Ni Gusti Ayu Putu Raka Suryaningsih

The tiny 12-year-old girl with wide, darting eyes and a big headdress, undulating across the stage in the graceful, highly stylized dance of Bali. Her arms floated and twined, as if they had no bones or joints, as she dipped and rose to the urgent syncopated gongs of a Gamelan orchestra. In 1952 New York the young dancer had never before left her home village, Peliatan, with its small, mud-walled houses surrounded by bright green rice fields. Now she was the star of the Bali Dancers, a troupe that had traveled more than 10,000 miles into the alien worlds of the United States and Europe. Accompanied by a 40-piece gamelan orchestra in which players used mallets to produce rapid, rhythmic and hypnotic music on banks of percussion instruments. Balinese dance, with roots in Hindu and traditional folk rituals, is central to the island's culture, performed in temples and courtyards for both religious and secular occasions. It is characterized by slight, pivoting gestures of the head, hands, fingers and especially the eyes, which are virtually performers of their own, round, intense and expressive. On the tour, Raka Rasmi performed a delicate new dance called the Oleg Tamulilingan, or the Bumblebee, in which a male and female dancer circle each other as if courting. Audiences were ecstatic. The performances received as many as seven curtain calls. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous