Offering the Rejang:

The Art of Sacrifice in Balinese Sacred Dance

By

Jennifer Rose Caroff

A note to readers

My interest in the topic of dancer as an offering to the divine grew directly out of  fieldwork experience with sacred dance during my study abroad in Bali, Indonesia, Spring, 2001.  I was captivated by the Rejang dance, in which women present offerings (sajen) to the gods. [1]   Although Balinese religion and daily life is abundant with ritual offerings, the dance as way of offering, “the most beautiful way of offering,” holds a unique position in the practice of Balinese religion simply because there are not other offerings of this kind. [2]

I studied a form of the Rejang specific to Batuan village (see map for location) with a well-respected teacher and performer of Balinese dance, Ni Wayan Sekariani.  For one month I ate, drank, slept and breathed the dance.  A two-hour lesson of non-stop practice was a regular, almost daily occurrence.  As I continued the dance, a fairly simple form in its technique, as Balinese dance goes, something strange began to happen.  I began to find that the dance was like a meditation, something that was always new, something I could always improve upon, the technique of which was never completely acquired, but always an art in process.  While I was dancing I would often lose all sense of time and simply exist inside the dance, its slow, flowering form.  My intensely personal relationship to the dance thus, informs my scholarship.  In this work, I am seeking some sort of formalization of the subjective.  Attempting to turn the subjective into the academic is, to me, fraught with difficulties, thus one obvious aim of my paper.  If any reader wonders where in me these ideas arose about sacrifice and art, devotion and dance, they needn’t, for they have grown directly out of my devoted engagement with the dance.  Thus, the paper that follows is my attempt to construct a creative vision that best reflects my embodied understanding of the material as it is situated within its own religious cultural and philosophical traditions.

Introduction

This paper examines sacrifice as a mystical death of the self that results in an experience nearing that of non-separation for the practitioner as it occurs through dance as a devotional offering.  The Balinese sacred dance ritual, Rejang, is the focus of our exploration.  Portions of the sacrificial model outlined by Hubert and Mauss will be used in order to examine sacrifice within Rejang, specifically the distinction of participants in sacrifice, and the dual aspects of communion and expiation.  In addition, two primary religious and philosophical traditions found within Indian Hinduism, which closely informs Balinese Hinduism, that of the Rasa and Bhakti traditions, will be used to examine sacrifice in Rejang as aesthetic and devotional, respectively.  Conclusively, the paper seeks to understand the art of sacrifice as it specifically relates to dance and the body and the possible implications of that relationship in relation to women, purity, and impurity.

Rejang: an offering dance

The word rejang means “offering.”  The Rejang dance has been a longstanding tradition in Bali, so longstanding that no one can really say when it began or from where it came.    The dance is performed throughout Bali by women of all ages.  Young girls learn the dance by watching and following their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers. Even girls as young as three years old may participate in the ritual offering. [3]   It is a tradition in which most Balinese women have partaken at some time in their life, if not consistently throughout the course of their lives.

Rejang is performed either in, or just outside, the temple grounds, signifying its sacrality within Balinese religion.  In most villages it is performed at temple ceremonies as a portion of much larger celebrations.  The tradition and style of the Rejang varies from region to region.  In Batuan, for example, the dance functions as an expiation ritual during the rainy season (January-May) and is performed repeatedly over the four-month period in order to ensure health and cleanse illness. 

The general purpose of the dance is to give offerings to the gods as an expression of thankfulness and devotion.  The emphasis on thanking the gods takes precedence over uniformity in performance.  Most, if not all, village women dance Rejang and many are not trained dancers. The dancers all do similar movements but they are not necessarily in accordance with one another or even with the gamelan [4] cycles. [5]     

Depending on location and tradition, the offerings could be to one specific deity, or to the larger Hindu pantheon.  In Batuan, for example, the dance is for Sang Hyang Widia Dari, a goddess of compassion who in legend is said to have given the Rejang to the people of Batuan in a time of need. [6]   Thus, the dance is a special one indicating Batuan’s special relationship with this goddess.  In other locations the dance is performed for the whole pantheon of Hindu deities (Brahma, Siwa, Vishnu, Saraswati, Lakshmi, Durga, etc.). [7]  

