Museu da Marioneta

The traditional theatre in Thailand combines music and dance and resorts to masks to characterise the different characters.
These carefully made masks are created through the successive collage of paper sheets on the clay head of the character whose mask is wanted (papier-maché). The clay mould has to be sufficiently expressive to translate each character’s features.
After the collage stage, the mask is cut in half in order to be released from the mould used to define its features and the two halves are glued together. This mask in progress is successively painted with colours which allow the public to identify the character.
The use of primary and saturated colours, the abundant use of gold leaf and the almost obsessively added props and details give the Khôn masks a nature specific from the world of the gods and their heavenly and fantastic world.
The features of these masks derive naturally from the type of story to which they give life to. The stories come from the Indian epic Ramayana, an epic confused with the origin of Thailand’s kingdom itself and its monarchy.
The Ramayana tells the story of Prince Rama and is beloved Sita, kidnapped by Ravana, lord of Lanka Island. This story could be the poetic tale of the conquest of the island of Ceylon (now called Sri Lanka again), by the Arian people coming from the Caucusus, and the assimilation of new lords and gods by the Dravidian populations of the Indian subcontinent.
Ramakien, the Thai version of Ramayana, follows the general tcontours of Valmiki’s poem, although it introduces adventures, designations and habits typical of Thailand.
Ramakien may be understood as the founding myth of a kingdom and the masks of the Khôn theatre are the means to relive it.
The Khôn tradition is at the same time a court theatre and a popular art, easily recognizable by each Thai, with characters and adventures conciliable which both identity and imaginary.