"Where is my leg?" moaned a disembodied head in a temple courtyard a few miles from the site of last year's terrorist bombings in Bali. "Where is my arm?"
This past August, the memory of the carnage was still vivid to the audience, but the actor playing a victim of the bombings turned the mood of hushed dread into one of comedy, evoking sudden peals of laughter by quoting the tagline of a popular Indonesian television show about the undead: "Don't watch me! I'm not here!"
"The audience laughed out of relief," said Gusti Ngurah Windia, a well-known Balinese actor, as he recalled his performance a few days later. He was sitting on the porch of his home in the village of Carang Sari, several miles from the southern town of Kuta, where the bombings took place. "For a moment, the horror of their memories was transformed into fiction, a dream from a television melodrama, as if it never really happened."
A year ago today, more than 200 people were killed in the terrorist attack by Islamic radicals. In other parts of the globe a similar assault might have led to ethnic retaliation, but the Balinese, living on the only Hindu island in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, answered with art.
During the last 12 months, performers in temple courtyards, village halls and on television frequently have used traditional Balinese theater forms -- masked comedies, shadow plays and folk operas -- to refer to the attack and its aftermath, which has shattered the island's tourist-driven economy.
Another response took place on Nov. 15 last year, when purification ceremonies, accompanied by theater, music and dance performances, were staged in every village across the island.
This grassroots event stretched as far as New York, where, on the same day, Balinese musicians in sarongs and flowered head-dresses led a ceremonial procession from the World Trade Center site to the Battery Park Esplanade. Among the hundreds of Americans and Indonesians who participated were family members of the American victims of the Bali bombing. They joined a masked Balinese performer in throwing flowers into the Hudson River, a Hindu ritual symbolizing the release of the soul to heaven.
Wearing the sacred mask of Sidha Karya, a mythological Balinese figure representing death and renewal, Nyoman Catra, the performer, surveyed the scarred skyline of Manhattan and said, "People are trying to destroy our world, our country, our village." In keeping with Balinese tradition, he was playing a character in a 15th-century story, but he was also speaking of contemporary events as he connected the terror victims of the two islands -- Bali and Manhattan -- by turning them into inhabitants of one town.
"Maybe the bombers wanted to create chaos and fighting between Hindus and Muslims," said Made Sumadi, an official in Bali's ministry of religion, during an interview in August near the island's capital, Denpasar. "But we did not respond the way the bombers expected. In Bali we responded to violence with peace. The bomb had a great impact on everyone, but it could not stop our performances."
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz called 19th-century Bali a theater-state, where performances were inextricably linked to politics, religion and the problems of everyday life. Similar theatrical impulses exist in 21st-century Balinese society, where almost every village temple ceremony includes some form of theatrical event, with clown narrators serving as mediators between the invisible world of gods and ancestors and the tangible one of current events. In improvised dialogues, the clowns grapple with issues like globalization and overdevelopment that endanger the island's Hindu-animist traditions.
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