The basic structure of the ritual is that of a group of female dancers proceeding in consecutive rows across the bale [8] towards the front end of the bale where tables, piled high with elaborate food offerings, reside. The gods are believed to watch from somewhere near and above the offering table and thus, are the primary audience. [9]  A typical performance could go on anywhere from three to four hours.  When a row of dancers completes their dance, which could last up to thirty minutes, they simply walk off to the sides of the bale and become observing audience members.  As has been observed of the style and procedure of the Rejang dancer by anthropologists Holt and Bateson:

One by one they complete their rounds in almost spellbound tranquility in which there is no climax, no variation, but a seemingly endless chain of repetitious movement; then, suddenly, as casually as she had just finished an errand, a dancer walk off across the court at an ordinary gait, while her companions continue their calm circling. [10]

For many of the women I interviewed, the dance was simply part of their tradition, something that they had done since they were small.  Several spoke of how they enjoyed the dance more as they grew older and that as young ones some often cried and tried to resist such long stretches of concentration that the dance demands.  All spoke of the dance as ngayah, or a “giving to the gods.” [11]   The majority of women I spoke with, all professional dancers, said they liked performing Rejang very much, it made them “feel happy,” and that they regarded it as a kind of prayer.

Dance/Dancer As Sacrifice

In Rejang, the goal of the dancer is self-sacrifice by way of devotion in dance.  Even though she herself is not the offering in the ritual, nor is the dance itself the offering, both merge as the offering in the ritual process.  Although none of my interviewees used this language of sacrifice to describe their intentions while dancing they said that it was a time for focusing on their god, and a time for giving.  The emphasis on giving to the gods to such an extent that the focus is on the giving away of the self lends itself to the language of sacrifice, particularly that of self-sacrifice.  If self-sacrifice is achieved, the dancer achieves a higher integration of consciousness and embodiment that is recognized by audience members as the power of enchantment, and is regarded as divine.  In order to give the gift of dance well, the dancer must fall into the body and die to her ordinary self-consciousness, thus becoming herself a motion of the divine.

To understand Rejang as a form of sacrifice we must first clarify what we mean by sacrifice.  Traditionally the idea of religious sacrifice is associated with an act of killing in which the victim’s death, usually an animal’s, results in some kind of gain for the sacrificers, the group of people performing the sacrifice. But the word “sacrifice,” from its Latin roots sacer and facere, means “to make sacred.” [12] At its fundamental level, a sacrifice connotes some kind of exchange; something is given in order that something be received.  Self-sacrifice implies a giving of one’s self in exchange for either real or figurative death.  In the case of figurative death, a kind of re-birth, or new self is acquired through the act. 

            According to Hubert and Mauss, all acts of sacrifice involve three primary parties, the sacrifier, the sacrificer, and the sacrifice.  The sacrifier they take to mean the individuals or community benefiting from the sacrifice, though not participating in the direct act.  The sacrificer is the individual or group responsible for committing the act, usually a priest.  The sacrifice is the object, animal, or person offered in sacrifice, the one undergoing death.  For Hubert and Mauss, the sacrifice functions as an intermediary between the human and divine realms, and is made holy through the act of sacrifice. [13]

To see the dancer as the sacrifice we must inquire about the dance as a means of offering and about the dancer’s relationship to the dance.  Rejang is, technically, the means of presenting an offering, the actual sacrifice. [14]   In her performance, the dancer approaches the sacrificial object as she moves across the floor and nears the offering laden table.  Thus, she begins as the sacrificer, the one who offers to the gods, but becomes the sacrifice, the offering, as she dissolves in the process of offering dance to the gods.  This play on the sacrificial model of Hubert and Mauss, the dissolution of the sacrificer and the sacrifice in one individual dancer, is the result of the sacrificial act of dance.  In dance, distinguishing between the dance and the dancer is “negligible.” [15]   As William Butler Yeats so poetically voiced, “Oh body swayed to music, oh brightening glance,/ How can you tell the dancer from the dance?” [16]   Thus, I argue that by way of devotion in dance, the dancer begins as the sacrificer, becomes the means of the sacrifice, and finally, in her act of giving, the sacrifice itself.  Now that we have established the dancer as the sacrifice we can look at the nature of her sacrifice, what is given up and what is gained, what is the motivation of the act and through what means does she achieve her self-sacrifice.

