Cantastoria

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.

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. 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.