A recent trip for my first ever visit to Indonesia, took me to Prambanan near Yogyakarta, Java.
One of the best things I saw there was the Prambanan Ballet, not a conventional ballet, but Indonesian style.
For the first time in my life I paid for VIP seats and trust me there was no regrets!
The Ramayana Ballet is a beautiful art performance, amazing and hard to match. This show is able to unify the Javanese arts of dance, drama and music in one stage and one momentum to present the Ramayana story, the legendary epic of Walmiki written in Sanskrit.
The music is not the accompanying music from the actual play as there is much narrative and singing and the quality quite poor from recordings. Instead I have used a piece of Javanese music called Gamelan, which consist largely of several varieties of gongs and various sets of tuned metal instruments that are struck with mallets.