Cultural Exchange in Bali

Posted Monday, September 24, 2007, 6:51 PM by Lonely Planet

Restaurateur and author Janet de Neefe, a Bali resident for 20 years, developed the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival to commemorate the 2002 Bali bomb attacks that killed 202 mainly foreign tourists. Now in its fourth year, the Ubud festival has grown into a leading stop on the Asian literary circuit and an emphatic counterpoint to the extremists' message of division among the archipelago's hundreds of ethnic groups and between Indonesians and foreigners.

Ubud is a traditional village in Bali's foothills ascending toward volcanoes considered sacred in the island's 1500-year-old Hindu tradition. Rivers twist through Ubud, cutting gorges between green hills. Rice paddies still fill spaces between temples, hotels, museums, restaurants and villas.



Ubud is also famously fertile ground for culture and cultural exchange. This year's festival closing gala takes place at the villa turned museum of east-meets-west painting archetype Antonio Blanco. As well as influencing visitors, over the decades, Bali has proven uniquely able to stamp what it absorbs as its own.

Balinese tradition and tourism mix most comfortably through culture. At one end, Balinese customs of massage and meditation beget spas and yoga classes. In the fine arts, interest and influence by talented visitors and moneyed tourists has helped preserve and nourish art forms originally grounded in religion, including painting and dance.

Back in 1930s Ubud, European painters Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonner, along with their Balinese royal patron Cokorda Gede Agung Sukawati jointly founded the Pita Maha (Great Vitality) movement that extended painting beyond temple life and texts into village scenes.

Western and Balinese artists - from jewellery designers to sculptors to musicians - still find each other irresistible influences. For decades, this crosspollination has enriched and deepened, rather than cheapened, Bali's artistic reputation and output, as shown by Bali's continued pull on foreign imaginations.

The Ubud Festival extends Pita Maha to literature, using Bali as a catalyst for 80 writers from 18 countries across the globe to learn from each other and from Bali. Whatever happens this week, it's surely not what the terrorists had in mind.

Muhammad Cohen is launching his novel Hong Kong On Air at this year's Ubud Writers and Readers Festival.

Labels: Asia and Pacific, Festivals and events

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