continued adventures with Japanese picture storytelling...

Last night I went to the Soho Theatre in London to take a seat in a cosy, dimly-lit studio along with thirty or so other audience members on fold out chairs. On stage was a black-painted plinth, illuminated with a lamp. Shortly afterwards, Spice Arthur 702 took their places on stage - a female narrator to one side, a pink-clad trombonist on the other side, and behind the plinth, a picture handler, with a wad of approximately 300 stacked cards with pictures on them.

During the evening we were told...no...given, no...assaulted with a series of stories created, primarily, with pictures. One picture would lead into the next and the next.....with each square piece of paper dancing, creeping, plodding or sliding eerily aside to keep the conveyor belt of images moving and to draw us further and further into the journey. It was quite simply hypnotic, whether or not accompanied by the endlessly entertaining trombone, or the broken English translation of the highly energetic narrator.

The picture 'handler', a manga-animator who had painted each image himself, displayed a fascinating relationship with his pictures, which started off as a heavy wad on the plinth and ended up as a carpet on the stage surrounding the performers. The simple act of revealing, and then discarding each image to make way for the next one allowed us to watch him 'perform' his paintings...to turn them into movement, to see the investment he had put into each of his designs transformed into a strange, symbolic dance. From the inexhaustable energy of the postman on his journey to a distant land to pass on a crucial message, to the agonising unspoken grief of two doomed lovers on separate sheets of card, suspended by one painted cord only to finally be smothered by a black-painted card whose significance we all understood...
...And all the while, the fast paced trombone, and the constant, brutal tossing of each image onto the ground once it had played its part.

My friend and I both commented on the energy this performance provoked in its very small audience - unbridled, hysterical laughter that I don't think I've ever witnessed in a formal theatre before, and a standing ovation at the end. People were bowled over by the simplicity and immediacy of the performance - heightened, I think, by the language barrier - allowing us to enjoy the kind of stripped-bare emotion often provoked by a clowning act.

Interestingly, the Kamishibai tradition of telling stories with pictures in Japan is very much connected to education, with the tradition often used in school settings (reminding me of the Rudolf Steiner quote I put in an earlier post). Whilst looking into this I found a blog about a teacher in Vermont, USA, who has been developing Kamishibai education techniques to fit in with learning in schools:
http://www.storybike.com/

My explorations in pictures, stories and learning continue...