Condong and Wijil in Katemu ring Tampaksiring

What Westerners know as Balinese dance is almost always the kebyar repertoire designed for the tourist market, not what Balinese themselves watch. The most consistently popular genre is Arja, which is the Balinese equivalent to Western classical ballet and opera rolled into one. Arja utilizes a range of classical metres, tembang , which give performance a distinctive and unforgettable tone. Arja is also extremely demanding, because performers must be first class dancers, singers and actors at the same time. Most of Bali 's great dancers were trained in Arja – Balinese say this is because, if you can dance Arja, you can dance anything!

Arja is extremely versatile and used for classical and popular stories. It has a well-developed cast of characters. What is distinctive is that the hero and heroine only sing, they are translated and interpreted throughout by servants, who therefore play many of the key roles. Arja is also interesting for other reasons. Most of the central roles – male or female – are conventionally played by women. And many of the plots of Arja are about the private side of public life and stress the personal rather then the public, dynastic and official accounts of other genres.

One of Balinesedance's initiatives has been to make Arja relevant both to contemporary Indonesians and to non-Indonesian audiences. The first stage was to use contemporary stories. For example in 2005 an all-star cast performed a modern short story, ‘They met in Tampaksiring' ( Katemu ring Tampaksiring ) at the International Bali Arts Festival (available on VCD from Bali Records). On a US tours in 2006, Professor I Wayan Dibia and Ni Madé Pujawati worked on an Arja version of Oedipus Rex with the arias in English. In the future, they plan to use contemporary dress as well.