Cantastorie

Cantastoria (pronounced [ˌkantaˈstɔːrja]; also spelled cantastorie [ˌkantaˈstɔːrje], canta storia or canta historia) comes from Italian for "story-singer" 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.

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. Nowadays, this Indian traditional art is still performed by Chitrakar women of West Bengal. In Tibet this was known as ma-ni-pa and in China this was known as pien. In Indonesia the scroll was made horizontal and became the wayang beber 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, a shadow play, and wayang golek, rod puppetry, developed around the same time and are still performed today.

In Japan, cantastoria appears as etoki or emaki in the form of hanging scrolls divided into separate panels, 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 that slid in and out of an open-framed box. Some kamishibai 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.

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Wikipedia