Plate Dance - Minangkabau

Plate Dance, including traditional dances that are hundreds of years derived from Solok, Minangkabau, West Sumatra - Indonesia.

This dance describes the feeling of excitement when harvest season arrives. The youngsters swung the motion step by showing skill in playing the plate in his hand.

This dance is accompanied by talempong and saluang music. Gratitude ritual is done by some pretty girl to bring offerings in the form of food that is placed in a plate. The girls dressed in good clothes and bring food in a plate with a dynamic movement.

After Islam arrived in Minangkabau, This dance tradition still continues, but only as an entertainment for the community.

Kecak Dance - Bali Culture

Kecak dance is an art culture that originated from Bali - Indonesia and is often shown to foreign and domestic tourists. Kecak Dance is a form of Balinese music drama, originated in the 1930s and is performed primarily by men, although a few women's kecak groups exist as of 2006.

Also known as the Ramayana Monkey Chant, the piece, performed by a circle of 150 or more performers wearing checked cloth around their waists, percussively chanting "cak" and throwing up their arms, depicts a battle from the Ramayana where the monkey-like Vanara helped Prince Rama fight the evil King Ravana. However, Kecak has roots in sanghyang, a trance-inducing exorcism dance.

Kecak was originally a trance ritual accompanied by male chorus. German painter and musician Walter Spies became deeply interested in the ritual while living in Bali in the 1930s and worked to recreate it into a drama, based on the Hindu Ramayana and including dance, intended to be presented to Western tourist audiences. This transformation is an example of what James Clifford describes as part of the modern art-culture system in which, the West or the central power adopts, transforms, and consumes non-Western or peripheral cultural elements, while making art which was once embedded in the culture as a whole, into a separate entity. Spies worked with Wayan Limbak and Limbak popularized the dance by traveling throughout the world with Balinese performance groups. These travels have helped to make the Kecak famous throughout the world.

Performer, choreographer, and scholar I Wayan Dibia cites a contrasting theory that the Balinese were already developing the form when Spies arrived on the island. For example, well-known dancer I Limbak had incorporated Baris movements into the cak leader role during the 1920s. Spies liked this innovation, and it suggested that Limbak, devise a spectacle based on the Ramayana, accompanied by cak chorus rather than gamelan, as would have been usual.