What Indonesia - Bali is all about ?

It is a curious fact that no place will admit to having been responsible for the first Djanger. The north of Bali says it came from the south; the south attributes it to the north. If Bali makes Lombok responsible, Lombok says it learnt from Bali; and an old man at Taman Intaran on the south coast near Denpasar says authoritatively that the first Djanger came from Noesa Penida. Probably the various stages in its development given below would be questioned by certain other people who positively remember the first coming of Djanger, and can tell you categorically in what month of 1930 it arrived complete with boys and girls and Daag. This only means that everything in Bali has its exception. To us it is comparatively unimportant to know through what stages it passed, to reach what is probably not even yet its final form.

It would seem that somewhere between ten and twenty years ago the small seated groups of men and boys who formed part of the rhythmic and vocal accompaniment to the Sanghyang trance-dance broke away from their subservience to the temple and set off on a career of their own. We have already seen their development in one direction into the Ketjaks, whose name perpetuates the sound yak which occurred again and again in the rhythmic accompaniment. Djanger means 'humming', and the name comes from the hummed or murmured background to the entranced girl dancers.
The first stage in the development of Djanger was the singing of Sanghyang songs by boys, sitting in two rows facing each other, with food and offerings between them: one row took the part now taken by the girl singers, swaying and moving their hands while they sang; the other, representing the yaks, developed the more exciting rhythmic movements and gestures which had characterized the seated circles in the Sanghyang

The trance dancing, of course, still went on with the same vocal and rhythmic accompaniment as before; but the yaks were definitely launched on a new and independent path.
The second step was the substitution of a square formation for the two rows; twelve yaks faced each other in two rows of six, and the twelve singers were similarly divided.
The final stage was the substitution of real girls for boys in the singing rows. They continued to sing and weave patterns with their hands, sitting between their folded knees, while the boys, cross-legged, developed ever stranger sequences of rhythmic movements and ejaculated sounds. A new character was next introduced in the person of the Daag, who, sitting in the middle of the square, acted as a kind of master of ceremonies.

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