Cantstoria (also spelled canta storia or canta historia) comes from Italian for "sung story" and is known by many other names around the world. It is a theatrical form where a performer tells or sings a story while gesturing to a series of images. These images can be painted, printed or drawn on any sort of material.
Picture stories in Asia
In 6th century India religious tales called "Saubhikas" were performed by traveling storytellers who carried banners painted with images of gods from house to house. Another form called "Yamapapaka" featured vertical cloth scrolls accompanied by sung stories of the afterlife. In China this was known as "pien" or transformation story, and in Indonesia the scroll was made horizontal and became the "wayang berber" and employed four performers: A man who sings the story, two men who operate the rolling of the scroll, and a woman who holds a lamp to illuminate particular pictures featured in the story. Other Indonesian theater forms such as wayang kulit shadow play and wayang golek rod puppet shows developed around the same time and are still performed today.
In Japan cantastoria appears as "etoki" in the form of hanging scrolls divided into separate panels, perhaps foreshadowing the immensely popular manga, or Japanese comics. Etoki sometimes took the shape of little booklets, or even displays of dolls posed on the roadside with backgrounds behind them. In the 20th Century, Japanese canndymen would bicycle around with serial shows called "kamishibai" where the story was told to a series of changing pictures in a box. Some kamishbai shows had a peep show element to them, where a viewer could pay extra to peer through a hole and see a supposed artifact from the story.
Picture stories in Europe and the Middle East
In 16th century Italy prayers would often be sung in the presence of illuminated scrolls while secular society produced the "cantambanco" or "singing bench" where a person would stand on a bench point to pictures with a stick. The singing bench migrated northward to Germany where it served as sensationalist quasi-news about murder, fires, death, affairs, sex and the like. Performers of such controversial bench songs were seen as vagrants and troublemakers and were often arrested, exiled, or ostracised for their activities. In Persia, banner artists had the foresight to paint a handsome police officer in the corner as a fail-safe against the wrath of police harassment - The narrator would be relating the tale of a hero's exploits and when a cop would appear in the crowd the narrator would point to the cop on the banner and shower the character with flattery in the context of the story. In Germany itinerant balladeers performed "bänkelsang" (bench song) banner shows for four centuries until the Nazis put the practice to death in the 1940s. The German bänkelsang can still be seen in Bertolt Brecht's play Dreigroschenoper and in the work of Peter Schumann.
Picture stories elsewhere in the world
In aboriginal Australia storytellers paint story sequences on tree bark and also on themselves for the purposes of performing the tale.
In North America cantastoria has been employed by the radical theater and puppetry movements, especially by the Bread and Puppet Theater.
References
- Painting and Performance book by Victor Maher
- Too Many Captain Cooks film by Penny McDonald starring Paddy Wainburranga