4 Days of Monlam Festival (Tibetan New Year). Day 2: Displaying Of The Thangka Ceremony at Rongwu Monastery.

Displaying of the Thangka. Rongwu Monastery, China. (February 8, 2009)

Note: See the introduction to this series about the Amdo Monlam Festival in the post of March 20th, 2009.

Day 2.

Displaying of the Thangka Ceremony at Rongwu Monstery.

Slideshow: Displaying of the Thangka at Rongwu Monstery.
Click inside the box if you can’t see the photographs properly, you will be redirected to a Picasa page.

Rongwu Monastery is the largest in Tongren, it has several small temples and chapels and hundreds of monks living in it. The buildings vary in style and detail, from the purest traditional Tibetan to a Chinese-Tibetan mix that the Chinese government imposed as part of the "China-fication" of Tibetan areas. The monastery has small and big gates, and walls like an ancient city, and every temple is enclosed within its own walls and gates. There are streets, houses, shops, each one with their very characteristic Tibetan doors, with wood frames sculpted with dragons or birds and flowers. Everywhere we looked there were statues, thangkas on walls, mandalas paintings, banners, prayer cloths, large canvases covering some facades, drums hanging ... It seems all this was made with mud, stone, concrete, wood… dust.

The first night of my stay in Rongwu we wanted to give the temple a look and, with great surprise, we found that we could enter, visiting its temples, chapels, walking through its streets and squares. I saw girls who, as if they were playing, sang religious songs while walking, or sometimes while running, around one of the temples. I saw people arriving in small groups and disapperaing into the darkness of the walls and streets of the Monastery, they came in processions from their villages in the nearby hills, they repeated mantras, some also sang. In the silence of that religious town, among the shadows of the monks who were walking that night I heard the sound of Tibetan horns, those sounds of the trumpets used by Tibetan Buddhists that are rooted in our memory as a powerful sound of the eternal image of Tibet; those horn sounds represent the Tibetan mystery to us, curious Westerners, and in trying to reveal that mystery we can risk everything.

Live Audio of Tibetan horns during the night of March 7, 2009, Rongwu.

Two days after that first visit to the Monastery I experienced the Displaying of the Thangka Ceremony.



Narration of the event:
(Translation from Spanish by Tadeo Berjón)

Monks carrying the enormous Thangka. Rongwu Monastery. Tongren, China. (February, 2009)

The ceremony is known for the displaying of a gigantic Thangka, by every Tibetan monastery, once as year. The thangka is "removed" from the darkness of the chapel temple (where it is always kept rolled) and then, in a procession, carried to the nearest mountain and exposed to the Sunlight.

Me, as a person interested in performing arts and the spectacular, "needed" to experience the public exhibition of the great Thangka, that ceremony with a whole village participating. I wanted to see and explore the spectacular ritual of the unveiling of a huge religious symbol, and I also wanted to try to recognise the structure of the event and the performance of its actors. But I could not just be a scholar, in an event of this nature you cannot be just a spectator, even in the remoteness of the differences in cultures and beliefs, we inevitably fade into the same event and become part of the ritual.

On March 9, 2009 we were informed that the ceremony would begin at noon and we were at the scene at approximately 11 am so we wouldn't miss any detail. With the experience of the previous day at Niantog monastery, we were prepared for a long wait. But we didn't understand clearly that Niantog was a small monastery with a relatively small number of monks and therefore with less dramatic events in comparison to what we were going to live in Rongwu; the wait had been long because the number of monks was not sufficient for the act, there was less organization, and it was even less "official", as there were no VIP's to please. The importance and grandness of Rongwu in the Tongren area meant it would be one of the most important events of the year, and so it was.

Dozens upon dozens of monks came and went, appearing beautifully dressed and carrying many banners, musical instruments and gifts; within the main temple hundreds of them gathered to make their preparations. Virtually exactly at noon they split into groups and began to leave the main temple, performing a kind of presentation (or introduction?) for about an hour, forming several circles around the square, with around 300 monks. The groups differed in rank (recognizable to us through the strange color of their hats and apparel), musical instruments (horns, drums, cymbals and conches) and carrying banners (flags, images, and sunshades with mandalas and peacock feathers). Each in turn made their way to their assigned space within the circle around the main square, playing their instruments or simply walking, without much ceremonial attitude; the images and sounds were so powerful by themselves that, from my point of view, there was no need to see these groups of monks in a trance or with any kind of attitude. Once that procession, which apparently had a very definite structure in such rituals for Monlam, everyone began to leave in apparent anarchy.

