Barong Festival to be held in Bangli

25 April 2007, 03:29:18 (1188 clicks)

Local government of Bangli in cooperation with Fine Art Institute Denpasar will hold Barong Festival. The event is aimed to preserve culture and also recover tourism, especially in Bangli, although currently Bangli is still not able to recover tourism industry fully.

The Head of Bangli Tourism Office, IBN Armaya, recently said, local government of Bangli would cooperate with Indonesian institute of Art or ISI Denpasar to hold Barong Festival, which will be participated by all art troupes in Bali Island.

He said, the well-known barong dance is hardly performed and as the result quite many people do not acknowledge the dance clearly.

“We hopes through the festival, Bangli will be famous in the eyes of foreigners as well as domestic tourists as a tourist destination with superb places of interests,” he said. Up to these days, around 38 participants have enlisted.

Moreover, all participants need not bring all necessary equipment of dance and the required gamelan orchestra to accompany the dance because the organizing committee has kindly provided all of things needed to perform the dance.

He said that the festival would not merely parade dancing skills of art troupes in presenting barong dance. In order to make it more interesting, their performances will be assessed in terms of 2 criteria.

The first criterion is the ability of dancers to play barong and second, namely harmony, compatibility, and also the performance of gong kebyar. "This competition will be taking place on 10th of May 2007 and we still open the registration for more art troupes wishing to participate in the festival," he said.