Every two years Toronto celebrates the Ashkenaz Festival, and one of its main events is the performance and parade, in the end of the festival, by Shadowland Theatre, on one subject referent to the Ashkenaz culture.
This year the theme was "the golem", that mythical monster of the Renaissance Praga, which once he is alive gets mad and kills everyone who's not a believer, and the only thing could stop his fury is being in love.
Texts, photographs and videos in this Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved by Gustavo Thomas.
If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.
Puppet Museum (Museu da marioneta) entrance in Lisbon. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)
I know,I didtravel to Lisbonat the end ofSeptember 2011,but as withmanyother experiencesin my travelsI could notshare itwhen thishappened.To every thingits timecomes.
That visitto Portugalwas a totaldelight,and althoughI did not seea singleplay ordance performance(I remind you thatIactuallywent to apartyto Andalusia, whereI would give myfirst presentation ofButohtoa live audience),there were some"performance"experienceworthsharing.One of these experienceshas already appeared in thisBlog:Hieronymus Boschpainting"The Temptationof St. Anthony",a masterpiece at theNational Art Museumin Lisbon.Today I offer you a second one I consider interesting to share:the pictures I took inside thePuppetMuseumin Lisbon (Museu da Marioneta).
Lisbon is acity of lovely and very old neighborhoods, wecanwalk among streets with Roman ruins,Islamic period buildings,medieval churches or, especially,Portugueseimperial era squares and palaces,take a charming tram or even a street elevator to a "miradour". Yes, walking isthe best way toknow and enjoy the city.So in one moment you get todiscoverthe beautifulfacade of theformerConvent dasBernardas, aseventeenthcentury building (today completely remodeled)that now housestheMuseo da Marioneta (The Puppet Museum).
Puppet Museum in Lisbon, former Convento das Bernardas. (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)
Of course, inside thetourist guidea museum dedicated topuppetsdoes not havea big rolebut even though I wanted tovisit it; I hadthe wrong idea(read somewherebefore my arrival) thatAsianpuppettradition entered though Portugaland its influencecausedthedevelopment ofpuppet theaterin Europe,so I wanted toseethose objects-documents (the puppets)whotestified that idea.As I said before it was not an entirelycorrect information: yes,there is a wholeancient tradition ofpuppet theater inPortugalbut there is no great evidence of ancient Asian influence in it; the Portuguese Puppet tradition comes originally fromthe southern province ofAlentejo,with the puppetsof SantoAleixo,which were very famousin the lateeighteenth century, currently enjoyinga renaissance inthe same Portuguese provincewithperformances,festivalsand exhibitions of ancient collections.
Boneços de Santo Aleixo, Puppet Museum in Lisbon (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)
My visitto this museumin Lisboncouldnot be what I was expectingat firstbut itpaid off, I enjoyedthe big collection ofpuppetsfrom around theworldon display,as well asthe curiouscreationsof severalPortuguese Puppet theatre companiesof the twentieth century, especiallybythe promoter for the realizationof thismuseum, thepuppet companyofS.Lourenço.
As I'm used to do, I'll show you the more interesting pictures (in my point of view, of course)but you have in the end a slideshow with all of them; in the samewayyou can visitflickr.comand open the album (following thelinkfromeach photo) andsee them with morecalmon that site.
Stage of traditional Portuguese puppet theatre. Puppet Museum in Lisbon (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)
Portuguese puppets from beginning of twenty century. Puppet Museum in Lisbon (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)
Modern Portuguese Puppet. Puppet Museum in Lisbon (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)
Modern Portuguese Puppet. Puppet Museum in Lisbon (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)
Vietnamese aquatic puppets. Puppet Museum in Lisbon (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)
Indonesian puppets. Puppet Museum in Lisbon (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)
Indian elephant Puppet. Puppet Museum in Lisbon (By Gustavo Thomas. 2011)
Texts, photographs and videos in this Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved by Gustavo Thomas.
If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.
