From my Notebook: Traditional Theater in SE Asia

Last night (ok, this was in Bangkok about a week ago) we went to a traditional Thai puppet show. The theater was running a section of the Thai Ramayana, the Ramakian. The Ramayana is originally from India, and contains some 6,000 verses. The Ramakian is based on the Ramayana.

The theater [called "Traditional Thai Puppet Theater(Joe Louis)"] was performing the story of the birth of Ganesha, the elephant headed god. The story runs like this: Before the beginning of the play, Satee, the consort of the Chief of the Gods, Isuan, dies. In grief, Isuan becomes a recluse and ascetic. The play opens with the Chief Demon, Taraka, petitioning Brahma, a senior god, to make him invincible, so that he might replace Isuan as master of heaven. Brahma eventually consents on the condition that the son of Isuan be able to kill Taraka. Taraka, seeing that Isuan is a childless ascetic, agrees to the condition.l

Upon obtaining his powers, Taraka invades heaven with an army of demons. The defense fails, and Indra, anothe senior god, flees to warn Isuan. First, he tells Brahma.

The scene changes. Uma, Satee's reincarnation, approaches Isuan and gives him a garland of flowers. Karmathep, god of love, shoots his arrow and Isuan and Uma fall in love. They go back to the kingdom together. Taraka, by an unexplained plot twist, has abandoned his attack on the kingdom of heaven, for the moment.

In the next scene, Isuan is preparing to go on a retreat and gives Uma a 5 pointed spear with which to defend heaven. During Isuan's absence, the demons invade again. Uma's lady in waiting sees the gods losing, and advises Uma to retreat to her bedroom and bar the doors. Uma does so. Next, she creates a child from her sweat, as she bathes in the waters of Konkka, the goddess of water. She names the child Kumarn, and instructs him to guard the doors with the 5 pointed spear.

Scene changes. Isuan and Visukam, another god, return from their retreat to find their way blocked by Kumarn. Visukam attempts to chase him away, and nearly gets killed, which enrages Isuan. He throws his trident, and severs his son's head. It is at this point that Uma appears, and she is not happy. Her grief turns to anger, causing her to turn into Kali, who is a four armed, seriously ugly, scary, angry woman. Isuan is horrified by the transformation, and promises to return the boy to life. He instructs Visukam to go north, and to bring him the head of the first living thing he finds lying down with its head pointed west.

In the next scene Visukam returns with an elephant head, Isuan reattaches it to his son, and renames him Ganesha. Indra and Ganesha leave to fight the demons. The scene changes and Indra enters with Ganesha. They destroy the demon army, and Taraka appears. He refuses to believe Ganesha is Isuan's son, as last he knew Isuan was living by himself in the mountains in a cave. Ganesha summons a naga (a many headed snake) to hold Taraka while they fight, and kills him with the five pointed spear. In the final scene Ganesha is venerated as a god of success and a patron of learning.

I was intrigued that the god of love carried a bow and shot arrows to make people fall in love. This might be 200 years of western influence showing itself, or it might be merely a coincidence. It didn't seem that the other gods bore any relation to their western counterparts, since they didn't really even appear to have western counterparts. Zeus and Jupiter throw lightening bolts, and Isuan hides in a cave in the mountains. Alternately, Hera throws a lot of lightening bolts and Uma retreats into her bedroom and bars the doors.

When Uma turned into Kali, there was a puff of smoke and a flash of light elsewhere on the stage to draw your eyes away from the puppet. This allowed for the puppeteers to change puppets, so that they could have the much bigger, and four armed, Kali, instead of the smaller two armed Uma.

I was interested by the fact that the puppeteers were clearly meant to be part of the show, but they were in uniform, not constume. Each puppet had three puppeteers, one controlling the feet, another controlling the head and body, and the third controlling the arms. The three puppeteers carried the puppet around the stage, and moved with it, stepping as the puppet stepped. The puppeteers wore traditional Thai outfits made from black cloth. There was one occurrence of an actual costume, which was when Taraka appeared after the vanquishing of the demon army. At that point, he was represented by a dancer in costume, as showing his death would have been too difficult to portray with a puppet.

In Cambodia, we saw a traditional dance. In truth, we saw a collection of dances in Cambodia: a palace dance, a fishing village dance, and a section of the Cambodian Ramayana. It was interesting how pronounced the differences were between the different dance styles in Cambodia, so it surprised me that the Thai puppets looked like miniature Cambodian dancers. Indeed the one dancer in the puppet show could have stepped right out of the Cambodian Ramayana. An aspect of Cambodian dance which is very important is the hand position; long fingers arched backwards and hands and wrists moved gracefully and deliberately. The Thai puppets had the same hand form. The feet of the puppeteers moved very deliberately too, much like the feet of the palace dancers. Indeed these similarities were pronounced enough, that I was surprised when we saw the water puppets in Vietnam, and they bore no resemblance to the Thai puppets or Cambodian dancers. If I stop to think about it, it's probably not that surprising, since back in the old days (1000 plus years ago), the Khmer ruled both Thailand and Cambodia, but I don't think they controlled Vietnam. Also, the Vietnamese puppets were not part of a Ramayana, so the stories, gods and people were not the same. I'll write more about the Vietnamese puppets later.