In the square now empty of monks the people rushed in the direction of the main doors of the temple and a big commotion began, there was great excitement in the air. More groups of monks left the temple and stood so as to make and maintain a walkway from the entrance of the temple hall, though the path didn't last much because of the crowds around; then more monks came out of the temple, pulling a rope wrapped in a kind of white gauze, typically used in the religious Tibetan tradition. Dozens of monks pulled the endless rope that, in the midst of the religious excitement, revealed what was being carried: the Thangka.

The Thangka was rolled up and was carried by many dozens of monks; order vanished and everything appeared to be driven by the chaos of an event ranging from the religious to the pagan. The common people ran to touch the large roll, some fell or were pushed violently by the movement of the row of monks, songs or rhythmic phrases (if they were not singing) could be heard and we, the outsiders, did not realise when we lost all sense of spectator civility and propriety and ran along with them, we were pushed too, we were living a probably different excitement but our senses were as altered as those of the people who were living a very special religious moment.

Our guide, I should mention, a real expert in these events, kept trying to get us to the next stage of the procession, so we wouldn't miss any of the essential parts of it.

Outside the main temple there was people everywhere and the monastery itself was a city in carnival, living a striking but live religious ceremony. The rows of monks pulling the rope and those carrying the Thangka did their utmost to move through the crowd amid the chaos, their own sweat, their shouting, their red tunics and dust.

To follow the flow of the procession that carried the Thangka would have got us stuck in some narrow passage, so our guide cleverly led us around the monastery to try to anticipate the procession and the crowd that followed them, which is why I could take some shots that simply would have been impossible to achieve otherwise.

The procession took another hour to reach the space designated for the revealing of the big thangka, the mountainside that served as backdrop to the imposing Rongwu monastery. There, on the slope, several monks who had preceded the procession waited for those who carried the Thangka. Now we had an image of perhaps thousands of monks all the way from the main monastery's entrance to the top of the mountain.

The path of the procession was turning into a wonderful live performance, deeply emotional and brilliant. Among their songs and effort, their joy when linked to the euphoria, I could see a gathering of the passionate people of the region, looking for contact with the sacred object while paying their respects at the same time. I saw old people kneel, mothers with children crying in the arms falling down while trying to get their children's forehead to touch the rolled up Thangka, monks hitting their brethren to open up the way and dozens of men offering their hands to help pull.

We had to find a space at the foot of the mountain where we could live the moment of the unveiling, but also to achieve a good angle for shooting video, but electricity cables and a huge amount of people made the task very difficult. In the end, and having found a place at the foot of the mountain, between the movement and jostling of the crowd I found the spot from which I made my shots.

The experience of seeing this huge religious symbol being unveiled in the midst of the euphoria (screams, prayers, music, prostrations, joy) of a people is a thing I fear is impossible to share in its entirety. Once the unveiling began, the people began to "open" religiously, to "ask", to "offer" to "burn", to move everywhere (and so I had to do with my camera). I went back to listen to those songs of the Tibetan women, the high pitches so characteristic of them and that the women of this people are prepared to sing as religious song but, apparently, with ts origins in popular culture.

In that chaos-spectacle the ritual followed its course, several monks in a semi-circle purified items, received money, recited mantras, played trumpets. - "Time is short" - the guide told us, in a blink of an eye everything would end. The Thangka are revealed each year for some 30 minutes only.

Our guide dragged us to another part of the mountain, from where we could see the culmination of the ceremony. Several groups of monks were already on their way back in totally relaxed way, walking, playing, carrying their ritual objects as if worthless packages, all the while groups at the side of the mountain were preparing to re-roll the big canvas with the image of Buddha. Rows of men left back for the temple, rows of men left the area of the event, but many expected the final stage. The chants of the monks continued and among them the rolling up of the Tangka happened relatively quickly. The show had ended in no time. An empty space now adorned the mountain.

Nobody was interested anymore in that gigantic rolled-up Thangka, everything was over, as if that great roll did not have value anymore. No one was waiting for ts return, or at least none of those who had witnessed the unveiling on the mountain.

On our way back, some were waiting, at the doorway of the temple, for the ashes of what had been a few moments ago, I suppose.

