Indian Theatre Journal - Current Issue

The reformulation of the world heritage, on the one hand, and the discontinuity of contemporary art on the other congregate at the agency of the performing subject. Yet, the partitioning of synchronicity and diachronicity concur at new cultural sites and conjunctions of ethos to allow discursive stylization, giving ample scope for studying acts of performance in contact. In this perspective, the Kathakali Nāṭyōtpatti (‘birth of theatre’), a new production recently presented at the Kalamandalam Kūttampalam traditional theatre of Kerala, makes performance strategies visible enough to gain insight into the super roles densely packed into the work of art. The article seeks the story maker in the position of the story teller, especially in this presentation on the origins of dance where a young generation of theatre artists are underway to find more or less new paths in understanding what they perform. Judging from the small attendance, a mix of teachers, dance students and members of the local audience who gathered at the opening night of a puttiyakatha (‘new Kathakali story’), some scratching their heads, others peeping into their notes on the play in search of points of reference in the story, a sense of unfamiliarity pervaded the atmosphere at the presentation of Nāṭyōtpatti (‘The Birth of a Theatre/Dance/Music’) in Kerala. To the native audience, a Kathakali performance bearing upon the Nāṭyaśāstra, the Indian holy book on theatre, dance, music and the theatre arts, could be as exotic as a Kathakali Shakespeare. Kathakali has long been associated with the epics and the Pūraṇas. Dealing with the birth of dance through the medium of dance might appear auto-referential. But that gave the theatrical event an overlay to its aesthetic expression. And yet turning to the śāstra to go back to the origins of theatre and dance, the Kathakali dance theatre exposes itself as a mode of representation, and warrants a reflection on its formative years and the ongoing process of transformation involved in its narrative and dramatic devices.

The goal of this study is to present an interrogation on the notion of ‘becoming’ a character in Kathakali and to develop some critical questions about the creative transformation widely discussed in the performance studies scholarship, whether it is a complete psychophysical process during a performance. As such, this study is primarily committed to the task of analysing and describing the experience of a Kathakali performer while they embody a character, and attempts to underscore that the performative transformation occurs as an oscillatory movement between the trained body and the mind. With this disposition, this study tries to make sense of everyday performativity of Kathakali performers shaped by their training, social and cultural background and how their somatic and psychological state during the performance helps them experience a performative transformation. This will be closely examined under three sections: (1) the physical training and the ways in which the actor’s body is prepared for the performance, (2) the nature of the internal preparation of the actor and (3) an account of how this internal and external preparation helps the actor embody character and what the actor experiences during a performance. In an attempt to investigate this performative experience, I employ frameworks provided by Philip Zarilli, Richard Schechner and Eugenio Barba and their observations about the body and the mind in performance to offer additional perspectives on the performative transformation in Kathakali. This article is informed by both scholarly sources and the author’s own practice of Kathakali as a performer.

This article attempts to raise the argument that performative Indigenous performance practices, which are not part of the ‘great’ tradition and have been valorized for articulating an authentic Indigenous voice, have not opened up to the accommodation of the ‘woman’s space’ within it. Using the data collected through interviews in rural Purulia, the article focuses on Chhau as a tradition of performance embedded in the folk-classic continuum and yet remains rooted in a characteristic inclination towards the classical over the folk. This is traceable in its historical development as a form and in its presentation of a classical content, primarily Hindu mythology. Foregrounding the fact that Chhau has essentially been categorized as a male dance form even though women are involved in most of the unrecognized labour that goes into the final presentation of the masked spectacle on the stage, it is clear that an attempt is yet to be made to account for the lack of allowance of the woman’s voice in the structure and content of the performative tradition. The result is an articulation of the tribal woman’s voice, herself doubly marginalized, in a performative tradition rooted in a liminal space, on the borders of the classic and the folk.