Kamishibai and Why I love Powerpoints: Insight from wikipedia
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| Tokyo kamishibai with a mic |
Looking at pictures and talking about them must be in my DNA. I love making and working with Powerpoints and digital projectors. Perhaps, many, many years ago a distant relative or ancestor was a "cantastoria" who told stories with i giuglliari di piazza or the "jesters of the square"
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| kamishibai |
Cantastoria (also spelled cantastorie, canta storia or canta historia) comes from Italian for "sung story" or "singing history" and is known by many other names around the world. It is a theatrical form where a performer tells or sings a story while gesturing to a series of images. These images can be painted, printed or drawn on any sort of material.
Picture stories were also popular in Asia. In 6th century India religious tales called
Saubhikas were performed by traveling storytellers who carried banners painted with images of gods from house to house. Another form called
Yamapapaka featured vertical cloth scrolls accompanied by sung stories of the afterlife. In Tibet this was known as
ma-ni-pa and in China this was known as
pien or transformation story.
In Indonesia the scroll was made horizontal and became the
wayang beber and employed four performers: A man who sings the story, two men who operate the rolling of the scroll, and a woman who holds a lamp to illuminate particular pictures featured in the story. Other Indonesian theater forms such as
wayang kulit shadow play and
wayang golek rod puppet shows developed around the same time and are still performed today. In Japan
cantastoria appears as "
etoki" or "
emaki" in the form of hanging scrolls divided into separate panels, foreshadowing the immensely popular manga, or Japanese comics.
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| Surrounded by children |
Etoki sometimes took the shape of little booklets, or even displays of dolls posed on the roadside with backgrounds behind them. In the 20th century, Japanese canndymen would bicycle around with serial shows called
kamishibai where the story was told to a series of changing pictures that slid in and out of an open-framed box.
In aboriginal Australia storytellers paint story sequences on tree bark and also on themselves for the purposes of performing the tale.
In the 19th century giant scrolling moving panorama performances were performed throughout the United Kingdom and United States.
The 20th century has seen cantastoria employed by the radical art, theater and puppetry movements to tell stories from perspectives outside of the mainstream media, especially by the Bread and Puppet Theater. Elements of picture storytelling can also be seen in the portable mural-posters of the Beehive Collective.
