Aesthetic celebration

Monday, June 11 2012, 11:37 AM

by I Wayan Juniarta on 2012-06-11

Each year, traditional artists and performers from across Bali will converge in Denpasar to showcase their aesthetic achievements in the one-month annual arts festival, locally known as PKB.

This year PKB enters its 34th year, the longest running arts festival of its size in Indonesia. Other provinces have tried to replicate this festival, but they usually ran out gas after several years.

As many as 15,000 artists, including from several other provinces and foreign countries, participate in the festival that runs until July 7 and features not only performances but also exhibitions, workshops, as well as seminars.

For the Balinese youths, PKB has become an integral part of their annual routine. They will flock from various regencies to Denpasar’s Werddhi Budaya Art Center to watch the performances of troupes from their respective hometowns, sampling delicious traditional foods in the culinary booths, and shopping at the adjacent, bustling market, offering almost everything — from cheap clothes to children’s toys. The presence of the open-air market has angered the purists, who claimed it degraded the festival into a sort of night market. For local housewives, young girls and children, it just adds another alluring attraction.

For the Balinese intellectuals, PKB stands for more than just an arts festival. Poetess Mas Ruscitadewi recalled that the late Ida Bagus Mantra, arguably the island’s most influential thinker in contemporary Bali, initiated PKB as a means to restore the Balinese people’s pride in their cultural heritage. I Made Bandem, noted scholar and one of the minds behind the conception of PKB, pointed out that the festival was one of the critical factors that drove the preservation and rejuvenation of so many rare and beautiful Balinese art forms.

“It has yet to reach its perfection, but it has contributed to the survival of these art forms, which otherwise might have no reason or no stage to exist.”

PKB’s opening street parade is the finest example of how proud the Balinese are of their respective heritage and how diverse that heritage is. For that, this island will forever be indebted to Mantra.