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Tag Archives: Ramayana

Games with Shadows

25 Wednesday Jul 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Fairy Tales and Myths, Narrative Methods, Theatre and Performance

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Tags

Claude Debussy, cuntastori, Estampes, gamelan, Hacivat, Indian shadow puppets, Indonesia, Javanese, Karaghiozis, Karagoez, Lotte Reiniger, Mahabharata, Marionettes, metallophones, Mimmo Cuticchio, Pagodes, Paris Exposition, puppets, Ramayana, shadow puppets, Teatro dell'Opera dei Pupi, Turkey, Wallace and Gromit, wayang kulit

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

From our childhood, we’ve been interested in puppets.  We began with marionettes.

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(These, by the way, are from Palermo, in Sicily, and come from the famous Teatro dell’Opera dei Pupi, whose chief puparo, or puppeteer, is a hero of ours, Mimmo Cuticchio,

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who is also  a street-corner storyteller, a cuntastori, who, with only a cape and wooden sword, can make anything happen.)

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All kinds of puppets interest us, however, from the most elaborate, like marionettes,

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to the most basic–

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and what can be more basic than Cookie Monster?

In our last, we briefly mentioned the work of Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981),

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who, in a long career, created hundreds of figures in silhouette, employing them to tell both traditional stories as well as original ones.

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Her method was to draw and cut out figures, then film them with stop-motion photography—if you know the adventures of Wallace and Gromit, you’ll have seen the clay figure version of this method.

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Her figures, as we wrote, reminded us of traditional shadow puppets, once popular in many parts of the world, from Karagoez, in Turkey (KAH-rah-goes on the right, with his friend, Hacivat—HA-tsih-vat)

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to his Greek cousin, Karaghiozis,

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to Indian shadow puppets

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to their direct descendants, the wayang kulit, or “leather puppets” of Indonesia.

 

Not only the look of these puppets, but how they’re managed against a screen reminded us of Lotte Reiniger’s work.

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We say “direct descendants” because, considering the two main stories Indonesian puppeteers tell, as well as elements of the puppets themselves, it’s clear that this part of shadow puppet tradition has come to the island from farther west, those two stories, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, being traditional Indian epics, like the West’s Iliad and Odyssey.

(If you don’t know Indian epic, we would recommend this English version of the Ramayana.  It’s meant for children, but it’s nicely told and keeps to the basic story—we also like the fact that the author’s first name, Bulbul, (“Nightingale”) is that of one of our main characters in our new novel, Grey Goose and Gander.)

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Lotte Reiniger’s puppets are cut from what appears to be black cardboard and therefore lack color.

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Traditional puppets are made of buffalo leather, scraped thin, and painted in such a way that they almost look like figures from medieval stained glass windows.

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They are large and are supported on a rod, with thinner rods allowing the arms to move.

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The stage is a large, white screen

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and the shadows are created by a lamp behind it.  Traditionally, an oil lamp is used, but you can now see performance pictures with an electric light which, to us, is too bright and rather spoils the old-fashioned, smoky effect.

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Because of the bright colors of the puppets, some people actually prefer to sit behind the screen,

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where they can also better hear the accompanying orchestra, a gamelan, or group of metallophones.

image17gamelan

 

Here’s a LINK to music used in performances.  We recommend it, believing it to be very beautiful, as well as being very different, both in sound and structure, from western classical music (and, if you read us regularly, you know that we’re passionate about that, as well).  In fact, it has even influenced western classical music, particularly that of Claude Debussy (1862-1918).

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Debussy first heard a gamelan in 1889 at the Paris Exposition,

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was impressed with what he heard, and began to play with effects which echo gamelan compositions.  “Pagodes” from his 1903 collection, Estampes (“Prints”) is a good example.  Here’s a LINK so that you can compare it with the gamelan.

The performances themselves are an interesting mixture, typical of what was originally an oral tradition.  Although plot lines are taken directly from epic, they act as a mere skeleton for the play.  The puppeteer, like someone rebuilding a body on a skeleton, adds his own material—dialogue, subplots, extra characters, jokes, and, sometimes, political commentary—to (literally) flesh out the basic frame.  It’s interesting, too, that the characters can be on two levels.  On the upper level, they are all princesses and princes, kings and queens, nobles and generals.

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On the lower level, they can be demons,

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who act not only as servants, but as interpreters, a very necessary function as the upper level characters tend to speak in Old Court Javanese, an archaic language which the audience wouldn’t understand.  The lower level speaks the local language and so can guide the audience through the (often complex) plot, as well as make local references and jokes.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to see wayang kulit outside of Indonesia or in any language besides those of Indonesia, but one of us has been fortunate to see several performances in English by the US puppeteer, Larry Reed, of Shadowlight Productions.  These shows are about two hours long (very short in comparison with Indonesian performances, which can go on all night) and feel like 10 minutes, the magic being in the shadows, the plot, and the quick wit of the puppeteer.  Here’s a LINK to Shadowlight to tell you more.

We want to end on a different note, however.  A long time ago, we saw a very good amateur production of The Hobbit as a play.  At the time, we were struck by how much could be done very simply on stage and, in particular, how Smaug could be brought to life with a small group of actors bunched together, swaying in a strobe light (that’s one of those flashing lights which alternates light and shadow effects) and all speaking at once.  Ever since, we’ve thought about shadow plays and The Hobbit—just look at this dragon from a production by the Great Arizona Puppet Theatre—what do you think, dear readers?

image22dragon.JPG

And thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

CD

ps

If you’re bitten by the puppet bug, and would like to know more, visit The World Encyclopedia of Puppetry Arts at this LINK.

