What world theatre traditions should I learn about?
July 11, 2010 6:22 PM Subscribe
I'm fairly literate in opera and American musicals. I don't know much about other theatrical traditions from around the world, and I want to investigate. What should I look into?
Examples: Noh theatre of Japan; wayang kulit shadow plays of Bali. I run out of ideas quickly, though. Ideally think of music and dance and visuals and dramatics. Also ideally: You find it interesting, and different than what I'm likely to already know. Super-ideal would be references to videos I can watch, or readings.
Examples: Noh theatre of Japan; wayang kulit shadow plays of Bali. I run out of ideas quickly, though. Ideally think of music and dance and visuals and dramatics. Also ideally: You find it interesting, and different than what I'm likely to already know. Super-ideal would be references to videos I can watch, or readings.
Kathakali? (There are lots of videos on Youtube.)
posted by thomas j wise at 7:41 PM on July 11, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by thomas j wise at 7:41 PM on July 11, 2010 [1 favorite]
Japan's kabuki theatre is much more operatic - that is, emotional and theatrical - than Noh drama. There is a fascinating introduction to kabuki in Alex Kerr's book of autobiographical essays, Lost Japan.
posted by Ladysin at 7:57 PM on July 11, 2010
posted by Ladysin at 7:57 PM on July 11, 2010
I was going to suggest Kathakali and Kabuki (also, maybe Bunraku puppet theatre?) as well.
One thing I will say about many of the suggestions here that I am familiar with, and I'm sure you've run into this with Noh: a lot of these performances are not tailored to people with a modern Western attention span. I'm not even talking about These Kids Today and their youtube videos and tweets and suchlike. I mean as in performances that can go on literally all night. Things that make a Broadway musical look like an episode of Pokemon. Which makes some of them a bit of an acquired taste.
A blog entry that might interest you (not only about theatre, but on the intersection between performance and religion in modern India)
posted by Sara C. at 8:39 PM on July 11, 2010 [2 favorites]
One thing I will say about many of the suggestions here that I am familiar with, and I'm sure you've run into this with Noh: a lot of these performances are not tailored to people with a modern Western attention span. I'm not even talking about These Kids Today and their youtube videos and tweets and suchlike. I mean as in performances that can go on literally all night. Things that make a Broadway musical look like an episode of Pokemon. Which makes some of them a bit of an acquired taste.
A blog entry that might interest you (not only about theatre, but on the intersection between performance and religion in modern India)
posted by Sara C. at 8:39 PM on July 11, 2010 [2 favorites]
Butoh? I saw Dairakudakan a long time ago and remember being pretty blown away.
posted by speicus at 11:45 PM on July 11, 2010
posted by speicus at 11:45 PM on July 11, 2010
Pantomime is enormously popular in the UK, as was agit-prop.
posted by mippy at 12:47 PM on July 12, 2010
posted by mippy at 12:47 PM on July 12, 2010
Verbatim plays like Unprotected or The Power of Yes, which use interview dialogue to create documentary plays about controversial topics.
Game plays, like A Small Town Anywhere, which sometimes don't have any actors at all. The audience are participants and drive the plot themselves.
One-on-one plays, like Kontakt or the work of Onroerend Goed. Again, the audience are participants, but this time it's incredibly intimate.
Forum Theatre, like the work of Augusto Boal and his many disciples. Part of the Theatre of the Opressed, this is drama used as a way to solve a problem.
Hip-hop theatre from practitioners like Benji Reid or Kenny Barracka, which fuse traditional theatrical performance with a hip-hop aesthetic.
British Panto, like Cinderella or Aladdin, where a complex and entirely culturally assimilated series of call-and-response participation has been built up around traditional fairy tales.
Work from writers like Zena Edwards or Polarbear who blur the boundaries between theatre and performance poetry to produce, intimate, lyrical shows.
posted by the latin mouse at 10:23 AM on July 18, 2010
Game plays, like A Small Town Anywhere, which sometimes don't have any actors at all. The audience are participants and drive the plot themselves.
One-on-one plays, like Kontakt or the work of Onroerend Goed. Again, the audience are participants, but this time it's incredibly intimate.
Forum Theatre, like the work of Augusto Boal and his many disciples. Part of the Theatre of the Opressed, this is drama used as a way to solve a problem.
Hip-hop theatre from practitioners like Benji Reid or Kenny Barracka, which fuse traditional theatrical performance with a hip-hop aesthetic.
British Panto, like Cinderella or Aladdin, where a complex and entirely culturally assimilated series of call-and-response participation has been built up around traditional fairy tales.
Work from writers like Zena Edwards or Polarbear who blur the boundaries between theatre and performance poetry to produce, intimate, lyrical shows.
posted by the latin mouse at 10:23 AM on July 18, 2010
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seeing some performances of that form really freaked me out.
there's a film titled 'chunhyang' that's based on a lovely 18th century suite of the same name. watching it can give you some idea of what pansori sounds like. and i'm sure that a quick youtube search would turn up too many videos of these highly charged performances.
posted by artof.mulata at 6:56 PM on July 11, 2010