Video 1 of the unveiling ceremony of the great Thangka at Rongwu Monastery (March 2009)

Displaying of the Thangka Ceremony at Rongwu Monastery (Monlam Festival 2009) Part 1 By Gustavo Thomas
View in HD Download 720p HD Version Visit Gustavo Thomas's ExposureRoom Videos Page

Video 2 of the unveiling ceremony of the great Thangka at Rongwu monastery (March 2009)

Displaying of the Thangka Ceremony at Rongwu Monastery (Monlam Festival 2009) Part 2 By Gustavo Thomas
View in HD Download 720p HD Version Visit Gustavo Thomas's ExposureRoom Videos Page

Although I had had other experiences with "processions" (two years earlier at Osaka with the Tenjin Matsuri festival and the other one here at Niantog monastery with the Buddha Statue procession), the grandeur of the event had no comparison and I could only compare it with what I experiences when I saw La Fura Dels Baus. I have followed (by chance) La Fura around the world and have managed to see them several times in Mexico, once in Beirut and another time in Beijing, both in open air performances and in enclosed space (1). It is clear that I refer to the open-air performances when I make the comparison with the Tibetan ceremony which I had just witnessed. In the end, what I was seeing was a mass spectacle. The waiting, the continuous preparation before the spectators, the excitement caused by such preparations (movements of players, attachments, machines, etc) always in motion, their spectacular choreography, the open spaces, the movement of the public that never stops being a participant, the freedom as a spectator to talk, to scream, to be as exposed as the actors, this all was so similar to what I had experienced at the ceremonial unveiling of the Thangka in Rongwu. I always wonder at how the experience with La Fura has become a legend in my stage memory.

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As I mentioned before (and as I like to emphasize) my interest in collecting this information and publish it on the web is purely documentary and is only to share my experience; even though I hope to improve or achieve a desired technical quality in my recordings, I accept that I have sacrificed all to make available the unique moments. I would like to be an educated photographer or to have a team with dozens of cameras filming everything, but too worry too much about that would make me lose the value of the very personal shots my videos of events and scenes offer. I avoid telling a story beyond the linear recounting of events, most of the time I use the actual sound during the shooting and keep the editing to a srict minimum to eliminate what becomes indistinguishable due to movement or error.

I think the best way to look at these documents is in a calm way and with a desire to explore, part by part, combining with the narrative of my experience. I do not want to replace your experience of going to the place and living a representational act of this kind. I want you to experience a little of what I saw that day, those hours. The rest, the stories, the creative videos, those are part of another part of my creative life.

(1) I have an entry on the visit of La Fura dels Baus in Beijing: http://gustavothomastheatre.blogspot.com/2007/05/la-fura-dels-baus-in-dashanzi-798.html. It is a pity that I didn't take footage of any of their other presentations. Beirut was a huge surprise, especially knowing that the performance would arrive in a boat that had crossed the Mediterranean and that, once anchored at the port of Beirut, would offer a huge "ritual" with no religious reason. This is a video I found in Vimeo.com with the same spectacle but in Portugal:

Street Theatre in Today China (Part 1)

The European street theatre tradition has grown into a fantastic development of acting and directing techniques, and dramatic structure as well, and those improvements have sprouted almost all over the world. Groups and companies like the Odin Teatret of Denmark, Tascabile di Bergamo and Teatro Potlach from Italy, have even created a new school within the theatre itself; La Fura dels Baus deserves a special chapter in this matter.

Latin America, Australia, the USA and Canada have joined their own traditions to these new ways of doing street theatre. Some oriental regions, like Kerala and Bali for example, have an enormous influence over these new ways of doing. The result has been stunning spectacles everywhere in the world: festivals, ceremonies, incursions in all kinds of mass-gathering, etc.

China is a different story. Chinese street theatre and all its performing arts have been hidden (and in one moment, during the cultural revolution, were almost erased) for many years; censorship and bans are common words in theatrical language here. Today, street theatre is fighting for its right to exist.

Street theatre is prohibited in China.

This is a strong sentence but also a misleading one. Well, not really, Street theatre is not banned in China; there is not one article in Chinese law banning street theatre, but we all know that not everything in law is written and clear. Chinese law prohibits any public demonstration without a permit from the police. Bad memories from the Tian’anmen square protest in 1989 are the origin of this ban, plus the usual censorship over any kind of public artistic expression. The Olympics and an impressive economic growth have not done anything for improving these conditions, and they’ve even pushed back any kind of improvement. (1)

There are no Chinese groups of street theatre in mainland China; groups and companies of traditional dance, commercial companies dedicated to creating mass spectacles, etc., yes, but nothing like the new street theatre I talked about.

