Hey Everyone

Omigod it's all done! It was a really great three weekends with lots of new shows and different approaches to the cantastoria form. Here is a link to fotos from the last weekend which featured Marsian, Susan Simpson, Beth Nixon, Meredith Miller and the Shoddy Puppet Co.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25248731@N06/sets/72157624040933156/

If you have not received your donor gifts please let me know (hello@davebuchen.com). There are some of you whom we still don't have an address.

Thanks again, and we hope to do this all again someday. The exhibition is all boxed up together and ready to be shown in the next town.

Thanks,
Dave

PS Oh! And here's a sample of the improvised cantastorias with Jenny Magnus and Chris Schoen spinning a tale from a scroll by Tim Portlock
http://www.youtube.com/watch...

Hey All

Here are the photos taken by Kristin Basta from Theater Oobleck's three nights of improvised cantastorias.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/25248731@N06/sets/72157623867088839/

Our third weekend opened tonight with a big mix of styles.

Thanks again
Dave and Clare

Hi All,

I finally got down to the post office with all of your books, posters and novelty items today. They will arrive shortly.
And now I am back home from the first night of weekend two of improvised cantastorias with a glass of wine and chocolate cake to celebrate.
Thanks to all again
Dave

Hey All

Here is a link to the photos taken by Kristin Basta, whom we were able to pay to document the fest thanks to your contributions. The shows were all a lot of fun to do and we had nice sized crowds.

Thanks much
Dave and Clare

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25248731@N06/sets/72157623814864113/

Fleeced: You Reap What You Sow
Soozin Hirschmugl
Minneapolis, MN

This Cranky was created as a preview for the 2008 Barebones Halloween Pageant, a condensed version of the story of Jason and and Argonauts as told by the Golden Fleece. It was created in the context of many world-shaping events: the Russian/Georgian pipeline intervention, the American presidential election and the wall street crash, all of which informed the production process. The work was performed by a bagpipe playing ram, the ram and hydra’s speeches were adapted from Bridget Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Song”.

Soozin Hirschmugl is a puppeteer, visual artist, and spectacle/pageant director. As a staff artist and company member she has worked with In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater, in Minneapolis Minnesota and The Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont. She is a founding member of Barebones Productions, creators of the Annual Barebones Halloween Pageant and Pyrotechnic Show, and Chicks on Sticks, an all women’s stilting troupe in Minneapolis.

HYDRA: I am so tired all the time. I am too tired from holding up all these heads.
RAM: Wake up. They are coming for me.
HYDRA: I will be here watching you. What do you think I do all day? What do you think I do all night?
RAM: At first you will guard me and Jason will not know what to do. But Jason will have help from Medea who will get you to sleep. They will hang my bleeding body, take my fleece They will do it at night, while everyone sleeps, while you sleep and the Congress sleeps.

La Terribile vicenda di Anselmo Forgiali
(The Terrible story of Anselmo Foriali)
Diamiano Giambelli/Teatro del Corvo
Milano, Italy

This text is a betrayal, murder and punishment story very typical of the repertoire of traditional Italian cantastoria of 19th and early 20th centuries, that often took inspiration from real events. This song comes from the area of the Sieve Valley, in the province of Florence.
The banner was painted taking inspiration from the traditional old cantastoria banners, that were carried along by singers and players from village to village.
The story was a part of a wider show, all about cantastoria, that Teatro del Corvo staged in august 2008 in collaboration with Suonatori della Leggera, a group of traditional musicians from Tuscany. The show was performed in the “Cianto viol” traditional music festival of Sampeyre in the occitaine Alps of northwest Italy, and included, along with the music of Suonatori della Leggera, giant puppets, cut-out puppets, dances and stilting. The performers were a group of people of all ages in the community who built all the puppets and rehearsed with the musicians during a two-week workshop. All of the scenes were based on cantastoria songs, some traditional and some written by Suonatori della Leggera.

Co’ una lunga e affilata coltella/With a long and sharpened knife
a quel bimbo il suo collo li taglia/the head of the child she cuts away
quella misera testa poi scaglia/then she throws the poor remains
nella stanza in un angolo lá/in a corner of the room

Quando sta pe’ tornare nel letto/Just as she is going back to bed
che l’amante la sta ad aspettare/where her lover is waiting for her
alla porta lei sente bussare/at the door she hears knocking
ma coraggio d’aprire non he/but she has not courage to open....

