Ten minutes into the second half of the Master Dancers of Bali program at Sanders Theatre on the night of October 4, a king and his servant were arguing loudly with each other in song and speech with spurts of English slang. The king was played by a woman, the servant’s face was covered by a half-mask and a moustache, and both of them were wearing variants of the costumes displayed in the classical-dance numbers earlier in the program. The scene, like all Balinese performance, struck me as ambiguous, disorienting, seductive, and strangely lucid.

When you first see these unearthly dancers in their shimmering costumes and fantastic headdresses, and hear the rhythmic clangor of the gamelan, you slide into an exotic, remote world fixed in some lost ocean of time. But the Master Dancers demonstrated, as few previous touring groups have done, that in Bali traditional culture has a place in backyards and hotel lobbies as well as in the purer preserves of the temples and academies.

Presented by World Music, the program at Sanders began with capsule versions of traditional dances; it devoted the second half of the evening to a popular dance drama. The small company consisted of mature performers, some of them senior artists, accompanied by a chamber-sized gamelan: one metallophone (the Balinese name is gender), drum, flute, and gongs.

The dance-drama form Prembon, which was devised in the 20th century, tells a traditional story mixing different traditional styles and characters. In Friday night’s tale, Putri Cina is a king married to a Chinese commoner, and when she proves barren, he takes another wife. Wife No. 2, however, turns out to be a demi-goddess, and a feisty one at that. Their ensuing brawl is finally settled by the Deity of Mount Batur, and the two women go off amicably with her. Probably the king is going to keep them both.

The plot accommodates specialty bits: clowning by the masked family retainer, laments by the Chinese queen, petulant scenes by the interloper, and ostentatious efforts by the king to find a solution. The two wives bash each other with branches, yelling bilingually all the while. The jokes and the grandstanding come across even though you can’t understand most of the words. But Prembon isn’t only a comic opera. It teaches reconciliation through divine intervention and acceptance of what can’t be changed.

The part of the Deity was played by 82-year-old Ni Ketut Cenik, who also performed in the festival dance Joged Pingitan in the first half of the program. Cenik represents a temple dancer, but the ritual efficacy of the dance is no longer in effect when it’s performed for a secular audience. Her limited range of movement seemed to concentrate her gestures into tiny impulses of the head, shoulders, and torso, but at the same time she took in the whole space of the theater and beyond with her eyes.

Legong, another temple form, one derived from even older exorcism ceremonies, is ideally performed by pre-pubescent girls, but here the dancers were two young women, Ni Made Sarniani and Ni Wayan Sekariani. First they dance side by side in an identical sequence of flashing eyes, fluttering fingers and fans, angling torsos and bent legs. Midway, they become characters from one of the great Hindu epics, in this case the monkey brothers Subali and Sugriwa from the Ramayana. Gliding in opposing arcs, they confront each other, closing in from far apart to glancing contact. They thrash each other with tree branches they’ve picked up from the floor. One of them seems to win, but they end as twins again, to fight another day.

Legong is the female Balinese dance model, Baris is the male. I Made Djimat, the famous Topeng or mask dancer, danced Baris Tungai, a portrait of a warrior who displays his prowess by drawing his body up to a great height, his lifted shoulders emphasized by the exaggerated epaulets and breastplate of his costume. His gaze darts in all directions; he quivers with anticipation of battle and assurance of his mastery. Opening his arms in long, suspenseful build-ups, he suddenly cues the gamelan to a clattering explosion with his quivering hands, then wheels off to face another enemy.

Djimat also introduced the dance drama with two characters from his repertoire of masked personas: the prime minister (penglembar), a swaggering politician; and the old man (tua), who waves to the audience and blows his nose on the silk panels of his costume.

Like all the elements of the program, these vignettes only hinted at much more expansive forms, but even the Balinese like abbreviated samplers nowadays.