The art of her ritual sacrifice is illuminated by two philosophical and religious philosophies of self-sacrifice, that of the Rasa theorist’s ideas of self-sacrifice of a performer to his art, and that of the Bhakti tradition of self-sacrifice of a devotee to her god.

Within Indian art and artistic performance, theater, music, dance, poetry, etc. is a longstanding tradition that views all artistic performance as spiritual practice (sadhana) leading towards ultimate liberation. [17]   The artist’s primary practice, regardless of medium, is one of offering, or sacrifice, which serves as a means for spiritual realization. 

For the traditional Indian artist, regardless of the field in which he worked, artistic creation was the supreme means of realizing the Universal Being.  Art was a discipline (sadhana), a yoga, and a sacrifice (yajna). [18]  

In the process of creating or performing an art, the artist sought to re-create, or reveal, an aspect of the divine that he intuitively knew through subjective experience.  The result was satisfaction for both the performer and the audience, a “pure joy” (ananda) second only to the highest revelation of the Self, Brahman. [19]  

The theory of aesthetics, known as the Rasa theory, describes the process by which the artist performs his goal of self-sacrifice and achieves the height of aesthetic experience.  Ideally, he must die in the giving of his art.  He must identify so much with the vision of art he aims to create that in the process of creation he loses any and all sense of separation he feels to his art.  When this occurs he temporarily transcends his ordinary limited sense of self and separateness and experiences firsthand a state of unity in which there is no performer or performance, only performing.  In this transcendent state he not only achieves this experience of rasa he in turn, gives the rasa to his audience and thus completes the sacrifice of art.

            The Rasa theory is pertinent to our understanding of the Rejang dancer’s art of sacrifice when we take into account the performance’s relationship to beauty or an aesthetic ideal.  “The point of the ritual is to offer something to the gods as beautifully as you possibly can.” [20]   Everything involved in the ritual must be aesthetically pleasing and properly attended to for the sake of beauty and presentation.  Thus, the dancer, in the same way as the performer, also concentrates on the perfected giving of her art, aiming to offer with as much beauty as possible.  However, like the performer, the sacrifice is only complete when she gives the art to the audience, in this case the gods, and produces a pleasure in them regarded to be rasa, a taste nearing divine. 

Another way we can understand the art of her sacrifice is as bhakti or “devotion.” [21]   Within the Bhakti tradition a devotee takes up a personal love-relationship with a god, and seeks to draw nearer and nearer to that god through devotion.  For the bhakta, the practitioner of bhakti, everything is to be given freely to god, every thought, emotion, action, gain and loss.  Through giving everything to the divine, the bhakta maintains a ceaseless relationship and is always moving nearer to the divine when in the act of giving. 

As already touched upon, the Balinese word associated with the dancer’s disposition of giving is ngayah, or “just giving to the gods without want of any monetary or material gain.” The term is used often in relation to performers who offer a performance free of charge with a spirit of generosity and with the intention of enhancing an event with their artistic gift.  In Rejang, then, the dancer nears the gods through her inward disposition of ngayah, with a feeling of desiring to give graciously to the gods her thanks, her appreciation for them.  The dance could be said to be ngayah embodied.  As the dancer continues in her act of giving, she nears the gods just as she near the offering table from where the gods are watching.  If she maintains one-pointed attention on them with her whole self, mind, heart, body, then she has the potential to lose her ordinary self in the dance.  Her self-sacrifice happens as she gives up her self in the act of giving.

The art of sacrifice in the dance has, as we have already noted, a special relationship with the body because the dancer’s offering is her devotion wedded with body in dancing.  This might not seem a particularly radical observation, but it is in the integration, embodied devotion, that we can see the unique position of dance in worship.  Because the dancer’s consciousness in merged outwardly with her form, she becomes a living sacrifice.  She remains the living sacrifice so long as she can remain in the free fall of embodied devotion.  Her free fall lies in her radical trust of the body and her ability to make her body transparent with the radiance of her devotion.  Like the performer in the Rasa theory, she has transcended ordinary distinctions between self and art because she has dissolved her ordinary self-consciousness.  And like the bhakta she has transcended her sense of separation from the divine through a relationship of giving.  As a dancer, this dissolution of self lies in a willingness to trust the wisdom of the body, to fall into deeper communion with the very physicality of blood, muscle, and bone while simultaneously giving away her dissolving self to the gods.

