Well before we arrived in Ubud, we were struck by the immediacy of Balinese art. The goggle-eyed faces peering out at us around Denpasar evoked both fear and laughter, as though every face was a laughing face lit by firelight from below. Scary. Funny. Somehow part of some full-bellied, cosmic joke. Even the sculptural decoration of columns and walls seemed so aggressively three-dimensional as to be extra-dimensional.

So when we saw a dance performance at the palace last night, all that imagery came to life for us. The Professor and I disagreed about the performance quality – I found it solid but not brilliant, in part due to a lackluster audience; he found some of the performers amazing – we did not disagree about the strong performances among the troupe and the transfixing nature of the dance period.

The evening featured an assortment of traditional dances. I liked the Kebyar Dudak, which “depicts the infancy and adolescence in the life of a young prince”, which featured a young, heavily made-up man with very sharp and precise movements, as well as a confident sneer and a great eye roll.

I also enjoyed the Topeng Keras mask dance, which featured a tough, red-faced man who moved like a video game villain from a late-80s Nintendo game, all sideways menace and sudden movements after periods of quiet.

Like gymnastics, this dance performance mostly featured mature men and tiny little girls. The girls did a butterfly dance that I quite liked, but I couldn’t get into the more traditional Legong dance. I did like the Puspa Wresti dance, which was performed by women and led by a woman in her 30s or 40s who had the most astonishing facial expressions. I don’t know if her eyelids ever touched her irises, she was that wide-eyed.

Afterwards, we went out on the town looking for action, which is apparently hard to come by in Ubud. At my insistence, we went to a jazz bar for dessert, but got there just as the band was packing up, and soon realized that the place was full of other couples, most of whom seemed older than us by a good deal, which was not important, but all of whom seemed uninterested in meeting new people, which was an issue.

We left and started walking down the street, and passed by an art gallery in which six or eight 20-something longhairs guys were sitting around a low table, drinking beer and smoking clove cigarettes. One of them called out, “hey, come in!” and after a quick huddle the Professor and I did so.

I’ll confess now – I smoked a few cloves with the guys, breaking my new year’s resolution for an evening. Two of the guys were the gallery’s artists, and their art wasn’t like anything around, not Balinese-iana at all. It featured scary/funny faces (that thing again), girls, text, objects from a bar, local dogs, and pure abstraction. Vigorous young-man stuff. One of them explained to me that he grew up in Sumatra, and had studied art in Jakarta, but had come to Ubud because artists can make a living here, even artists who don’t make the stuff tourists expect to buy.

Not that things weren’t thin for them as they are for young artists everywhere. One guy, an artist and a former boxer who dropped fighting after being put in a coma, explained that he grows his hair into long dreadlocks to sell once they reach a certain length.

We talked about living far away from home, the phenomenon of short hair on women and long hair on men, politics, economics and art. They shared their beer with the Professor.

So today, after touring a big and gorgeous museum, we bought them a big beer in return, and they invited us to come see their studio. We might see it tomorrow, after taking a silver-smithing class or touring the ARMA museum and the monkey forest.

– The Private Eye