Kecak (pronounced: "KEH-chahk", alternate spellings: Ketjak and Ketjack), a form of Balinese music drama, originated in the 1930s and is performed primarily by men. Also known as the Ramayana Monkey Chant, the piece, performed by a circle of 100 or more performers wearing checked cloth around their waists, percussively chanting "cak", and throwing up their arms, depicts a battle from the Ramayana where monkeys help Prince Rama fight the evil King Rvana. However, Kecak has roots in sanghjang a trance inducing exorcism dance.
In the 1930's Wayan Limbak worked with German painter Walter Spies to create the Kecak from movements and themes in the traditional sanghjang exorcism ritual and the portions of the Ramayana. This collaboration between artists worked to create a dance that was both authentic to Balinese traditions but also palatable to Western tourist's narrow tastes at the time. Wayan Limbak popularized the dance by traveling throughout the world with Balinese performance groups. These travels have helped to make the Kecak famous throughout the world.
Video of a Kecak performance is prominently featured in the 1992 film Baraka. Several audio recordings are commercially available.
Ketjak is written in series of expanding paragraphs where the sentences of one paragraph are repeated in order in subsequent paragraphs with additional sentences inserted between them, recontextualizing them.
Ketjak is written to force the reader to notice his or her own recognition of each sentence and the composition of its elements into one image or concept at a time, and then to see the ways by which the reader adds these up by means of contiguity and the familiar touch of recall.
Ketjak is the opposite of casual or causal collage; it does not push toward a whole so much as it reveals the habitual urge toward assembling what Silliman, in his interview in The Difficulties special issue and elsewhere, has called "the tyranny of the whole,"
Ketjak, which in many respects marks my adulthood as a writer, was the next step in my work as a poet, not a step away The concept for Ketjak had been in my mind for at least a year, but I didn't know how to proceed with it.
Ketjak is structured so that every paragraph has twice as many sentences as the previous paragraph, with every other sentence being a repetition of the sentences (in exactly the same order) from the previous paragraph.
Unlike Ketjak, where development from one occurrence of a sentence to the next is minimal, I took a device from "2197," one of the works in The Age of Huts, in which a recurring sentence is radically rewritten so as to appear distorted, broken, artificial.
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