In all cases, what is again and again the nature of the sacrifice is the giving away of the self, the sense of a personal, limited, and separate identity.  Similarly, the result in all three cases is described as an experience of transcendence where ordinary perceptions of orientation cease to exist and a kind of fullness, beauty, holiness, or conscious embodiment is experienced.  There is no dance or dancer, only dancing.  Because it is sacrifice the dancer, or practitioner, does not lose all sense of awareness rather, she remains in a state of giving and is, thus, aware of something beyond herself. 

In the sacrificial act of the performer the audience perceives a vision or manifestation of a divine reality.  In Bali, the dancer’s achievement of dying in the giving of her art is also gauged by the audience.  Whichever dancer the audience likes to watch the most is said to possess taksu, an actual spark of the divine.  Taksu is bestowed on the dancer by Dewa Taksu, the god of divine inspiration.  A dancer possessing taksu will be able to enchant the audience, leave them spellbound, and produce in them a happiness much like that of rasa. 

The dancer’s power of enchantment is precisely what the original Rejang dancers achieved in the origin myth of Batuan’s Rejang.  This enchantment of the Rejang dancer is similar to Hubert and Mauss’s model of the victim who becomes divine.  According to legend, the specific form of Batuan’s Rejang was given to the people of the village by the goddess Sang Hyang Widia Dari, [22] a goddess of compassion. [23]     The dance was prescribed as a cure to ward off evil neighboring demon-gods.  The dance was successful at keeping the demon-gods from causing harm precisely because the dancers possessed the power of enchantment.  In the following account, the demons are spellbound by the beauty of the dance and are thus, distracted from causing further harm to the community:

Dulu, dulu (a long time ago)…the gods in Batuan were fighting with the god in Nusa Dua. And the gods from Nusa Dua were coming and eating the people in Batuan and making a very bad situation here for everyone.  Then the priest of the village of Batuan…received a cure...maybe through divination or trance.  The cure was the form of the Rejang (danced by all the women in the village today).  Next time, when the evil gods from Nusa Dua came to cause trouble and eat the people of Batuan, they were so taken with the beautiful women of the village dancing the Rejang for something…something like a little bit of god entered the women when they danced.  So transfixed by the beauty of the Rejang were the gods of Nusa Dua that an entire night passed and they forgot that they had come to do naughty things and eat people.  As soon as morning arrived they remembered and realized they had been seduced into not performing their naughty desires.  Because it was morning, now daylight, they had to flee. [24]

 Thus, the power of the dancer’s enchantment is a power that emanates a blessing force for the community of Batuan.  The demons’ captivation with the dancer is contingent on her communion in sacrifice.  The dancer’s enchantment also acts as an expiatory power for the community.  Hubert and Mauss identify the two main components of sacrifice as communion and expiation.  The communion serves to unite the human with the divine realm to which the sacrifice is made.  The expiation serves to cleanse the community of sins, evil forces, etc. [25]  

In the legend, the power of the expiation is clear: the sacrifice purifies the community of evil, sickness and disease.  But, in the dancer expiation also occurs; it is the expiation of her self, which in turn leads to her ability to enchant, transmitting some quality of the divine through taksu.  Her expiation and her communion both occur in her self-sacrifice.  The expiation, or purification of herself also implies a purification of her body which, purified in the living act of the sacrifice of devotional dance, receives, reveals, and transmits the divine in act of communion. 

            What then, might be the significance of such brief sanctification of the body occurring in devotional dance?  It at once blurs the traditional regard for the body as impure, especially that of the female body.  Within Balinese culture, the extent to which purity is attended to can be seen in the code for proper dress.  The selendang, or waist sash, is tied around the waist to signify a distinction between the higher and lower nature of a person.  The upper half of the body is regarded as the purer half, while everything from the waist down is regarded as impure and therefore sanctioned off from the rest of the body.  The ritual observance of this distinction between higher and lower nature is strict, especially within religiously charged areas.  Women will not be allowed into the temple unless this code of dress is properly observed. 

