Visitors to Thailand have ample opportunities to see bits and pieces of Thai classical dancing, be it at the Rose Garden outside Bangkok, at dinners organized by the big hotels, or even from the small group that performs at the Erawan Shrine in Bangkok. It is also easy to find replicas of the masks used in the traditional Khon performances, or costumed dolls to take home as souvenirs.
It is harder, however, to actually see an actual Khon performance, which tells the story of the Ramakian, the Thai version of the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana.
However, a Khon troupe from Thailand's Fine Arts Department will perform extracts from the Ramayana at the Zhongshan Hall in Taipei tonight, giving local audiences a taste of a story that is well known in India and most of South and Southeast Asia.
PHOTO COURTESY OF NEW ASPECT
The company, consisting of 20 dancers and a five-member pitphat orchestra, has been performing in Ilan County this week as part of the Asia-Pacific Traditional Arts Festival, sponsored by the National Center for Traditional Arts. It will also appear in Chungli tomorrow afternoon.
Khon, which can trace its origins back to Hindu temple rituals in India, began as an entertainment for the royal courts of Siam. It is a combination of finely stylized dance, acting, martial arts and acrobatics, with most of the dancers wearing elaborate costumes and hand-crafted papier-mache masks that portray their character's personality and rank. The monkey king, Hanuman, is easily recognizable by his white mask, while the demon king, Thosakan, is green-faced and wears a multi-tiered royal headdress. Prince Rama, the hero, and his wife Sita, like other humans in the play, do not wear masks, although Rama does have the traditional multi-tiered crown headdress of Thai kings.
Given that most of the actors/dancers are masked and so cannot speak, the narrative is recited by a chorus that sits with the musicians.
But you don't need to understand Thai or the Ramayana story to be able to follow the action as it's easy to comprehend. But briefly, the Ramayana tells the life story of Prince Rama — who is believed to be a reincarnation of Vishnu — and the epitome of all that is virtuous. It recounts his many battles with demons, his rescue of Sita, who had been kidnapped by the demon king of Lanka, their return to the kingdom of Ayodyha and his coronation.
Somrit Lagchai, a professor with the Fine Arts Department who has been acting as a translator for the troupe during this tour, explained that the group will be performing just a sample of the classic.
“It's one hour. Just extracts from the beginning and end of the Ramayana,” he said in a press conference last Friday.
A full continuous performance of the entire saga — which has more than 300 characters and scores of battle scenes — would take at least a month, something that even royal courts no longer have time for.
Performance Notes:
WHAT: Ramayana, performed by a Khon troupe from the Thailand's Fine Arts Department
WHEN: Tonight at 7:30pm
WHERE: Taipei Zhongshan Hall (台北市中山堂), 98 Yenping S Rd, Taipei (台北市延平南路98號). On Saturday at 2:30pm the troupe will perform in Chungli
TICKETS: Admission is free
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless