Barong and Rangda: A Contest With No Winner

The Barong is a guardian creature of Balinese religion, most often in the lion form called Barong Ket, worn by two men under a great mane of fibre with a hinged wooden jaw that clacks. Rangda is his opposite, a widow figure with pendulous breasts, protruding tusks and a long tongue, associated with the practice of harmful magic and with the Calonarang story in which a slighted widow brings plague on a kingdom. Both masks are consecrated, kept in the village temple, and treated as containing power in their own right, which is why they are given offerings and are not simply props.

The dance stages their meeting and does not resolve it. Rangda is not destroyed, the Barong does not triumph, and the piece ends in a standoff and a restoration of balance. That is the theological content: Balinese religion sets its problem as the maintenance of equilibrium between opposed forces rather than the elimination of one. A village that destroyed Rangda would have destroyed something necessary. The dance is performed at temple anniversaries and at other calendrical occasions, and in some villages it is performed when the community judges it needs performing, after illness or misfortune. The masks are re-consecrated on a set cycle, and a village that lets that lapse is held to have let something more than an object lapse.