Personally, I am very interested in Asian styles of theatre, dance, music, and other forms of art. The aesthetics of Asian arts are much different from the rest of the world, starting from precise and beautiful hand gestures to the colors and patterns of costumes. This fascination with Asian culture has pushed me to choose one of the theatre traditions from either Indonesia, Thailand, or Japan. In regards to Bali, there is a style of dance called Topeng (Indonesian for "mask"). This is a dramatic type of dancing in which one or more actors wear masks and beautiful costumes and perform traditional narratives involving kings, heroes, myths. It is a accompanied by gamelan music, made up mostly of percussive instruments. There are many different genres of Topeng, so if I focused on that, I would most likely have to narrow it down further. Another theatre tradition I'm interested in is the Khon dance drama of Thailand. Khon is a genre of dance drama from Thailand. It is traditionally performed solely in the royal court, by men in masks. These actors are usually accompanied by a narrator. A variation of this genre with female performers is called khon phu ying. In modern Khon, there are female actors playing female characters, and most of the human characters do not wear masks- but animal characters do. Lastly, there is Rakugo "sit down" theatre from Japan. Rakugo is a form of Japanese verbal theatre. The single storyteller sits on stage, using only a paper fan and a small cloth as props, and without standing up from the sitting position, the artist depicts a long and complicated comical story. The story always involves the dialogue of two or more characters, the difference between the characters depicted only through change in pitch, tone, and a slight turn of the head. This is very interesting as it is not normally done- usually one would have to act out every movement for the audience to understand exactly what they were doing, or were going to do. These Rakugo actors must have an extremely interesting voice and story to get the audiences attention. |