Tradition · Balinese chant dance-drama
Kecak
Also known as Kécak, Ketjak, Kechak, Tari Kecak, Ramayana monkey chant, ᬓᬾᬘᬓ᭄
A Balinese dance-drama in which a circle of fifty to a hundred or more bare-chested men chant 'cak' as the monkey and demon armies while dancers act the Ramayana from the exile in Dandaka to the battle of Rama and Ravana. It grew from sanghyang trance ritual and took its present form in the 1930s, when the dancer Wayan Limbak and the German painter Walter Spies turned it into a Ramayana spectacle for visitors.
- Date
- 1930–None
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
It uses no instruments at all: the human chorus replaces the gamelan, and in the fire scene the dancer playing Hanuman, blessed by a priest, performs the fire-kicking dance in trance.
Authorship is debated: the usual account credits Walter Spies, but the Balinese scholar I Wayan Dibia argues that Limbak and other Balinese were already developing the form, and that Spies suggested the Ramayana plot.
Connections (3)
- Craft tradition ofBali
Kecak is Balinese in origin and in practice. It grew out of sanghyang, a trance-inducing exorcism dance, and was shaped in the 1930s by the dancer Wayan Limbak with Walter Spies, a German painter living in Bali. Limbak's international tours made it famous. Today it is performed every evening at temples such as Uluwatu and Tanah Lot by villagers who usually have other jobs; the first women's kecak group started in 2006.
- Ramayana traditionRamayana
The hour-long kecak follows the Ramayana from Rama and Sita's exile in the Dandaka forest through the golden deer, Sita's abduction, Jatayu's fight and Hanuman's search, to the battle between Rama and Ravana. The chanting men play both the monkey army and Ravana's demons, a dalang narrates in Balinese and Sanskrit, and soft-moving roles such as Rama, Sita and the golden deer are sometimes danced by women. The Ramayana arrived as the plot only in the 1930s.
- AnaloguePrambanan Ramayana Ballet
Kecak and the Prambanan Ramayana Ballet are both twentieth-century stagings of the Ramayana shaped with visitors in mind, one in Bali and one in Java. They answer the problem differently: kecak, shaped in Bali in the 1930s, replaces the gamelan with a male chorus chanting 'cak', while the Javanese ballet, staged at Prambanan since 1961, keeps a full gamelan and wordless court dance. In Bali, Ramayana dance is still offered both ways.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, "Kecak" and "Ramayana Ballet". I Wayan Dibia, as cited there; Kendra Stepputat, The Kecak and Cultural Tourism on Bali (2021).
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