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adding to the beauty and wealth of the Balinese culture is its dance, which is performed during temple festivals and in ceremonies of the cycle of life and death. Dances are so much a part of Balinese daily rituals that the performances that tourists see in hotel and restaurants are just a fraction of the wealth of Balinese dance.

Though the origin of the Balinese dance harks back long before any written history, inscriptions from the ninth century named the wayang (puppet theatre) and topeng (mask dance) as the main entertainment of the day. Even gamelan music had already been performed in the Dong Son bronze culture of the first millennium BC. Apart from the trance dances that are indigenous much of the Balinese dance heritage actually originated from Java.