Kecak Uluwatu
Nightly cliffside chant performance retelling an ancient epic through fire and a chorus of bare-chested voices.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Kecak performance at Uluwatu in Bali traces the chant back to sanghyang, a trance ritual once used to summon spirits and drive out sickness, with no instruments beyond dozens of human voices. It follows a German painter named Walter Spies, who in the 1930s worked with Balinese dancer Wayan Limbak to strip the ritual down and graft onto it the Ramayana, a tale of a stolen wife and a war between good and evil. Watch the macaques roaming the grounds; tradition holds they descend from that story's monkey army.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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