Bondres: Bali Style of Comedy ( 1 )

Balinese people have a great sense of humour. This can be seen through their visual arts such as painting, sculpture and the performing arts; including the sacred puppet-shadow and mask dance. Clown characters that make jokes and help audiences understand stories are pre-eminent in all of the Balinese performing arts.

One of the most popular forms of performing arts that is dominated by or often focuses upon only humorous elements, is bondres, also known as topeng bondres. Topeng in Balinese means mask, while bondres refers to comic characters. Topeng bondres means an amusing form of mask used by dancers to make a comical appearance.

Bondres became known in the mid 1970s through the birth of a mask dance group called Topeng Carangsari, named after the village of Carangsari, North of Sangeh Monkey forest. Before this decade, the word 'bondres' was not know and still doesn't appear in today's dictionary of the Balinese language.

The Topeng Carangsari was the first group of mask-dancers to create the typical clown and they made the whole performance entertaining through their fresh, original, and smart jokes. Mask-dance used to be a sacred or serious dance, usually performed to accompany a ritual such as a temple festival or a particular stage in a cremation ritual. When the mask-dance transformed into a performing genre, like prembon, by performing particular stories such as the genealogy of a king or clan, they were hardly entertaining and quite boring. Suddenly, Topeng Carangsari lead by a talented dancer, I Gusti Ngurah Windia, came up with great format of mask-dance which is called topeng tugèk Carangsari. Tugèk means 'chubby beautiful lady'.

Topeng Tugèk Carangsari created three distinctive characters who are a chubby-cheeked lady, the hare lipped arrogant man, and a deaf old man. These three characters have similar important roles, which are to articulate the story and to make audiences laugh. Interestingly, these characters were all played by one dancer, Ngurah Windia, who also played other characters such as a priest and king's adviser or enemy. He played each role just by changing masks and voices accordingly. The total number of topeng dancers is six. Other characters are the princess and her follower, the king (played by a female dancer) and two of his male adjutants. They were quite a solid group.