By Jonathan Bailey
Ketut Arini came into mylife 15 years ago, in 2009, when she choreographed a Balinese dance for a composition about Mary and Martha that I’dcreated for the church in Bali. Though she was Hindu, mylove for her culture provided a bridge by which wecould step into each other’s religious traditions. She told me back then that her uncle had trained her in a number of dances that he had created between 1920 and 1950 and she was the only one who remembered many of them. Her dream was that we could document those dances for future generations of Balinese dancers who might someday dance them.
Although we learned several of them and performed them often in the ensuing years, it wasn’t until this year thatwe made audio and visual documents of two of them. Our 25 musicians learned the music over the course of several weeks and Arini, now 80 years old, coached the young dancers who would perform them. On May 19, we recorded. Arini was beside herself with excitement to see her dream coming true.
Jonathan Bailey is a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel serving a network of artists and communities in the tiny southeast Asian island of Bali, Indonesia.