Now You Don’t See Me, Now You Don’t

07 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Villains

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Tags

1984, Antagonists, Big Brother, Hobbits, Invisible, Palantir, Paradise Lost, Prince Valiant, Ramayana, Ravana, Saruman, Sauron, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Villains, Visible

Invisible-Man

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

     Imagine this—and we’re sure it’s happened to you. You’re working, somewhere by yourself, maybe downstairs. It’s late. Very. Everyone else is long asleep. And you suddenly, for no easy reason, look up. It’s nothing. Nothing…visible. Is it something you heard, then? But what? Is it even a sound—and certainly not something distinctive, like things in old horror movies—chains, groans, thumping footsteps from overhead—but maybe something very quiet—almost nothing more than the disturbance of familiar patterns like appliance hums. In fact, maybe it’s the silence under the familiar patterns which magnifies it. No matter what it is, it’s there. And, at the moment you actively take notice, the creepy feeling catches hold, and you sit, listening ever more intently. (Holding your breath is optional, but a popular choice for times like this.)

     Recently, we wrote about two kinds of villains, those we called “open-ended” and those we called “terminal”. Another classification which might spring from that eerie feeling described above: villains visible and villains invisible.

     Let’s return for a moment to that not-so-quiet place where your work was disturbed by…what? If you were a small child, perhaps it would be easy to give it shape from a fairy tale book you’d read, or a movie you’d seen. One of us, for example, was haunted in far childhood by a Hal Foster Prince Valiant illustration in which Prince Valiant has been drugged by Morgan le Fay. Every night, creatures like those in the picture would creep out of the eaves doors at the far end of the room and clutch at the bottom of the bed…

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 As we’re adults (sort of), however, do we necessarily embody whatever it is at such moments? And there’s that second question: do we want to? For all that we may be creeped out, is there some odd, perverse pleasure in being creeped out? Certainly those who make horror movies think so! But is there a difference between seeing what scares you and only feeling it?

     With that in mind, suppose that you’re not you, spooking yourself (yes, pun intended) late at night in your living room, but Tolkien constructing a long and complex combination of myth and adventure. You’ve got a wide assortment of protagonists, beginning with some of those beings you created in an earlier story, Hobbits.

fellowship

     What about villains, antagonists? As we’ve discussed in a previous posting, they are necessary to provide friction, that resistance which pushes against the heroes and creates the motion which is a plot.

     Commonly, such a figure is visible, like Lucifer, in Paradise Lost.

GustaveDoreParadiseLostSatanProfile

     Or he’s very visible, like Ravana in the Ramayana, with his ten heads.

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     For us, however, this is to risk circumscribing the villain, his visible body suggesting his visible limits. After all, it was a Sauron with hands who lost the Ring to a sword blade. To have a body, then, is to be vulnerable (literally, in the case above) and, more perhaps more important, in terms of story, more predictable, more bound by conventions.

     You (as JRRT) create Sauron, then, who once had a body, but now you make him nearly disembodied, being represented physically as a single, fiery eye.

Eye_of_Sauron

     This gives the effect of a brooding, ever-watchful presence, a bit like all of those posters in 1984’s London of Big Brother.

big-brother-is-watching

     This presence can be captured in the text in all sorts of ways, both direct and indirect. You have only to look up “Sauron” in the index to The Lord of the Rings to understand this: “Dark Lord, Enemy, Black One, Black Hand, Black Master, Base Master of Treachery, Dark Power, dark hands of the East, Nameless One, etc.”

     A brooding presence, however, is a real challenge for anyone trying to transfer The Lord of the Rings to the screen, which is why, after the previous defeat of Sauron, in which he appears as a huge being in black armor, he is reduced to that eye, sometimes captured in a palantir

palantir

Or Galadriel’s mirror, though, more often, as Sam and Frodo come closer to their goal, as the equivalent of a tower-mounted searchlight.

Mordor

     Film and fiction are different media, with different needs and tools to satisfy those needs, as the script writers never tire of explaining to us. In our opinion, however, this extremely literal depiction so strongly smacks of old black-and-white prison escape films,

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that we wish that those script writers could have left the Dark Lord offstage entirely, if this is the best they could do.

     With our feeling that an bodyless villain might be more powerful here than an incarnated one—remember feeling spooked at night by a subtle change in the ambience?—we would wish that the writers had been a bit more imaginative—and had read their author a little more closely. After all, he had plenty of good ideas about how to depict villains. And it is perhaps a sad commentary on their work that, increasingly, in their years of using JRRT, they abandoned him, choosing, instead, to bloat his story and turn it in directions he clearly never intended. Why not, for example, do as Tolkien did and mirror the villain not only in that long list of titles, but also in the actions and words both of his subordinates and his opponents? Would this have worked? Perhaps a reference to the amount of time “You Know Who” appears on-screen in the first Harry Potter movie in contrast to how often he is mentioned would suggest how this might have worked.

     As for villainous subordinates and their actions, we’ll have more to say about them in our next.

lee34

Thanks, as always, for reading. Remember: we want to encourage discussion and debate. If you agree with us, say so. If you don’t, say so and we can have fun working through our views.

MTCIDC

CD

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