Author Archives: Christopher Agostino

Gallery ML – Collective Body Art Gallery – Kickstarter for their Big, New Space!

Gallery ML, the fine art body painting gallery in Philadelphia, is expanding. They have acquired a much larger new space (7,000 square feet!) and will have a Grand Opening Event in their new home on April 6, featuring the current bodypainting world champions Scott Fray and Madelyn Greco of Living Brush, plus a score of guest artists.  Gallery ML has initiated a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to cover the costs of converting the space into an art gallery, and everyone who donates will receive something for their support: limited edition show posters, signed prints, postcards, t-shirts, and canvas printing for their own images (one of the wonderful things about Gallery ML is that they offer printing services for body painters).

Please consider helping their Kickstarter campaign:

 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/galleryml/the-worlds-first-collective-body-art-gallery

And check out their video to learn about the Gallery and their plans for the new space:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/galleryml/the-worlds-first-collective-body-art-gallery/widget/video.html

Old School Style Magical Realism and Quantum Mechanics

by Christopher Agostino

This week I visited a couple of English classes in our local High School to tell some very old folktales. The students are studying the genre of Magical Realism in literature and film. They’d read authors such as Gabriél Garcia Márquez and seen films like Pan’s Labyrinth. I went a little more old school on them to tell a 1000 year old Japanese Demon tale  to get their attention (having just seen the Storytelling in Japanese Art exhibit I had to tell a demon tale). We discussed the universal belief of ancient human cultures in a spirit world and what we today would call magic, and how, from a storyteller’s perspective, modern authors include such elements in fiction to tap in to this ancestral understanding that the world is more than what it appears to be, using magic (or science fiction, for that matter) as a vehicle to open up the reader to new perceptions about their own lives.

It is an old device. When Homer wrote the Illiad and the Odyssey (the oldest examples of Western literature) he was already writing about a time that was mythic from his perspective, and using mythological stories as conceptual archetypes in the way a modern Magical Realist might. As a young actor I was in a version of The Odyssey that might be termed “Realist Magicalism” because it reframed the myth as psychodrama, making it the inner psychological journey of Odysseus from adolescence (reckless hero) to maturity (responsible husband) a la Joseph Campbell’s interpretations of hero tales via Freudian (or perhaps more accurately Jungian?) psychology. Continue reading →

Storytelling in Japanese Art — Onmyoji and Raiko: Super Heroes Team-Up vs. More Japanese Demons

The Drunken Demon

by Christopher Agostino

see also: The Eye of the Demon — a StoryFaces Performance to learn about the stage presentation I do based on the legends of the samurai and the demons that they fight

I ran into a couple of old friends at the Metropolitan Museum of Art yesterday in the exhibit Storytelling in Japanese Art. In an “emaki” (handscroll) illustrating the story of “The Drunken Demon” I found the hero samurai Raiko (who I know from a folktale I tell of his battle with the Goblin Spider) and Abe no Seimei (my favorite Onmyoji, or yin/yang magician)—both in the same story like a Spiderman/Dr. Strange crossover in an issue of Marvel Team-Up.

Marvel Team-Up — Twice as Many Pages! Twice as Many Thrills!

Emaki are like the original comic books or animated movies, telling a story through text and sequential illustrations. A scroll might be 30′ long, and to read it you would look at about two feet at a time, unrolling it with your left hand while simultaneously rolling it up again with your right. “The Drunken Demon” version in the exhibit was told over three scrolls from the Edo period by Kaiho Yuchiku (1654-1728). A boyish demon becomes terrible when drunk, stealing all the beautiful women. When he captures the daughter of an aristocrat, Abe no Seimei uses his powers to find where the girl is held, and the Emperor orders Raiko and his warrior companions to rescue the girl—which they do with the help of three gods disguised as men, a tree that grows across a chasm to become a bridge, some poisoned saki and a golden helmet. In the climactic illustrations, after a wild feast featuring human sashimi, the sleeping demon is depicted as filling an entire room (described in the text as 10′ tall, but illustrated as if 30′ tall) before Raiko cuts his head off, blood spraying out in a fine mist just like in the modern samurai movies like “The Warrior’s Way” (a fun one I watched last night). Continue reading →