Traditional Puppet Theatre at Noge Street Performance Festival, Yokohama
(By Gustavo Thomas. All Rights Reserved. 2011)
Last Sunday 24th, 2011, I went to enjoy a big party in Yokohama, the Noge Street Performance Festival. This festival has place every year since 1974 (this is its 37th year) with dozens of street performers from all over Japan and the World. Of course my main interest was around those japanese performers rarely viewed in our western World and I was not deceived.
Among many of those performances it was this Japanese traditional puppet theatre: charming, simple and very interesting.
I took some photographs and two videos. Enjoy.
Traditional Puppet Theatre at Noge Street Performance Festival, Yokohama
(By Gustavo Thomas. All Rights Reserved. 2011)
Traditional Puppet Theatre at Noge Street Performance Festival, Yokohama
(By Gustavo Thomas. All Rights Reserved. 2011)
Traditional Puppet Theatre at Noge Street Performance Festival, Yokohama
(By Gustavo Thomas. All Rights Reserved. 2011)
Traditional Puppet Theatre at Noge Street Performance Festival, Yokohama
(By Gustavo Thomas. All Rights Reserved. 2011)
Traditional Puppet Theatre at Noge Street Performance Festival, Yokohama
(By Gustavo Thomas. All Rights Reserved. 2011)
Traditional Puppet Theatre at Noge Street Performance Festival, Yokohama
(By Gustavo Thomas. All Rights Reserved. 2011)
Traditional Puppet Theatre at Noge Street Performance Festival, Yokohama
(By Gustavo Thomas. All Rights Reserved. 2011)
Traditional Puppet Theatre at Noge Street Performance Festival, Yokohama
(By Gustavo Thomas. All Rights Reserved. 2011)
Bunraku Puppets. Kaganawa Museum of Cultural History. Yokohama (2011)
I've always loved Bunraku and seeing those amazing puppets was a real gift for me. The Kaganawa Prefectural Museum of Cultural History in Yokohama has two Bunraku puppets in exhibition and I could take some photographs of them.
Happy to see that, little by little, my theatre photo-document work is being recognized: one of my photos of a Wayang Kulit performance (Balinese Puppet Shadow Theatre) was chosen to be on all the programs, flyers and posters of the new Asian Art Museum of San Francisco exhibition: "Bali. Art, Ritual, Performance."
The exhibition is running from February 25th till September 11th, 2011.
This is the second part of 2 of the Ashkenaz Festival 2010 in Toronto, but I repeat the introduction of the first part:
¿In which part of the World you can experiment Jewish culture without feeling you are not part of it? Aside of New York and (maybe) Israel itself, almost everywhere in the world Jewish communities are closed to other eyes, and that's it, yes, well not in Toronto.
Jews are a very strong community here and also a very active one. Just months ago there was an impressive Jewish film festival with a huge quantity of Jewish-subject and Jewish-made films, and every September the whole city celebrates Jewish Culture with a festival called Ashkenaz Festival or Festival of New Yiddish Culture (as it was called in Yiddish). During more or less an entire week there are theatre performances, music concerts, dance performances and lessons, parades, a market fair, painting exhibitions, lectures, and religious ceremonies with a relevant openness to non-Jews that most of us have never experimented before.
Jewish artists and celebrities from all over the world come here for the festival and party and talk with everyone who wants to listen to or dance with or learn from, and that is simply amazing.
So I tried a little bit of everything and I had many surprises. I'm sharing some photographs of every spectacle and there is a video or audio when I could record something.
Now, the other five events I listened to and watched, including the parade with giant puppets, musicians and actors.
Sephardic and Mizrachi Cabaret
A concert with 10 of the best of the best in Sephardi and Mizrachi Music (from Israel and Morocco to Washington, from Sarajevo and Seattle to New York). It was the first time I experienced as spectator Ladino Songs.
Finally a very live performance and parade with hundreds of people lead by Shadowland Theatre Group with their big puppets and music bands.
Seeing a street theatre performance in Toronto is almost a miracle, there are some acrobatic groups performing here and there (Orange Circus and others), but street theatre groups I only know Shadowland Theatre Group. It seems they are working in Toronto since many years ago, and some of their first performances had political connotation for the city during the eighties, so it has been a long way on an almost deserted land. Good for them.
