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Tholu Bommalata is the shadow puppet theatre tradition of the state of Andhra Pradesh in India.〔 Its performers are part of a group of wandering entertainers and peddlers who pass through villages during the course of a year and offer to sing ballads, tell fortunes, sell amulets, perform acrobatics, charm snakes, weave fishnets, tattoo local people and mend pots. This ancient custom, which for centuries before radio, movies, and television provided knowledge of Hindu epics and local folk tales, not to mention news, spread to the most remote corners of the subcontinent.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://ccrtindia.gov.in/puppetforms.htm )〕 Tholu Bommalata literally means "the dance of leather puppets" (''tholu'' – leather and ''bommalata'' – puppet dance).〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.puppetryindia.org/page2/page8/page8.html )〕 The puppeteers make up some of the various entertainers who perform all night and usually reenact various stories from Hindu epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata. == Performance details == The performance begins with a series of sung invocations and a line of ornate, strikingly stylized puppets pinned in overlapping fashion onto the sides of the screen. The puppets are mounted down in the middle on a palm stem, extended to form a handle used to move the body of the puppet. Their arms are moved with detachable sticks that had a small piece of string with a peg at the end, which slipped into holes on the hands. Generally, one puppeteer manipulates all three sticks of a single puppet, holding the central handle stick in one hand and two arm-control sticks in the other. Often two to three puppeteers operates puppets on the screen at the same time, each one delivering the lines for his or her own puppet. As the players manipulated the puppets, placing them on the screen and then moving them away, they create the illusion of the figures suddenly materializing and then fading out. They also cause the figures to walk, sway, hop, and fly through the air. The degree of skill they display in animating the dancers is astonishing. They can swivel a dancer's detachable head and manipulate her hands while keeping her hips swaying to create a remarkable illusion of twirling. The puppeteers accompany all the character's speeches with animated movement of arms and hands, which they flip over to create a three-dimensional effect. The swaying of freely dangling legs also adds to the feeling of animation. When several puppets are stationary on the screen at the same time, they are pinned to the screen with date palm thorns. A puppet would be rapidly pinned with one or two of the lone, thin thorns passed through the perforations in the headdress of shoulder ornaments. Such puppets are still able to engage in animated conversation by means of the sticks moving their hands. Characters that engaged in rough fighting, such as the monkey king Hanuman or the jesters, are often held from the hip, enabling them to be moved with greater control than by the central stick alone. About five minutes throughout the performance the action will be broken by the episodes of broad comic relief from the jesters speaking in a slangy, quirky style and engaging in slapstick antics. Some of these depended on a strong dose of scatological humor or puns and risqué allusions. Except for certain commonly used expletives, their language is not obscene, though sequences were bawdy to a degree not observed in other popular forms of entertainment. Interspersed with spoken dialogue, verse passages in literary Telugu and even Sanskrit are sung accompanied by music. These occur especially in contexts of heightened emotion or important events rather like arias in European operas. The players serve as their own musicians and all members of the troupe knew the music that accompanied the various passages. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Shadow Puppets of Andhra Pradesh」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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