In contrast to ordinary conceptions of the body as impure, the sacrifice of dance suggests the entire body as gift for the gods, implying, at least momentarily, a purity fit for divine offering.  The temporary sacrality of the body in its entirety depends on the dancer’s sacrifice of her ordinary self, or ego, the portion, which would more likely be associated with all the impurities of the lower half of the body.  The sacrality of the dancer rests in embodied devotion.  When that devotion is expressed through the body, the body, in turn, becomes devotion in form.  Thus, dance serves as a bridge uniting the purity of devotion with the impurity of the body and turning the dancer’s embodiment into a divine revelation possessing the blessing force.  The purity, holiness even, alive in the dancing is a purity existing within the whole body.  Although temporary, it nonetheless provides us with a moment of embodied sanctification that must not be ignored.  

To see the significance of the Rejang dancer’s sacrifice is to recognize its effects on the community around her.  In the Batuan myth, the dancer’s self-sacrifice has both the power to enchant evil away from action and to protect and heal.  If we use our imaginations could we entertain possibilities beyond the scope of this story and the effects of the Rejang on the Batuan community?  How could we extend this metaphor, the felt usefulness of dance as a blessing force, to today’s world?  Is it possible that we also could enchant demons from further destruction?

Conclusion

In conclusion, we have explored the dancer as sacrifice in the Balinese sacred dance, Rejang.  Her art of sacrifice is both an art of devotion and a willingness to fall into embodiment.  The power of her self-sacrifice is best characterized as an enchantment that pleases those around her and also contains the power of expiation for both the dancer personally, and the community at large.  It could be said then, that women who dance the Rejang become temporarily imbued with the divine, thus their cultural impurity is temporarily dispelled.  That there has been a temporary recognition of a blessing force radiated from the dancer’s body suggests that the impurity of women and women’s bodies be reconsidered in light of their manifestation of the divine.

Works Cited

Holt, Claire, and Gergory Bateson. “Form and Function of the Dance of Bali.” Belo,
Jane, Ed. Traditional Balinese Culture.  London: Columbia University Press, 1970.

Huber, Henry, and Marcel Mauss.  Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions.  Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1964.

McPhee, Colin. Dance in Bali. New York: Dance Index-Ballet Caravan, Inc., 1949.

Schomer, Karine, and W.H. McLeod, Ed.  The Sants: studies in a devotional tradition in
India. Berkeley: Berkeley Religious Studies Series, 1987.

Suryani, Luh Ketut, and Gordon D. Jenson.  Trance and Possession in Bali: a Window on
Western Multiple Personality Disorder, Possession Disorder, and Suicide. 
Kuala Lampur: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Vatsyayan, Dr. Kapila. Classical Indian Dance in Literature and the Arts. New Delhi:
Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1968.

Webster’s II New College Dictionary.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995.

Yeats, William Butler.  “Among School Children.”  Courtesy of David Weddle: Colorado College, March, 2003.

Works Consulted

Bandem, I Made, and Fredrik Eugene deBoer. Balinese Dance in Transition: Kaja and
Kelod. Kuala Lampur: Oxford University Press, 1995.

MacGregor, Geddes. Aesthetic Experience in Religion. London: Macmillan and Co. LTD, 1947.

Martin, James Alfred. Beauty and Holiness: a dialogue between aesthetics and religion. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990.

McCormack, Margaret, Ed.  Sacrificing the Self: perspectives on martyrdom and world religions.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Picard, Michel. “ “Cultural Tourism” in Bali: Cultural Performance as Tourist Attraction.”  Indonesia  49 (1990): 37-75.

Prabhavananda, Swami, trans. Narada’s Way of Divine Love: the Bhakti Sutras. Hollywood: Vedanta Press, 1971.

Smart, Ninian. Concept and Empathy: essays in the study of religion. Hong Kong: Macmillan, 1986.

Spies, Walter, and Beryl de Zoete. Dance and Drama in Bali. 1938. Hong Kong: Periplus Editions, 2002.