Li Chi Slays the Dragon — LIVE at PIFA — storytelling

Li Chi Slays the Dragon — a Transformation Tale by Christopher Agostino, from an ancient legend of China

One of my favorite tales, Li Chi Slays the Dragon, from a performance on April 30, 2011 at the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts street fair, presented by The Kimmel Center. It was a truly beautiful day, the first one after some rainy ones, so the street was packed and a crowd formed instantly as I started up. I painted a couple of people to demonstrate the transformation story-faces concept and to focus the crowd, and then picked a volunteer and launched right in.

The tale of the brave maiden Li Chi who volunteers to be sacrificed to the dragon in order to kill it is an especially fun one to tell. My source is a brief folktale nearly 2,000 years old, written by Gan Bao (or Kan Pao), found in the book “Chinese Fairy Tales & Fantasies” edited by Moss Roberts, 1979, Pantheon Books. Like most of the stories I perform, it has been gradually re-written through the course of presenting it to modern audiences — though the heroine Li Chi’s chiding of the previous girls sent to the dragon for not taking care of him themselves, that comes right from the original version. 2,000 year old advice: take care of business or you might get eaten.

The source image for my depiction of Li Chi, the female hero from a Peking Opera production

Hero Tales like this are the original motivational speeches, encouraging all of us to take care of business, and this is why they survive (in addition to the pure fun of telling them). I made Li Chi Slays the Dragon a centerpiece of a special show I designed this summer about why we tell stories, for a series of performances at libraries to fit the Summer Reading Club theme of “One World, Many Stories”. Kids need to hear Hero Tales, to know they can defeat a dragon if need be even though they are kids. I especially like to share tales like this one in which the hero is young, or small, or misfit, with no superpowers, fairy godmothers or magic swords (just the faithful family dog.)

Sketch for Li Chi and her faithful dog as a bodypainting design for the back of the performer portraying Li Chi in the Bodies Alive! production.

The tale and the telling of it has also been a source of inspiration for face and body painting designs exploring the Chinese Opera imagery of the female hero and of dragons, particularly as I expanded the visuals from one face to full bodypaintings on a group of performers to create the mountains and the full dragon as well as several changing images of Li Chi for the Bodies Alive! show at the Face and Body Art International Convention in 2008. http://www.fabaic.com/

See my “Shows” page with the tab at the top of the post for more information on my Transformation — Storytelling shows

In addition to my performing at PIFA, we also had a team of facepainters there. To see the faces:  https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/05/03/facepainting-event-modern-art-faces-in-philly-pt-1-britt/

and https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/2011/05/04/facepainting-event-modern-art-faces-in-philly-pt-2/

to learn about that event: http://www.kimmelcenter.org/events/pifastreetfair.php

Li Chi's figure as a face design

From Bodies Alive!, with Li Chi, as a painted hand-puppet, approaching the temple on the top of the mountain

Prior to the Bodies Alive! production I worked out some of the designs and did color tests on people's faces at our events. I've always preferred doing such explorations for new designs on actual faces and bodies at our regular events, as well as sketching them out in advance.

One of the sources of inspiration for the dragon face. This image came from a book brought back from China by one of our artists, with dozens and dozens of face designs from the Chinese Opera.

The cast of the Bodies Alive! full body production, from 2008 at the Face and Body Art International Convention in Orlando.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

To learn more about Transformations Storytelling Shows see: https://thestorybehindthefaces.com/storytelling-show/

Bark Masks and Bodypainting of the Yamana (or Yaghan) and the Selk’nam (or Ona) of Tierra Del Fuego

by Christopher Agostino

From the first time I saw a photograph of these full-body transformations from the cultures down at Tierra Del Fuego, at the very southern tip of South America, I was amazed, struck particularly by the complete success in disguising/removing the humanity of the individuals by very basic means. The human form is so effectively altered by the shape of the headpiece/mask. The eyes (our most identifiable human feature) are removed. The simple geometric bodypaint designs achieve the fundamental tribal bodyart goal of breaking up the soft curves of the human body to make it un-human. They look like aliens. I think I first saw such photos in the Marks of Identity exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in 1999 (http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/bodyart/index.html), and made a sketch of the figures in my notebook. Since then I’ve seen a few other old photos — but only photos, and never thought to see the real thing because these are dissipated cultures.

