The bad news — or perhaps it’s an exciting opportunity — is that little of this is announced or scheduled in a way that fits into a world of prearranged vacations or advance-purchase airfares. Web-based information is sketchy. You could always call. But this is a place where, as Ry Cooder famously said of Havana, “when the phone rings, it’s like a dog barking — no one pays attention.” Official sources such as the city’s tourism group and most hotels know mainly about static attractions like the museums and temples. Word of mouth, through new acquaintances and friends, is how you come to see its hidden life.

So you show up at the right places, find the right people (this town has coffee and pastry shops like Boston has Irish bars) and leave plenty of messages. You spot the few other travelers at recitals and galleries and become comrades at a glance, comparing hand-scrawled notes as they did a hundred years ago. You get invitations to gamelan evenings, or hear of a gallery opening as if it were a rave, show up and meet an artist who last week was lionized in Paris.

Or maybe you just get a cryptic text message telling you to be at a crossroads outside of town. That is the only hint something special may be going on up a dusty farm road, past pens of chickens, goats and a few munching water buffalo. But at its end, a large postindustrial studio is throbbing with activity. Dancers, stagehands, musicians carrying heavy brass gongs, computer technicians with clipboards; all in a swirl and, at its center, the intent, black-clad choreographer Martinus Miroto.

Mr. Miroto was born and raised in this city, where dance class is required in high school. Since then he has toured the world and won praise with acclaimed choreographers such as Pina Bausch and Peter Sellars. His own dancing draws on the rich vocabulary of classical Javanese movement, pulling together its rapid, angular, formal phrases into fluid, emphatic statements of personal experience rather than collective myth. Rather than remaining in Berlin or Los Angeles where he studied, he started the Miroto Dance Company, building an arts campus around this high-roofed studio, clad in aged coconut trunks. A performance here may start on a traditional stage or outdoors, on a terrace that lets dancers overflow across the nearby stream, wandering among torches and foliage, or splashing in a pool fed by a waterfall.

For the traditional dance he grew up with, one of Java’s most vivid full-scale productions is showcased just a few miles north of town. The Ramayana Ballet, a spectacular staging of the South Asian epic, takes place every night of the year with firelight, extravagant costumes, a full gamelan orchestra and grandeur in the shadow of the nearby ninth-century Prambanan, the largest Hindu temple in Indonesia. (The region’s other World Heritage Site, the ninth-century monument at Borobudur, is the largest Buddhist temple in the world and worth a day trip.)