ABSTRACT
Music and dance in Central and East Java have long been intimately bound up with notions of the sacred. To some degree, at least, all traditional Javanese performance genres serve both as entertainment for their human audience and as a vehicle for reaching beyond the mundane and human to the sacred realm of spirits and hidden forces. Yet some genres, musical pieces, musical ensembles, musical instruments, dances, dance properties, puppets, and even manuscripts relating to these are imbued with heightened sacred significance, having special supernatural powers that set them off from others seemingly like them. Following some introductory material, I would like to consider in this essay two performance rituals held to be particularly sacred: the BedhayaSemang of the Yogyakarta court in Central Java, and the Seblang of Bakungan, in rural Banyuwangi, East Java. I do not wish to argue that these be understood as two manifestations of some deep underlying Javanese ur-ritual. They contrast in many significant ways; from the gestures and sounds presented, to the constitution and expected behaviour of the worldly audience, for example, these could scarcely be more different. But both present music and dance felt to be ritually powerful, tying together notions of human sexuality, agricultural fertility, supernatural power, illness, and death.
