were in 1968 in a palace in Bali with the Queen and the King and we could feel the rage, the love, the delicacy of the characters. Their emotions were transcended by the repetitive rythme of the drums.

A unique experience.

Maybe, I enjoyed it in the end…!