What it is
The fourth lesser field is nāṭaka, drama: what a body does on a stage before an audience. In Tibet that is above all the opera, Ache Lhamo, the masked dances of the monasteries, the circle dances and regional dances of the people, and the singing of the epic. Music, which the tradition counts among the arts of speech, is kept under Arts; this field is what is danced and acted.
Where it comes from
Tradition credits the founding of Ache Lhamo to Thangtong Gyalpo in the fifteenth century, the yogin and engineer who built iron-chain bridges across the rivers of Tibet and, the story goes, formed a troupe of seven sisters to sing and dance for the funds to build them. The repertoire settled into eight classical plays, stories of princesses, kings and ordinary people tested by fortune, performed over a whole day in the open air, with a narrator’s chant carrying the story between the sung parts. Every performance opens with the hunters in their blue masks, the ngonpa, and the opera’s great festival is the Shoton, the yoghurt festival, held in Lhasa each summer.
Cham is the masked dance of the monasteries, a ritual performed to music by the monastic orchestra at the great festivals, each dance with its own choreography, costume and meaning. Folk dance belongs to the people: the gorshey, the circle dance that any gathering can join, and the dances particular to Kham, Amdo and Ü-Tsang. And the epic of King Gesar of Ling, among the longest in the world, is not read but sung, by bards who carry hundreds of hours of it in memory; it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2009.
In exile, the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts was founded in Dharamsala in 1959, in the first months, before almost anything else, because the opera and the dances were understood to be as urgent as a school.
What is at stake
An opera needs a troupe, a troupe needs a village, and the narrator’s chant, the masks and the steps are taught by doing. The Gesar bards are old. A performing art that is not performed for a generation does not come back from the archive.
On Genla
Performance holds Ache Lhamo, cham, folk dance, and the epic of Gesar.