Growing up, I remember my mum would occasionally play balinese gamelan and dance in the living room, she would make me listen to the music, and teach me to understand the way it changes and flows. She told me that when she was in Primary School, it was compulsory for all students to learn a traditional Balinese art, so like many other young girls her age, she took up the art of traditional Balinese dance. Around the same time, my mum took me to a traditional Balinese dance class taught by Ibu Merthi Poedjono (my mums first friend when she arrived in Australia in the 80s), at The Indonesian Consulate in Melbourne. Ibu Merthi taught me the basics, like how to “Seledet”, a series of expressive eye movements characteristic to traditional Balinese dance. It’s memories like these that shaped me and are what drove me to become a dancer. Much later in my life, I also had the opportunity to learn the choreography to Tari Puspanjali, taught by Sanggar Lestari Melbourne, however they didn’t specialise in Balinese dance, so they could only teach me so much, in terms of the technical movements and postures. That was the extent of my Balinese dance knowledge, and I quickly realised I really needed to learn from the ground up to completely understand the art form, so I guess naturally at some point I felt like I had out grown Melbourne a bit.

So I packed up my life and moved to Bali, starting my new journey through the complicated yet beautiful world of Balinese dance. As you can tell since I was a kid I’ve always wanted to learn traditional Balinese dance, it kind of makes sense – since Balinese blood runs through my veins. So, when I moved to Bali, I was excited to start my search to find a dance school and finally learn traditional Balinese dance first hand. I thought this would be the easy part since there’s an abundance of traditional dance schools in Bali. It turns out I was wrong. Believe it or not, finding a traditional Balinese dance school in Bali is not that simple.

Looking for a dance school

To begin my search, I turned to Google Maps and looked up traditional dance schools in my area, and literally hundreds of schools popped up. So, I started clicking away, trying to dig up more details on prices and how to sign up. To my surprise, even though it seemed as though all of these schools had tons of students, none them provided information on their social media and almost all of them didn’t have websites. It felt as though it was general knowledge for the Balinese community, so providing the information online was irrelevant for them.

Luckily, my nieces were part of a traditional Balinese dance school, so I turned to them for some guidance. Both of my nieces are part of Sanggar Tari Warini in Denpasar. I heard this was a well known dance school so after talking with them and their dance school, I decided to give this place a shot.

My first dance class

One sunny Saturday afternoon, I arrived at Sanggar Warini. I had my cousin and niece help prepare me with what I needed for my first class – a Kamen, Strapless/Stagen, and Kipas. I headed to class early feeling energized and ready to go. As I waited for my class to start, I sat back and watched a class of 30 or so little girls, no more than 5 years old learning to dance. It was so adorable to watch. About half way through, the older girls started arriving for class – when I say older girls, I mean ages ranging from 10-15 years old, so imagine me as a 30+ year old, feeling out of place and nervous, especially since the dance mums who were around my age, seemed to be sitting at the back in what felt like gossip groups. I knew it was all in my head so I had to shake it off and remember what I came for. To add to my nerves, just as class was about to start, I realised I didn’t know how to wear a kamen properly, and the introvert and overly anxious person in me couldn’t find the courage to ask for help. So I frantically tried to figure out how to wrap it by watching the other girls wrapping theirs and attempt something similar – but my bad eyesight didn’t do me any favours! I literally broke a sweat before class, just trying to put it on.

Then it was time for class, the teacher called out for us to prepare to learn a dance that I had never heard of before and as a new student I was told to just find a spot amongst the sea of students and follow along. The music started and everyone else began to dance. I instantly found myself confused – I expected the dance teacher to stand at the front of the class and break down the dance moves step by step. Instead, she was calling out the names of very specific dance moves in the balinese language (which I don’t understand well enough), while she stood on the side lines watching. All the other girls just seemed to flow naturally and knew what to do. Meanwhile, I had never properly learnt the foundations of Balinese dance, so I didn’t know the names of the moves or how to execute them. I was lost, I felt like a headless chook, running and spinning, doing my best to keep up. After class, I found out to learn those foundation moves, I would need to take the class with the little 5 year old girls from earlier… to avoid the future embarrassment in front of the Bali dance mums, I asked the teacher if I could take private classes to learn the foundations of balinese dance, but unfortunately she told me they didn’t offer this service.

After that experience, I jumped onto Instagram and watched how other dance schools ran their classes to see if there was somewhere that suited my skill level, and it looked like all dance schools were structured the same way as Sanggar Tari Warini. So it was back to the drawing board for me. I couldn’t possibly continue to take these classes without understanding the foundations, so at least now I knew, that I had to either join 5 year olds classes, or find somewhere that could provide private lessons to bring me up to speed. Obviously I chose the latter, as I could never imagine my anxious self feeling like a clumsy giant, confused and freaking out, in a sea of cute and composed 5 year old girls. So off I went again, on a hunt for a private dance teacher.