Small theater mask - Kaili - Guizhou Province, Southwest China, 19th century

Small theater mask - Kaili - Guizhou Province, southwest China, 19th century.
Black and red/orange lacquered wood.
Nice patina originated by the use and the passage of time.
Measurements: 18 cm.

This mask represents a cuckold character sticking out his tongue. Due to its small size, it is probably a hand mask. It is a specimen from the province of Guizhou, in the mountainous southwest of China, probably linked to the Nuo theater, a living practice in ethnic communities such as the Dong, Miao, Buyi or Yao, where ancestral traditions survive with a strong spiritual charge.

Guizhou, a region with rich ethnic and geographical diversity, is one of the last bastions of traditional Nuo theater, where these masks have an apotropaic function, i.e. they protect the people during New Year festivals, purification or agricultural fertility ceremonies.

These masks were used in conjunction with costumes and codified dances, in which the performers, often local shamans or ritual specialists, embodied deities, heroes or demons in narratives that combined myth, history and local cosmology.