Espaço e Idéias (Space & Ideas)
Morgan Fitzpatrick
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The images in "space & ideas" revolve around the ailments and needs of four elements in the human body: eye, ear, head and foot. Two characters perform an everyday ritual—eye exam, ear cleaning, haircut or shoeshine—while a third recites a list of maladies endured by that particular body part. Remedies appear as black-and-white blockprints, followed by parallel situations from Brazil and the United States that demonstrate people yearning to reclaim their physical and ideological environment. Inspiring words from Gandhi make an appearance, and the fragmented black-and-white world unifies into a colorful image. Philly-based puppeteer Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews created "space & ideas," along with four other short pieces, for a U.S. tour with Frederico Freitas from São Paulo. The tour, called Terra E Teto (Land and Roof), raised funds and awareness for the MTST (Roofless Workers Movement, the urban wing of Brazil's Landless Workers Movement), visiting 26 locations across 12 states in three weeks. Jan Burger, Rafter T. Sassafras and Alison Tubini Miner did some driving and performing along the way.

Here are some images for the posters that I just printed up.

Thank you all so much for getting us to our goal of $3,000 in just two weeks. We appreciate it so much.

We are scheduled to end the drive on April 1st, and hope to keep raising more money to allow us to pay the 13 different performers that we are bringing in from out of Chicago, not to mention the 10 or so performers from Chicago. This is also an effective way for us to distribute the books and posters far and wide. And who knows, maybe we'll be able to pay ourselves something.

Thanks again, and we hope to see you at the show.

Dave and Clare

The Beheading of Rahu, The Demon of the Inauspicious Time.
by Parvathi Baul
Kerala, India

After her secondary school education, Parvathi Baul joined Kalabhavan of Shantiniketan as a student of Fine Arts. During her study at Shantiniketan she traveled widely in the villages of Bengal to meet Baul Gurus. Later, she left the university and received initiation into Baul singing from Shri Sanatan Das Baul. She also practiced with shri Shashanko Goshai (who left his body in March 2006 at the age of 100.) Since the year 2000 Parvathy has been building up an unique style of (solo) storytelling with painted pictures. She has titled this work as the Chitra Katha Geeth or (storytelling with painted picture). The Beheading of Rahu, The Demon of the Inauspicious Time was created in 1995 as part of the Indo Japan exchange program, and performed in Japan with Kyogen and Kamigathamai performers. The scenes include:
The Churning of the Milk Ocean
The Sun on his Chariot of Seven Horses
The Moon with his Two Wives
Rahu’s Throat being cut while he tires to devour the Sun and Moon

SCHNITZELBANK
by Bernice Silver and Great Small Works
New York City

Bernice Silver was a member of the 1930's WPA-funded Federal Theater Project. In 1997, Great Small Works helped her recreate this cantastoria from her memory. Stephen Kaplin painted the pictures.

Bernice's introduction to the performance of this piece included a story:
"They sent me out one night to a Polish ship on the West Side all by myself. I came to the seaman--a great big brawny guy--and none of them speak English. And I start getting up in front of all of them with my German English--I use a German schoolmarm thing, as you will see. I tried to get them to sing. And I couldn't. But at least I did my duty."

LA HISTORIA DEL SUNUCO
by El Teatro Indigena de la Sierra Tarahumara
Chihuahua, Mexico

El Teatro Indigena de la Sierra Tarahumara is a small puppet theatre company located in the southernmost extension of the rocky mountains inhabited by the Raramuri Indians. The company is comprised of young indigenous men and women who did not finish school and are transitioning into adulthood. El Teatro travels from community to community, giving one week workshops in different regions of the mountains, providing an opportunity for young people from surrounding areas to gather and participate in the event.
El Teatro is organized by Teresa Camou Guerrero and core members of the current company; together they decide which local issues to address in their work, which often involves the incorporation of local legends and the creation of new songs written and performed by the company. The scripts are collectively written. El Teatro has utilized cantastoria in their performances since their founding. In 2003 the Center of Support for Indigenous Missions invited el Teatro to make a show during their national conference in Mexico City, on the theme of the importance of native corn in our communities. “La Historia Del Sunuco” deals with the contamination of native corn in the Northern indigenous regions of Mexico by the introduction of genetically modified seed. El Teatro Indígena de la Sierra Tarahumara, have performed this cantastoria in Mexico City, Chihuahua, Tijuana and all around the Sierra Tarahumara for many years. The word Sunuco comes from the Raramuri language that means native corn.

UNTITLED SCROLL
Performance Scroll
by Baku Chitrakar
Shahid, Matangini, West Bengal

Baku Chitrakar is from the Purba Medinipur district and the village Shahid Matangini, a rural village in the southern part of West Bengal.
This scroll was created as part of a collaborative project between the Bond Street Theater and traditional Patachitra painter-storytellers. The goal was to boost the economy of their community and encourage cooperation between villages. The artists derive their income solely from the presentation and sale of their paintings to the tourist trade. While the paintings are exquisite, their storytelling in chant is seen as monotonous to modern audiences, and the popularity of their presentations has diminished over the years.

