Tag Archives: Chinese Opera

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/

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Easter Bunny Breakfast in the Year of the Rabbit

a new idea for today's Breakfast with the Easter Bunny

A couple of us painted at the annual Breakfast with the Easter Bunny at Macy’s Herald Square store this morning. Here’s a few bunny faces from that, and from a Chinese New Year’s event I painted at back in January celebrating the Year of the Rabbit.

basic bunny

a design based on a specific Chinese Opera face, which had that very cute bunny design on the mouth

a hawk, I guess in case there are too many bunnies

Traditional Facepainting – World Masks Workshop

by Christopher Agostino

This week brings an opportunity for teaching a group of High School students how to paint faces. In conjunction with a performance of Before Cave Walls…The Transformation Lecture, I will be doing a hands-on workshop with a group of art students who will then have the pleasure of painting several classes of elementary aged students. We present these programs in schools within a cultural context, and so the face patterns I will be bringing into these workshops are traditional designs from world cultures.

Click on this link for the pdf guide sheet for this World Mask Workshop WorldMasks_facepainting_agostinoarts

From the magazine article that first fired my imagination about painting faces based in cultural traditions

Choosing which cultural examples to present students is always a conundrum. There is an infinite wealth of source materials, and I recognize that the limited selections I present may seem to represent a much larger world than they can. The examples I present in a workshop setting are different than those I might demonstrate in a lecture performance, as I want to give them designs that a novice facepainter can emulate. (For example, in presenting this program to experienced makeup artists I will include the classic female role face from the Chinese Opera which requires a facility with blending colors that is difficult for beginners.) I also use examples with minimal pictorial imagery because I want the students to work free from the idea of trying to create a realistic portrait of an animal or such. The less complicated the design examples, the more they can focus on what it feels like to transform a human face. And that is the primary goal of this workshop, to give these students the experience of being the mask maker.

Here are the 6 faces I am using as the key cultural examples.

Amazon: A Mayoruna matriarch wearing markings and whiskers signifying a powerful cat like a jaguar

Africa: Surma people, from the Omo River area of Ethiopia.

Papua New Guinea: Example of traditional face art from a highlands culture, painted for a festival

Native American: Portrait of “Fast Dancer” of the Iowa culture, by George Catlin, with the hand symbol signifying he is a warrior

Africa: An example of the asymmetrical bodyart of the Southeast Nuba, Sudan.

Japan: The “suji-kuma” pattern to portray a samurai

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See a video and images from the workshop:  World Masks – Facepainting Workshop