Keris bargain

[David]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

A nice old photo Marco, but what David wants to see is dress.

We know there are a lot of photos of dancers who are holding keris, but how many dancers are wearing keris, especially the particular style of keris dress that is under discussion?

I really cannot recall having seen any dancers in Bali actually dancing whilst wearing a keris. I might have, most of the dancing that I watched was over 20 years ago, mostly in the 1970's. I must admit, get a bit bored with Balinese performance art these days.

True Alan, i would like to see the sheaths used by dancers and actors to truly confirm that they were indeed used by them. However, what i do see in Anthony's 1941 image is again the use of the bondalan hilt form, not the figural hilts that we always see mated to these so-called dancer sheaths.
Here are two more images from famed photographer Henri Cariter-Bresson of the Barong dance from his time in Bali in 1949. Again we see the bondalan form. I cannot say i have ever seen a bondalan hilt matched with these "dancer" sarungs though.
Now this isn't conclusive evidence of course, but then, what are we basing the assumption that these sheaths actually were used by dancers and actors at some time? I don't doubt your remark that you "have seen a couple that came into Australia before WWII", but we can't really take that to the bank, now can we? Have you ever personally seen such dress actually used in Balinese theatre or dance in the past? Do you have access or photographs to these pre-WWII examples of this dress so that we can compare it to the tourist dress that we are assuming developed out of it? I mean, we have examples of keris dress that go back hundreds of years in collections. Surely then older examples of this dress should still exist somewhere. Again, i am not so much doubting their existence, and it makes a certain amount of sense that this dress form didn't just appear out of nowhere in the 1960s and was suddenly adopted for tourist keris, but i would like to see some actual evidence to confirm these suspicions.