Tabanan Town
To the west on the main highway, one soon enters the medium sized,
bustling town of Tabanan. Though it appears rather nondescript
and has not much of a reputation among tourists, the arts are
actually well represented here. The town already had skilled woodcarvers
at the end of the 19th century, and there were and still are many
good juru basa, or bards who recite fragments of classic Poems
(kakawin) at festive occasions and during contests of the Bebasan
recital clubs.
Bali's most famous dancer, the late I Ketut Marya (pronounced,
and frequently written as Mario) is also connected with Tabanan.
He was born at the end of the 19th century and died in 1968. Although
he was actually born in Denpasar, he was raised in Tabanan under
Anak Agung Ngurah Made Kaleran of the Puri Kaleran palace.
Marya performed as one of the dancers representing the (female)
pupils of the witch, Calonarang, with a music club called the
Gong Pangkung, which was founded in 1900 and became quite famous.
The Gong Pangkung, named after a village quarter in Tabanan, also
possessed a set of tingklik instruments, bamboo replicas of a
gamelan orchestra.
Marya and his three fellow dancers experimented widely with this
orchestra. They traveled and gave gandrung (transvestite) performances.
They also refined the fast and lively kebyar musical style that
had been invented in north Bali around 1900. Marya developed a
number of new dances for the ensemble. The two most famous are
the Trompong Dance, in which the performer crouches and plays
the trompong (a row of 10 bronze kettledrums) while dancing, and
the Kebyar Duduk (sitting kebyar), in which he crouches and sinuously
flirts with a drummer or another musician while dancing.
In the late 1920s and 1930s, these dances were already well known
to tourists. Walter Spies made superb photos of them for the book
Dance and Drama in Bali which he produced with Beryl de Zoete
in 1935-36. Marya was also a teacher of many dancers who would
later become famous, in particular I Gusti Ngurah Raka from Batuan.
He was a very strict mentor and only accepted the very best pupils.
Although he taught them the same dances, he assigned each pupil
slightly different movements, to enable him or her to have something
characteristic. To remember this dancer and teacher who made Tabanan
so famous, the Gedong Marya Theater was erected in Tabanan in
1974.
There is also a museum in Tabanan. This is the Subak Museum, which
contains tools and implements connected with rice field irrigation
and agriculture in Bali. It lies just outside of the town on the
right-hand side of the main road to Denpasar.
A famous native son
Tabanan also has a modern temple-like memorial, which can be considered
a national shrine. It is located in the village of Marga, about
15 km northeast of the town, on the spot where lieutenant-colonel
I Gusti Ngurah Rai, commander of the nationalist forces fighting
the Dutch, was killed with his 94 men on November 20th, 1946.
They fought till the death, and their behavior is commonly compared
with that of the ruler of Badung and his family in 1906, so that
the event is also referred to as a Puputan.
The heroic death of Ngurah Rai is commemorated not only in this
temple, but also in a poem, the Geguritan Margarana, written a
short time afterwards by a fellow nationalist fighter. His name
has also been given to the international airport of Bali. The
memorial itself contains a stone tower or candi in which a replica
of the famous letter containing his refusal to surrender is carved.
Placed in rows outside are 94 pointed stone pedestals representing
his fellow martyrs.
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