So far mainly the physical aspects of the origins of Asian theatre traditions have been discussed, such as the trance rituals, animal movements and martial arts. If we consider the textual and narrative aspects of Asian theatre, it is obvious that the origins can be traced back to the simple act of conveying a story to the audience orally. This kind of storytelling traditions can still be found in abundance in Asia today, for example in the Islamic world of West Asia, in China, in Korea etc.
Many of the later theatrical traditions, such as shadow theatre, puppet theatre and many of dance theatre forms evolved from early storytelling traditions. Indeed, in Asia, as will be seen later, the storytelling tradition served, at least partly, as the starting point from which the complex theatrical performances, based on the same oral and later written material, developed.
The process could roughly be outlined as follows: (i) the starting point is the act of storytelling, i.e. the act of conveying the oral literary tradition. (ii) Gradually the storytellers started to employ different kinds of visual devices to illustrate their narration (panels, scroll paintings, shadow figures, puppets and in some cases even dolls), and (iii) storytelling was enriched by gesticulation, body movements, mime, dance, music etc. During this process the act of storytelling became more theatrical in character and the narrative tradition and performing arts cross-fertilised each other, which resulted in many of the present classical theatrical forms.
Just to give some examples: the wayang wong dance drama of Java is believed to have developed from the Javanese wayang kulit shadow theatre in which the primus motor of the whole genre is a dalag puppeteer, who is also the storyteller in the performance. Sometimes during the history of the process live actors came to replace the puppets. The background to the khon mask theatre of Thailand seems to be a similar case: in this the narrators take care of the storyline and dialogue while the actor-dancers gesticulate according to the narration. The Japanese bunraku puppet theatre, for example, developed when the puppeteers in the 17th century started to co-operate with the so-called joruri storytellers, who still dominate the whole art form with their expressive recitation.