Word: bali
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Hays Office has definitely begun to unbend, gentlemen, and it is high time someone broke forth with a few congratulatory huzzahs. "Honeymoon in Bali," the latest case in point, has Madeleine Carroll; it has faint glimmers of Bali; and it has a script that sometimes scintillates. Of course, it does have Fred MacMurray, too; and it is burdened with a plot; but such things seem to be inevitable. Only when the Message becomes too obvious does the pace sag; Miss Carroll, it seems, has planned her whole life with the mathematical precision of an M. I. T. graduate, and must...
...Bangka. Coffee, tea, tobacco, sugar, rice are the more ordinary products; but copra as a basis for facial creams, lizard skins for shoes and handbags, Sumatra wrappers for cigars, cinchona bark for quinine, sandalwood and teakwood, ebony and macassar oil, and even the bare-breasted women of Bali, tourist paradise, do their full share in making this Netherlands overseas a going concern...
Young as nymphs are the temple dancers in Bali. At 12 they are too old for the temple, retire and usually marry. But when Temple-dancer Devi Dja (pronounced Davy Jah) was dancing the Legong in Klunklung,* the late, great Anna Pavlowa visited neighboring Java for a couple of concerts, and round-faced Dancer Devi Dja went to see her dance. Result: Devi Dja decided that 12 was over-young to quit. So she collected a group of other aging temple-dancers, started giving commercial performances for visiting tourists. Two years ago Devi Dja's dancers toured Java...
Their first performance in the Guild Theatre was a sellout, for few Manhattanites had ever seen a temple dance outside of tantalizing glimpses in the movies. For them Devi Dja and her accordion-bellied maidens imitated ancient frescoes, did solemn ritualistic wriggles, proved with deft, complicated gestures that Bali's classic dance is not as simple as a sarong. Between these pantomimes and rituals, the wiry, Balinese youths ritualistically jabbed at each other with crooked knives...
Climax of the evening came when the temple-dancers forgot about the temple, and swung out in a lowbrow song & dance from modern Bali, accompanying themselves with corny, Hawaiian-style music on a steel guitar and a couple of mandolins. Though purists complained it was not according to the Sanskrit, the bronze-skinned Balinese broke down and grinned, swayed like jamming jitterbugs, wailed a torch song or two, and showed that East is meeting West as fast as the flicker of an exported Hollywood movie...