 Yesterday I saw the real thing, two of the real masks, at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York, part of a fantastic exhibit of major pieces from their collection: Infinity of Nations.  These two masks are from the Yamana or Yaghan culture, from the 1910s, whereas all the other photos I’d seen were from the Selk’nam or Ona culture. In his Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Joseph Campbell talks about these two cultural groups being closely linked in their mythologies and rituals. He describes these as deriving from very ancient hunter-gatherer origins, without much outside influence since their location was so isolated.   http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/infinityofnations/

*Depending on the text, these two cultural groups are referred to by multiple names. The Selk’nam are also called the Ona. The Yamana are also called the Yaghan.  

The masked figures appeared in initiation rites and were used to impersonate powerful spirits. Worn by already initiated members of the men’s lodge, they would appear to the younger male initiates as manifestations of spirits they were raised to be fearful of and the effect would be truly startling. The initiates would have to fight the spirits and unmask them to learn the truth, and then they would be told the story of world creation and the origin of the masks:

In the time of the Ancestors, all things walked the earth as people. The sun, the moon, the mountains, all were people. Women ruled, and to maintain their rule they created a secret lodge. Led by Kra, the moon woman, the would wear bark masks and bodypaint themselves and would appear to the men so disguised, saying they were the powerful spirits who stayed with the women in their lodge. They would  frighten the men and order them to stay away. Kran, the sun man, discovered the deception. He and the men chased, beat and killed the women. Then they created the men’s lodge and their own spirit masks and disguises.

As a culture, the Selk’nam and the Yamana did not survive the encounter with Europeans. According to information that Campbell relates from Lucas Bridges, the son of an English missionary who lived there, there were about 8,000 Selk’nam in the 1880s, and less then 150 by 1947. They were killed both by exposure to European diseases and through an extermination campaign by ranchers who offered a bounty to hunters for killing the indigenous people.

seeing the real mask gives so much more information about their appearance and how the were constructed then visible in the photographs. This one was made with strips of bark laced together.

This is such an effective transformation of the human identity through such simple means. I can’t think of another example from world cultures that achieves so much so simply.

http://www.agostinoarts.com

Scraping Paint for the Power of the Ancients — Rock Art from Pecos River area

A caller into today’s Science Friday show on NPR asked archeologist Solveig Turpin how later inhabitants of the Pecos River region responded to the more ancient, more elaborate rock art there as they created their own. She replied that they apparently respected it/ revered it as the work of their ancient ancestors. They didn’t destroy it or paint over it, though they would sometimes add their more modern drawings to it. And then she said something that really caught my attention. There is significant scraping of pigment from some of the ancient rock paintings because apparently the newer cultures would then mix the ancient pigment from the rock paintings into substances they would use or ingest during puberty and other rituals to gain the power of the ancients. “Scraping Paint” kinda feels like what I do when I look to all this stuff and try to find my inspiration in it by re-creating it as bodyart.

She said this Lower Pecos River style of rock art dates back 4-5,000 years, with sophisticated, complex painting techniques.

It features “shamanic” figures (to use that modern term for all of these ancient human/animal transformation figures whose true meaning and purpose we can only guess at), some 12 – 15′ tall. The thematic content of much of the art being interpreted as relating to human to animal transformation (or animal to human?, or humans acquiring animal attributes?) — and the panther is the key animal power figure, just as the lion is in similarly themed “shamanic” images in ancient Eurpoean cave art. Solveig Turpin: Research Fellow, Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory, University of Texas at Austin Author, “The Indigenous Art of Coahuila” (Universidad Autonoma de Coahuila, 2011)

Click here for a video of examples and her discussion of the art:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/embed/video/10392.swf

More examples and some great fotos at  http://www.rockart.org/gallery/index.html (their site asks that they not be reproduced without permission so I am not posting any here) Rock Art Foundation

National Park site information on the area and its indigenous history: http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/amis/crs/sec1.htm

An image of a "shamanic" figure, from the National Parks Services site

http://www.agostinoarts.com