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THE LEGONG The dancer who plays Lasem enters, followed by Rangkesari (the two legongs) . Lasem, tugging at her skirt, tries to force the princess, but she strikes him with her fan. This is repeated until Lasem grows impatient and, after a struggle, retires enraged. The princess is left alone, wiping her tears with the edge of her apron and slapping her thigh with a fan, a gesture of grief. As the girl kneels, Lasem reappears, angry and defiant, on his way to continue the war against Rangkesari's father; the closed fan becomes a kris which he points threateningly at his imaginary enemy. In the following episode the attendant, the tjondong, puts on her arms a pair of golden wings made of leather, to portray the unlucky crow; she dances sitting on the ground, fluttering her wings with lightning speed, advancing on her knees with birdlike leaps, and beating the earth with her wings. Lasem hesitates for a moment at sight of the ominous bird, but goes on with his kris drawn; the bird dashes at him, obstructing his progress and hampering him in the battle. The dramatic end of the episode is left to the imagination, and the three little girls end with a relaxed dance of farewell. The performance has lasted well over an hour and at the end the girls appear perfectly calm, unfatigued after their strenuous dance. From the treatment of the story, conventional dance formulas to represent actions and emotions explained by a story-teller, one could deduce that the legong is an elaboration of the archaic shadow-plays, the wayang kulit. It hints at an attempt by human beings to perform dramatic stories like those played by marionettes, as is perhaps the case of the Javanese way ang wong -" human wayang " - or actors that play in the wayang style. It is interesting to note that while the old records speak of other forms of Balinese theatre, no mention is made of the legong, which may not, after all, be an ancient dance. A very popular dance that seems related to the legong is the djoged, performed by a girl in a variation of the legong costume and in the traditional legong steps. The dance is considered erotic by the Balinese because the girl entices the men from the audience by " making eyes " at them during the course of the dance. The man invited must dance with her in postures that represent a love game of approach and refusal (nibing) , in which the man tries to come near enough to the girl's face to catch her perfume and feel the warmth of her skin, the Balinese form of a kiss. As the audience becomes worked up, other men " cut in " and dance with her. I have seen performances of djoged that had an intoxicating effect on the crowd, especially in the more decadent form called gandrung, when it is a boy in girl's clothes who performs. Fights among the men of the audience at gandrung dances are not unheard of, a procedure which is extremely un-Balinese. The djoged could easily be a modernized, decadent version of the ancient mating dance still to be found in the village of Tenganan, stronghold of native tradition. There, once a year, a dance called abuang is performed in which the unmarried girls of the village appear dressed in their best, wearing gold flower head-dresses (reminiscent of the paper scallops that decorate the back of the diog6d head-dress) and meet bachelor boys who posture with the girl of their preference in a short dance in which the gestures make one think of a chaste and restrained djoged. Curiously enough, the diog6d is forbidden in Tenganan. But there is still another dance, undeniably of ancient origin, that is even more closely related to the legong: the sanghyang dedari (to be described later) , a magic dance in which the little girls dressed in Iegong costumes go into trance, supposedly to be possessed by the spirits of the heavenly nymphs, to bring luck and magic protection to the village through their performance. The steps of the sanghyang are exactly the same as those of the legong and it is disconcerting and eerie that at no time have the little girls received dance training, and that when in trance they are able to perform the difficult steps that take months and even years of practice for an ordinary Iegong.
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