Even with this dismal panorama, if we are lucky, we can find some ‘actions’ or ‘manifestations’ that we can call ‘theatre’. China is a huge country with dozens of cities with more that one million people and many things happen there, even that different kind of theatre.

My experience is centered on the two main cities, Beijing and Shanghai, as they are a good example of what is happening here.



Wangfujing and Chaoyang Park


Squares and streets can’t be taken by surprise and the police don’t give permission to perform to anyone without some link with the government; it is inside ‘special’ public places where we can find some kind of street theatre; talking about streets and squares, we have Wangfujing street, the most famous commercial street in Beijing, and Chaoyang park, which is also an amusement park.

The surprise that usually comes with the incursion of the theatrical play in the daily life of any street or square in the city finishes when the place is chosen for anyone and prepares the public for the spectacle, but it is also a common practice in the Western world: festivals have their own schedule and people know the who, where and when of performances and, of course there are laws that allow or not the spectacle to take place, depending of many factors, including security ones, of course. The difference in Beijing is that there are no other places to do it and you almost never find Chinese independent groups.

Till now (March 2008) I have not seen in Wangfujing any street theatre spectacle as we know them in Occident, but many touristic festivals and some dance group performances. I know by direct sources that some spectacles have been suspended because they didn’t have the right permits, and I have seen some foreign festivals taking place on this street.

Some photographs from Internet about events in Wangfujing:

St. Patrick's Parade at Wangfujing AP: Bands Music Parade at Wangfujing

Chaoyang Park (and its amusement park) is the main venue for festivals which use any kind of street spectacle; it has some squares just for performing arts and concerts. Foreign groups usually perform their street theatre here, and Chinese spectators react not much differently from a spectator from the Western world. I have never seen or heard about any Chinese groups performing here.

Video of Sychroswing by the Australian group Strangefruit:

Beggars in Shanghai


It is also possible to see some street spectacles from every day life: beggars playing music are the usual one.

In Beijing, begging is not permitted, but Shanghai is a slightly more liberal city and doesn’t care much about it, so I could find some examples of this street spectacle.

Video: blind musicians in Shanghai

Fairs: Liulichang and its Chinese New Year fair


On some special occasions as important holidays the government organize fairs; millions of people enjoy eating traditional food, buying regional art-crafts and seeing spectacles; these spectacles are always tinted with Chinese tradition and none of them are “contemporary”: traditional chinese dance, traditional Chinese music and singing, Chinese opera and traditional Chinese acrobatics.

Liulichang street in Hepingmen, a very traditional street area in downtown Beijing, hosts every year one Spring festival (or Chinese New Year festival) fair. This 2008 I found, among millions walking all around, two interesting street spectacles: the dance of the lion and acrobatics with stilts.

Dance of Lion at Liulichang Fair

Acrobats on Stilts at Liulichang Fair

Nuo Theatre and traditional open air theatre


Traditional theatre and dances are part of the touristic program of the Chinese government. Every part of China, every village, has one special program to attract tourists displaying their “cultural treasures”, many of them just recovered from their ashes after the cultural revolution in the 60s and 70s of the 20th Century, and many of these dances have also lost their religious origin.

Video of traditional Chinese regional dance:

Among these “cultural treasures’ we can find the Nuo theatre from Fujian province in the South of China, which is one of the last remains with religious-origin theatre. (2)

Video of Nuo theatre:

Now, two videos of Puppet theatre and Shanghai Opera both performed on Shanghai streets in 1927. These videos are invaluable documents about the way of perform Chinese theatre and how people used to see them.

Chinese puppet theatre in a Shanghai street (1927)

Chinese opera in a Shanghai street (1927)

(1) We have to see the reaction of the Chinese government to the riots in Tibet to understand that. Amnesty International has reported in March 2008 how the Olympics Games in China have also strengthened some forms of censorship in the country.
(2) Jo Riley in “Chinese Theatre and The Actor in Performance” (Cambridge Studies in Modern Theatre. Cambridge University Press) explores ritual sources of Nuo Theatre and its similitude with Beijing Opera.

