Amal Choucri Catta enjoys a naughty pantomime Gangneung Gwanno Masked Drama from Korea: venue Cairo Opera House, Main Hall, 24 April, 8pm Since its inauguration in 1988 Cairo Opera House has introduced many foreign troupes to local audiences, performing Japanese, Chinese, Indian and other Asian spectacles, as well as traditional shows from Europe and the Americas. Last week Korea's Gangneung Gwanno Masked Drama Association presented a traditional masked pantomime, usually performed at the Gangneung Danoje Festival, and which UNESCO has proclaimed a "masterpiece of oral heritage". The Gangneung Danoje Festival starts on 5 April and closes on 7 May and is the oldest and largest traditional festival in Korea. The festival begins with offerings of rice and malt from which the sacred liquor is to be brewed. The entire city of Gangneung is cleaned and purified. Priests and shamans of Korea's traditional religions -- Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism and Shamanism -- carry out rituals and ceremonies at different shrines. The sacred tree, a trunk decorated with a colourful display of ribbons and scarves, symbol of the deities and the object of people's prayers, is carried through the city. The different ceremonies comprise a number of rituals, such as partaking of sacrificial food and drink, enshrining the deity and setting lighted lanterns down the stream while offering prayers for a bountiful harvest and peace. The Gangneung Festival also celebrates song, dance and music, with shamans striking the rhythm on double-headed drums, cymbals and gongs, wooden pipes and trumpets as dances based on ploughing, sewing, weeding, harvesting and threshing are performed. Among the dances the Gangneung Gwanno Masked Drama is held in particular esteem. Performed on 24 April on the Opera's Main Stage, the drama opens with the arrival of nine percussionists, mostly drummers but including a single trumpeter who makes rather more noise than all the drummers put together. Musicians and performers follow the bearer of the Shaman-tree and the play opens with two "action initiators", huge Jangia Maris, black-robed and masked, noisily throwing themselves to the ground, sticking out their bulging stomachs and sometimes ridiculing the spectators as they symbolically clean and prepare the area where the play will be performed. The choreography includes a number of risqué steps, alluding to the matrimony that is to take place on the cleansed premises. The second part of the show is the prelude to a romance between a white-clad, mustachioed aristocrat and young lady in red and yellow. He proposes, she accepts, and they demurely execute a shoulder-to-shoulder dance while trumpet and drums celebrate their love and harmony. Evil, however, lurks in the background, appearing in the form of two Sisi Taktagi, young chaps wearing ugly masks who rush on stage and perform a frantic sword-dance. Discovering the dancing couple they are filled with jealousy and decide to separate the lovers who resist vehemently. The girl, however, finally has no choice but to dance with one of the Sisi Taktagi while the other pushes and pulls her young lover, who is outraged. He nevertheless succeeds in reaching his beloved, though he cannot forgive her for having danced with the masked figure. Thus the love-game continues: sweetly romantic when the lovers perform, naughtily sensual when the Sisi Taktagi take over. In the end, the girl decides she is better off without her lover: if he does not want her she does not want him either, even though she would have been ready, at one point, to commit suicide by hanging herself on her lover's long mustache. Finally the men join the groom in trying to convince her to stay with him and have a happy life, and black-robed bad boys descend from the stage, inviting the audience to join the dance. Children and youngsters filled the stage, merrily prancing around the lovers and having a whale of a time. When the performers take their bows, unmasked, the audience discovers they are all good-looking young men, and as they trot away they were accompanied by laughter. Children and adults seemed to enjoy the show in equal measure. It is unfortunate that such shows seldom fill the main auditorium of the Opera, and many seats are usually left empty, leading to the distracting habit of the audience constantly changing places. Whenever possible it would be better, perhaps, to stage such performances at the somewhat smaller Gomhouriya Theatre, though admittedly the stage will be in some cases unable to accommodate the larger folkloric spectacles.