It is said (people who knows about it) that in the origin of the acting technique in Chinese Opera it was the way puppets were manipulated to become alive. Following strict patterns from ancient rituals to convert a dead matter in a live body, in the same way the actor’s body becomes alive in a new one, through training, in a theatrical body. That’s a fascinating subject but today I want to go further back in history. It is also said (the same savants) that the origin of the Puppet Theatre technique of movement it was inside of the ancient tombs of China, in the technique mortuary figures were made for. Human-like figures, made of wood, paper, bronze or clay, which must have had movement to recall and to reinforce life to the dead once installed in the other world; and the techniques to provoke movement in those mortuary figures were used later to create a Puppet performance outside the tomb (and at the end the actor’s performance as well).
I knew a little bit about this ideas before arriving to China but it was there, in 2005, when reading Jo Riley's book Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance(1) that I answered many of my questions about Beijing Opera Actor’s movement technique and I could compare them with what I was seeing in every performance I attended in China. Of course, and I must say it, this doesn’t mean that a common modern Chinese Opera actor is aware of this origin, or any other, in his training, he learns from a tradition, most of it imitation, and in that kind of education many questions are not answered and origins usually are covered with mystic and fantasy. That’s then part of a researcher’s field or maybe of a curious observer.
What it’s fantastic in all this story is the origin of all of it, apparently very simple human-like figures buried in a tomb, functioning as puppets for the dead, as a company for the other world, recreating life and movement in a subterranean stage-world. It wasn’t till the last century that Chinese discovered the figures and researchers could elaborate a reasonable discourse about their function in funerary rituals, keeping the idea of being alive through reaching the movement inside the tomb. So, many of these figures were made with moveable arms and jaw, painted with vivid colors for the eyes and signs referring to muscular gestures, and in some tombs hanging in a position that could keep them in movement thanks to the air (as a common puppet); all of these figures imbued of substances linked to the fluids of life (related to the Chinese terms of Qi and Shen), blood of course and several mineral powders.
Riley makes for us a fantastic parallelism of the ways those figures were made with the objective of becoming alive and how Chinese Opera training technique is structured to create the actor’s new body for the stage. In the beginning puppets were a medium for exorcism in the underworld while actors were exorcists in this our "real" world; both should follow the same patterns, being related to the same materials, and of course the same technique to become alive.
I didn’t find any of these figures inside China, only because I didn’t have the opportunity to travel where they were in exhibition, but surprisingly I found two of them during my visit to San Francisco in February 2009, inside the very well known Asian Art Museum; these figures are made of clay and their arms, once moveable parts, are missing. The Museum information said they were more than 2000 years old.
The next photographs of mortuary figures come from Jo Riley’s book, from a Principal's tomb in Mawangdui, just 40 kilometers from Changsha, in Hunan Province. The Tomb dates to approximately 168 B.C.
Finally here you see two photographs with more mortuary figures taken from an Internet site: one of them, from the Mawangdui tombs, shows a group of musicians with their instruments (it is not dated), and the other presents an almost recognizable modern puppet (but still a funerary figure), dating from Liao Dynasty (Between 907 and 1225 A.D.).
As usual, I’m happy to expose information and documents, then, the rest, if up to you. See you next time.
(1) Jo Riley "Chinese Theatre and the Actor in Performance" Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, 1997.
Once having explained (with help of a Balinese master, of course) the details of both the Wayang Kulit and the performance I witnessed at the Oka Kartini Gallery on July 19th 2009 (see my Blog post about it: http://gustavothomastheatre.blogspot.ca/2009/12/wayang-kulit-balinese-shadows-puppet.html), we can go on to the filmed material of the performance (which lasted approximately 20 minutes) and my experience there.
Evidently, ancient Balinese and Sanskrit were incomprehensible to me, but not so the sound of the singing (or reciting) and the music, nor the aesthetic visual aspect and the actions (I think in the video you will be able to appreciate it quite well in a manner similar to how I I lived it). Yet, there are some comments that I would like to share with you:
In addition to the characters that were presented in the video in the previous post, you will note the presence of a sort of leaf or butterfly (when it moves); it is a tree, "the tree of life" or Kayonan. It is one of the most important puppets and appears both at the beginning and at the end of each performance: it represents the centre, the life force, balance, which is why negative characters are placed on one side and the positive ones on the other one, with the Kayonan in the middle.
