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World-renowned dancer and sculptor Made Sija remembers the fear and woe that seeped through his tiny village as disease cut a swath through the villagers’ ranks.
Around 5 years old in 1935, today the 83-year-old’s thunder-like roar of “cak cak cak cak cak”, his hands aloft and shaking, helps him remember the birth of Kecak, a fiery dance performed across Bali, but — intriguingly — no longer in Bona.
Kecak started here in Bona in the 1930s. People were ill, they were vomiting, they had diarrhea,” says Sija. “Things worsened until the sick were vomiting blood and had fevers. A lot of people died. In one day there could be as many as four funerals, the next five, and on it went, day after day, week after week. Every year we faced this.” Sija lost an elder sister to the disease, which he says turned the skin black and spared the lives of very few.
With no doctors and with all temples and holy places locked and barred from giving help, making noise was perceived to be the only method left to ward off the disease
“People knocked on their beds before sleeping to hold off their fear of the disease. We hoped that by knocking, the noise would keep away the disease. Sasih Kelima was the month of illness,” says Sija.
Despite the dark, silent temples abandoned by priests, Sija says the community still went there to create a cacophony of resistance against the perceived demons of the disease.
“One night there was a man who became possessed by the rhythm — not the rhythm of the gong, but of human voices,” says Sija, breaking into the Kecak song, his voice deep but rising like a storm.
“From that moment, the disease started to ease and the death and the illness stopped.”
This was the beginning of Kecak.
To this day, the people of Bona believe the beginning of the dance outside the temple walls on that black night of death and disease, saved the village.
“Since then, every odalan [six months], we perform the Kecak with 150 dancers. We believe if we dance the Kecak it can cure people. We had no other dance, no Legong, no Rajang. For the people of Bona it was just the Kecak,” says Sija.
By the 1970s, Bona’s Kecak was attracting attention. Dancers were invited to perform it in Kuta, Ubud and Legian.
“In Bona we no longer have Kecak. There is Kecak in Kuta, Legian and Ubud. In the past, tour operators brought visitors here to see the dance, but they asked for beer and food and more and more commission. Our village refused, so the guides took people to see Kecak in other areas. They said Bona had no Kecak, explained the artist.
“How can tourists know that this village is the birthplace of Kecak?” asks Sija, adding that with the transportation of this highly charged fire dance to tourist areas, the dance was altered, fused with motifs and myths that were never part of the original dance.
“The dance gave us back our spirit. Kecak is a movement of the shoulders. It makes you stronger and to the people of Bona this was the dance that purged an epidemic. This gives us a great sense of pride, because this dance was born and grew here. Even if it is still performed in other places, we know it came from here,” says Sija.
Bona’s Kecak troupes of 150 dancers perform today by special request.
They still perform the original version, called into being through trances in a time of pestilence, outside temple walls that were barred to both the dead and the living.
Kecak’s origin: The dance that saved a village | The Jakarta Post
