Thai dance

Country: Spain

Manufactory: Lladro

Date of establishment: 2012

Sculptor: José Santaeulalia

Size (cm): 40*34

Limited Series

Porcelain Story

Our Kyiv friends went to celebrate the New Year on the island of Phuket in Thailand. Once I already talked about how fate saved us from a trip to this country just a day before a terrible tsunami hit the coast of the island where we were supposed to fly. The force of the elements was so powerful that, together with people, machines and buildings, the water lifted the highest palm trees to the heights and carried them further into the sea, like paper boats from a children's notebook, even huge elephants moaning loudly from impotence ...

When we ended up in Phuket a few years later, the locals had already tried to forget many of those tragic events, to erase from memory. Kind, smiling, accommodating Thais again lived their usual lives, welcoming tourists from all over the world and producing rubber known for its high quality on endless well-groomed plantations. After boat trips and excursions to elephant farms, in the evenings, my children and I often went to the capital of the island, Patong. Each trip was a real journey. First, you had to go by local tuk-tuks (auto-rickshaws, whose red and yellow open vans looked like brightly colored mobile Christmas trees). They shone with many lights and the music played in them so loudly that we did not hear each other at all.

Evening Patong has always been filled with a festive atmosphere. There everyone sang, drank, ate, walked. Attended circus performances. These "circuses" were there literally at every turn and showed such unusual tricks in them, which, of course, aroused the delight of the tourist public, but it's just not all of them that it's decent to even retell. But the visit to the local theater made the greatest impression on us. Immediately, I note that the theater there is really real. Even with a somewhat rustic repertoire, but with wonderful actors who have simply unique dancing and vocal abilities.

We did not immediately guess that all the roles in the play - both male, female, and children's - were performed only by young men. It's just that young men who have become girls as a result of various operations are a very common and even popular phenomenon in Thailand. We were told that there are traditionally only two ways for boys from poor Thai families to escape this poverty - Thai boxing and Thai "reincarnation" into girls, for which, it turns out, there is a very high demand. For example, large fair-haired Scandinavians who come to Phuket for "this very thing" ...

We liked the theatrical performance in general. Only when, after the performance, literally all the actors went out into the street and with rare readiness rushed to offer tourists their hugs for a selfie, we modestly decided not to participate in this ...

But having soon met today's beautiful composition on one of the American sites, naturally, I could not deny myself the pleasure of replenishing our porcelain collection with it. It seemed very attractive to me. Yes, and all these memories of theatrical Thailand somehow immediately flooded suddenly.