The length and public of the performance
The performance lasted a little over an hour and I noticed something that Covarrubias mentions in his book about public attitudes abroad (1): faced with a lack of understanding of the text and the lack of an ear educated to listen to the sounds of that language and music, they just started to get bored, but not so the Balinese public and some others (including me) that found an interest in them and struggled to keep from falling with the rest, but the common foreign public did fall into boredom. Some children went out to play, but others remained; in the end whole families were leaving the place before the end of the performance.
Covarrubias explains (2) it is not a children's theater, it is a religious drama featuring mythological epics that last 6 to 8 hours, full of beauty and codes that even the more stringent Balinese intellectuals enjoy (3); it is the case that the shadows, fire, song, and puppetry get the Balinese children's attention, but that's just a bonus. Hence its difficulty, hence the apparent lack of interest beyond a few minutes during the performance of almost a fifth of its normal length!
Unlike some Chinese shadow theater companies, the Balinese have not changed their themes and stagings for a child audience, nor do they show just excerpts so small only the fight scenes and acrobatics games are displayed (4). Moreover, Chinese puppets have an unparalleled movement while the Balinese ones may, in some cases, only move their arms (5)
The technique of the Dalang (the master manipulator) is, without any doubt, the same both for this performance as well as for the one he performs inside a temple, and the only fault, if I can call it that, are some comments in English ( "Hello, How are you? Do you speak English?, etc.). that, nevertheless, belongs to improvised moments of comedy that exist in long for-Balinese-only performances too; that comedy is contemporary (with up-to-date jokes), improvised and, as I mentioned, part of the tradition of representing the Wayang Kulit.
As expected, the battle scenes have the most movement and dramatic power of representation, and at some point we lose the awareness that this whole movement is performed by a single person behind the screen, the Dalang.
When you see the puppets of the Balinese shadow theatre in the windows of the shops or even in a stack while carried by the company's aides, one cannot perceive the beauty they achieve when they become shadows with help of the lit oil lamp, literally giving them the energy that the Dalang then activates to achieve the movement of life. I had had such an experience in Cambodia, in Siem Reap (6) with this same type of puppets, but that performance was done by children who had developed their technique and who somehow didn't make us see their puppets in the best way possible; but here, with a Dalang (an expert), the images remained in my memory and I remember especially the light passing through the holes carved on the doll as truly spectacular moments.
I personally enjoyed the continuous image of the tree, even more so when it "flies" like a butterfly and goes away and comes back again with the flame of the lamp in the center; in the same manner, the sound of the small Gamelan orchestra (bieng the first time I listened to it beyond restaurants' or shops' background) made me enjoy the show a lot.
The performance was about an hour and half long with no intermissions; the numbering of the videos is due to the fact that Youtube does not allow posting more than 10 minutes of material, so I split the performance into three parts (5 if I count the two extras videos, the introduction one and the one of the shots from behind the screen).
(1) Covarrubias "Island of Bali" page 237. (2) Covarrubias "Island of Bali" pages 234-237 (3) Certain types of stories are performed only for the deity, as is the case with the theater and dance from India. (4)My post on a shadow theater performance in Wuzhen, China, is a perfect example of such only-for-kids performances: Wuzhen (II) A Chinese Shadow Theatre Experience. (5)Some of the puppets from Java's shadow puppet theater can move the jaw. (6) See my post on three performances of shadow theater in Siem Reap, Cambodia: Three Shadows Puppet Theatre Plays in Siem Reap, Cambodia.
Texts, photographs and videos in this
Blog are all author's property, except when marked. All rights reserved
by Gustavo Thomas.
If you have any interest in using any text, photograph or video from
this Blog, for commercial use or not, please contact Gustavo Thomas at
gustavothomastheatre@gmail.com.
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