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Any comment, please, if you want a reply write your e-mail. China has already blocked Blogger so I can't acces to my posts and read your comments (I can read them thanks I receive a mail with them)

La Fura dels Baus in Dashanzi 798: IMPERIUM

On May 1st, 2007, La Fura dels Baus performed IMPERIUM at the Dashanzi 798 Art Compound in Beijing, China. These are some impressions about the event and, of course, some images I took of it.

Since the 80s, as a spectator I’ve kept in touch with the work of La Fura dels Baus. I knew about them for the first time when I was a theatre student at university in Mexico; people were saying that a group of crazy spanish actors was going to come, trash cars and spray the public inside the parking of the National Auditorium with paint (and it was like that, of course). Some time later I saw them in some theatre festivals and tours around Mexico; as everyone did, I also watched their spectacle for the Opening Ceremony of the Barcelona Olympic Games, and watched the TV news about their performances in the World Expo in Germany; and the last time, live, in Beirut, Lebanon, when a part of the company was travelling on a boat through the Mediterranean and stopped at the Beirut port and moved, with their technological and spectacular games, the static Lebanese culture.

I was very surprised when I heard La Fura was coming to Beijing: the Chinese (the Chinese government, of course) usually avoid “dangerous” Performing Groups, but I also remembered that La Fura dels Baus, even if they like to play with violence, protest and rebellion, have got an advantage: their spectacles are mainly movement, music, sound,yet very little text (1). And I wasn’t wrong, they choose IMPERIUM, a spectacle where text is minimal, in Spanish, and with no translation.

An old depot or factory room was chosen as the performing espace, one of dozens with huge theatrical possibilities that exist in this former industrial complex in the east part of Beijing.

Dashanzi is currently the avantgarde in China, more than any other artistic place in the country, including Shanghai; they say it’s the next Soho China offers to the world. In one enormous area of obsolete factories where the Comunist era had its climax many years ago, with some interesting Bauhaus style buildings, a small group of chinese artists (first) and some foreigner investors (later), took root there and established their studios and small galleries. Time passed by and Dashanzi 798 (the name by which people knew the factory place) became the new Mecca for the new Chinese artists, for foreigners hungry for contemporary art, for more entrepeneurs and, of course, for the Chinese government(2). Now Dashanzi is included in the plans for the modernization of the artistic chinese world; yes, it’sa fact and there’s no turning back. But thanks to that, it was in the eyes of the international Cultural World, and La Fura dels Baus performed there.

Any spectacle by La Fura del Baus is always fantastic; once you taste their products inevitably you offer yourself to them, and that’s because they offer everyhting to the spectators.

I’ve always had my doubts about their way of managing dramatic structure, about the developing of the story within any spectacle, even about Acting (when acting refers to the needs of a classical character), but at the same time I recognize every spectacle is an evolution in their amazing way of exploring the stage. IMPERIUM got the same “mechanical” structure of other spectacles of theirs: machines in continuous movement, video, physical violence, but the story and the way to put it on stage got a real link with the spectator, the mix between technology and the human body (including the spectator’s body) is really punching; this time there are no unresolved points because, as a spectator, I couldn’t define any intelectual point beyond body language, beyond sound. It is not an apology of Violence, it is a showcase of it. IMPERIUM is very “actual”, we can see terrorism, politics, the media, and our bodies, our horrified minds; it literally moves the spectator, running together, shouting together, yelling together.

I saw dozens of spectators yelling and running and taking video and photographs at the same time; and this is for me one of the most interesting points, the creators of IMPERIUM are in concordance with our modern world: you can’t forbid people to bring in technology if the spectator actually wears it, uses as a part of his memory… They wanted us to take photos and videos as part of the spectacle, IMPERIUM is still performing in my computer, every time I see the images extracted from it.

IMPERIUM video (first part)

IMPERIUM video (second part)

(1) There are exceptions, as their “Fausto” (Faust), but they definitely didn’t want to perform those kind of spectacles, first because of the language barrier and second because of the obstacles Chinese could put to any theatrical text. Of ocurse all these are suppositions of mine.
(2) That means censorship working nearby (let me remind you of The Gay and Lesbian Dashanzi 798 Cinema Festival, banned since 2005); it also means big enterprises look at it as a good way to spend their “cultural taxes”, investing in special galleries and museums like Nike and Guess have done, showing their products like pieces of art. This bizarre mix between unknown artists looking for spaces to show their art and the “new Chinese free market money” make of Dashanzi 798 a place partly fascinating, partly hideous.