As a result of the project with Bond Street, the villagers in Shahid Matangini created a new performance, which addressed village current events. It earned them some attention, and measurably added to each of the participant’s income. The performing group consisted of four participants from the workshop program and four other villagers whom they taught. This is a significant change since the Patrachitras never work as a group, only as individual painters.

Victor Mair Appreciation Corner

For those interested in knowing more about picture-story recitation than can be gleaned by the slightly embarrassing video of me decked in a painted dress and standing in what looks like a bathroom shower stall, there is no single source written in English which can surpass Victor Mair’s book Painting and Performance (University of Hawaii Press, 1988.) Mair is a Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He was researching Chinese Pien and Pao-chuan transformation stories, when he discovered an oral, performed precedent to the written literary form. His research led him to discover a whole body of performance with paintings, and undaunted, he embarked on an exhaustive exploration of picture story recitation that stretches across the globe. The book is eloquent, thoroughly researched, and incredibly inspiring, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about cantastoria.

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A Brief History of Picture Story Recitation

Mair traces the roots of picture-story performance to India, where 6th Century linguist/grammarian Panini describes objects or images of Gods on banners which enabled a low order of Brahmins called devalka to make a living by carrying them from door to door. The devalka would sing, describing the Gods, pointing out their attributes using the paintings, and then ask for money. There were also saubhika, a kind of performance of religious story at that time. Scholars are not sure whether they were picture shows or shadow plays, but speculate that they could have been both. Mair cites numerous references to particular kinds of picture showman in India from the 6th century, for example the yamapattaka who display pictures “probably on cloth scrolls or hanging [vertical] [and who sung] of the rewards and punishments to be experienced in the realm of Yama, God of the Underworld.” References also appear in political tracts of the time to spies disguising themselves as picture showman in order to travel freely. Indeed, from this very early mention of picture storytelling, already the performers are characterized as disreputable, underprivileged, and nomadic vagrants who made their living from their pictures, often passing their picture scrolls from generation to generation. These are things that I love about the form and which attracted me to it in the first place--the idea of the painting as an object that is only "manifested" when it is performed, that is also a family heirloom, and is also a means to make a living, and is also a sacred object with special powers, and also a passport, a marker of nomadic life...In cantastoria, the painting is all of this.

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Mair says that Indian picture-story performance then traveled through Central Asia with the spread of Manichaeism and Buddhism into China, where it became Pien, transformation stories, pao-chuan, and layang-pien. It also spread to Indonesia, becoming wayang beber--usually long, now horizontal (rather than vertical) painted scrolls, unrolled while a narrator spoke and sung to explain the illustration. Up to 6-8 scrolls were required for a full story cycle. This is of course brother to the wayang kulit, the shadow shows which you are probably familiar with, and also the wayang klitik, which used little flat painted wooden puppets, and the wayang golek, the 3-dimensional wooden puppets dressed in cloth clothes. All of these forms can still be seen today. From China picture-story performance spread to Japan, becoming the etoki. Mair says about etoki:
One striking aspect of Japanese etoki that helps us to understand other traditions of storytelling with pictures is the wide variety of formats employed. There are hanging scrolls with subdivisions into sections, horizontal scrolls that are unrolled on a stand or on the floor as the narration progresses, paintings that are unfolded and hung up and, in some cases, sets of illustrations in booklet form that were used when the performer went from house to house. There were even sets of dolls or figurines that the etoki performer would display by the side of the road. As he arranged the dolls in different ways and against varying backgrounds, he would tell stories about them. What this amounts to is a type of moveable etoki tableau, as it were. Or one might look upon narratives told with dolls as incipient puppet plays.

Etoki in turn developed into kamishibai “picture card shows” which was enormously popular in Japan as late as the 1950’s (the advent of television.) Guys would ride around on bikes with sets of picture cards which fitted into a box frame attached to the bike. The performer would make a lot of noise, attract a crowd, and sell candy and trinkets for money. Then those who bought from him were allowed to stand up front the closest while he would perform his story.

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Like these etoki with its dolls, or the kamishibai with its trinkets, modern versions of Chinese picture-story recitation also included objects. Some of these Chinese performances included peep-shows--little boxes with viewing holes cut in them. After the performance of the show, those who pay extra were invited to peep through the holes to see artifacts associated with the story, perhaps a lock of the heroine’s hair, or scrap of cloth from the hero’s tunic, or things like that.

