Kecak is the sound of fifty to a hundred and fifty men, bare-chested, seated in rings around a single flame, chanting the syllable cak in interlocking rhythm until it becomes a kind of engine. There is no gamelan. The whole score is voices.
Where did it come from?
Kecak is not ancient, and the true story is better than the myth. Its voice descends from the sanghyang, an older Balinese trance ritual of exorcism in which a male chorus chanted to invite divine possession and drive off spirits. In the 1930s the Balinese dancer Wayan Limbak, working with the German artist Walter Spies, shaped that chant into a dance-drama that tells the Ramayana, made to be watched. Limbak then carried it out into the world on tour. The chant is old. The theater built around it belongs to the last century, and to a Balinese artist as much as a European one.
What do you see?
Concentric circles of men in checked poleng cloth, a coconut-oil lamp at the center, and the chant, which begins slow and accelerates. Voices take roles: a beat-keeper, a leader who calls the stops and starts, a melodic soloist, and a narrator who carries the story in Balinese and Sanskrit. Around the circle the Ramayana unfolds, the golden deer, the abduction of Sita by Ravana, Hanuman's search, the battle. It runs about an hour, often at the cliff temples of Uluwatu and Tanah Lot as the light goes.
Is it sacred?
Partly, and it is worth being exact. The cak chant carries the memory of real ritual, and trance still touches the performance. The dancer who plays Hanuman is sometimes blessed by a priest and enters a trance during the scene of fire. Yet the nightly cliffside kecak is theater, performed for ticket-holders against a famous sunset. Sacred in its root, spectacle in its form, and clearer for being seen as both.