It seems that picture-story telling traveled to Europe at least in the middle ages, where in Southern Italy there is evidence of painted illuminated scrolls which would be performed with sung prayer or narrative recitation dating from the 12th Century. In the early 16th Century cantambanco appeared, the word meaning “bench singer”, as the traveling performer would stand above the crowd on a little bench, singing and pointing to the pictures with a stick. Cantastoria is another Italian name for the form. In Germany you found the bankelsanger, the “bench singer”, or strassensanger (“street singer”) who performed what was sometimes referred to as Moritat, which might refer to the sensationalistic nature of these increasingly secular stories--songs about murder and death. There is documentation of these early European picture performances in a variety of etchings and engravings and in later anecdotal accounts, mentions in literature and also in the records of police arrests. The evidence in police rosters again highlights the continuing status of these performers as itinerants, functioning somewhat illicitly, outside of authority.

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In Spain the bankelsanger was called cantor de feria and the picture story itself known as retablo de las maravillas, tableau of marvels. In France the performer was known as Le chanteur de cantiques or crieur de journeaux, the name for the picture-story tellers who would tell the news of the day in picture story form. With the advent of printing, these European performers would print up broadsheets to sell,which would include excerpts or verse from their songs and sometimes reproductions of pictures as well.

All of this information in much greater detail you will find in Mair’s book, along with a stunning array of pictures.

Bread and Puppet Appreciation Corner

Right now in North America I'd say there is a mini-revival of cantastoria as a tool for artists, activists and experimental performers. This revival is due in very large part to the Bread and Puppet Theater, directed by Peter Schumann. Peter Schumann was born in Silesia in 1934. He studied and practiced sculpture and dance in Germany, moved to the United States in 1961, and founded the Bread and Puppet Theater in New York City in 1963. From hand and rod puppet shows in the streets to giant puppet parades, Schumann addressed local injustices as well as the Vietnam War. Schumann saw german banklesangers on the streets as a child, and included cantastoria as a form he often used for street-shows, prologues and scenes within larger puppet shows. Bread and Puppet has been performing shows, giving workshops, attending demonstrations, and offering internships to young artists for so many years now that the sheer numbers of puppetry artists and activists who have somehow been influenced by this company is pretty remarkable. A large number of the practitioners of Cantastoria in the U.S. today have either learned about this performance form directly from Bread and Puppet, or learned about it from someone who learned about it from Bread and Puppet

Further Resources

Another book I have referenced a lot is a book on Czech painting recitation performances. Senzace Pěti Století V Kramářské Písni, by Josef Scheybal (published in 1990. ISBN 80-7031-624-1). I had a Czech friend translate parts of it for me. Totally interesting. It also has fantastic pictures.

There is a children’s book about the Japanese kamishibai, called Kamishibai Man (2001,

Moritat, Song, Bänklesang: zur Geschichte der modernen Ballad by Karl Riha (1965, Sachse and Pohl).

Russian Minstrels: A History of the Skomorokhi by Russle Zguta (1978 University of Penssylvania Press).

In the United States the popularity of first magic lantern and then panoramas and “cranky shows” is clearly related to the practice of performed paintings. There are many books on these subjects. The Veleslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles (www.panoramaonview.org) is a great source for panorama information. The artists involved are wonderful enthusiasts of the old painting and performance technologies, and are creating a very special universe within the walls of their panorama. They have a small library of books on panorama, and when I visited them in L.A. last year, they were working on a giant cranky show which they plan to perform on tour.

I just wanted to say how humbled and heartened we are by the support that we have received. Thank you all so much. And now, more coffee and to work! to work!
dave

The last weekend of the festival features three performers from LA and two from Philadelphia all of them breaking with the traditions of cantastoria and stretching the form.

From LA, we have Marsian, puppet artist, chanteuse, and high-art drag personality, performing Growing Up LInda: Fudgie's Death. Table-top pop-up books are transformed into full-screen cinema in a neo-noir tale of desperation and depravity surrounding the troubled life of an ice-cream heiress.

Katie Shook will be performing A Very Close Look At The History And Future Of America's National Parks, Through Time Travel, In Miniature.

Susan Simpson will be performing Homesick for the World which utilizes slides. She is on the faculty of the CalArts School of Theater and is the co-founder and co-director of AUTOMATA, an organization devoted to the advancement of puppet theater, pre-cinema, and other forgotten or neglected forms.

And then from Philadelphia we have two world premieres.

Beth Nixon of Ramshackle Enterprises attempts "to surprise us out of our daily zombiedom with homemade spectacle and celebration. "

Morgan Fitzpatrick Andrews of The Shoddy Puppet Co. has been an organizer of puppet fests and maker of cardboard capers and suitcase shows.

http://www.manualarchives.org/susan.htm
http://www.katieshook.com/
http://www.marsiandelellis.com/
http://www.ramshackleenterprises.net/