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- Volume 5, Issue 1, 2013
Studies in South Asian Film & Media - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2013
Volume 5, Issue 1, 2013
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The ‘ancient’ body of modern Yoga: The influence of Ramanuja on Iyengar Yoga and the use of Yoga in actor training
More LessAbstractYoga is one of the most popular leisure activities that flourish in contemporary western societies and also one of the most common non-theatrical disciplines used in performer training. This article focuses on the pedagogy that underlies the practice of yoga and poses and outlines two different ways of practising: the active and passive. It draws links between the pedagogy of modern yoga and the conceptualization of the human body in the pre-modern religious doctrine of Ramanuja. Based on this account, it presents the ways in which yoga can inform the actor’s work with different dramaturgies. In this manner, this article aims to examine modern yoga from a perspective that has been neglected so far and also proposes additional ways in which yoga may be used in actor training.
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Begum Barve: Embodiment of subversive fantasy
More LessAbstractSatish Alekar’s play Begum Barve (first performed in 1979) is a play of fantasies superimposing reality. It accommodates a universe constituted by the imagination of petty men – a female impersonator actor, a gambler and two ordinary clerks. The mixing of their imaginations creates a female fantasy-character called Nalawadebai/Sarangnayana. This is a complex exercise because the fantasy-character is inscribed on the impersonator’s male body in the wake of the physical absence of woman in the play. Nalawadebai/Sarangnayana serves as an interface for one of the clerks and the female impersonator. The character is constituted by the female impersonator’s aspiration for important female roles and the clerk’s aspiration for a normative familial life. The result is a complicated network of gendered social meanings, theatrical references and unfulfilled desires instead of any narrative. The play is unique for calling our attention to the place of mediocre female impersonators in the supposedly golden age of Marathi Sangeet Natak/musical plays. In the constitution of the fantasy-character, the play revisits contemporary cultural understanding about womanhood as exhibited and constructed by Sangeet Natak. It is important to note that the play, although much acclaimed, does not have an extensive production history. The present article proposes to examine the role of fantasies in achieving complexity of social meanings. It discusses possible reasons for the small number of performances of the play, sociology of Sangeet Natak, the subversive potential of fantasies and the theatrically constructed cultural understanding of female gender. The theoretical context of my research is informed by concepts of everyday life and embodiment.
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Miruga Vidusagam: Theatre of the body, ritual and land
More LessAbstractThis article engages with Miruga Vidusagam, a seminal play by Tamil theatre director Murugu Bhoopathy, to explore his authorship, and its focus on the human body and traditional rituals in its reinventions of myths to address contemporary issues. Murugu Bhoopathy’s play undergird the human body as a dynamic space to frame the trajectory of history from ancient rituals to contemporary culture, and foreground the movement of the actors and the various objects of the ritual, like the lamp, sieve, basket, mortar and pestle, to paint the many shades of oppression experienced by women, clowns, animals, landless farmers, refugees, workers, employees and children. The focus of this article is on Bhoopathy’s rural-experimental theatre, where the human body, land and rituals get intricately linked and metamorphosize into each other for the representation of the voice of the people on the fringes in Tamil Nadu.
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Rasa and the saturated event
By David MasonAbstractWestern performance theorists have concluded, often, that rasa is an emotion, or a physical sensation, or the product of the physical expressivity of performers. For the Natyashastra, rasa is none of these things. Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman’s description of brain activity and consciousness may help understand rasa. Edelman’s description of consciousness as a ‘process’ entailed (but not caused) by the interaction of various brain systems may renew theoretical approaches to rasa. We may be able to talk about rasa as a ‘conscious state’, having its own unitary and subjective quality, as well as its own content determined by memory and knowledge. Certainly, given the Natyashastra’s insistence on aesthetic distance, rasa, like Edelman’s ‘consciousness’, is modulated by attention. Based on the precepts of Neural Darwinism, as articulated by Edelman, we can articulate rasa as a state of consciousness that arises from the contingent interactivity of brain systems, intentionality and attention.
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Experiencing ‘an opening’
Authors: Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley and Lee MillerAbstractThis article asks a fundamental question that is close to the authors’ heart: ‘What is Yoga?’, and then how this might influence both the execution and readings of various body-based performance practices, with a particular focus being given to the in preparation for performance art. Using their own burgeoning relationship to Ashtanga yoga as its base and its filter as an ad hoc training for witnessing performance art, the authors focus upon three interrelated pieces by Marina Abramovic´ (Marina Abramovic´ Presents … as part of the Manchester International Festival, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK, The Pigs of Today are the Hams of Tomorrow, Plymouth, UK and The Artist is Present at MoMA, New York, USA).
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Rhythm embodied: Training Rasa in Hindustani tabla?
More LessAbstractAs Hindustani music (North Indian classical) and the performance of tabla moves outside of its South Asian origins the underlying aesthetic, rasa, and the structure of the musical system travels across and between musical and cultural borders informing and shaping the performative context. To what extent does the rasa concept, referred to as a ‘tasting’ experience, dominant in the arts of India, affect the global art of tabla? Often overlooked by scholars, and confused with the process of bhava (emotion) by performers, the concept and application of rasa continues to be the dominant aesthetic principle in what we have come to know globally as tabla soloing. I argue that it is in the phenomenological experience of music training and music making that we find a possible connection between the practice of rasa and the embodiment of bhava (performer emotion).
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Book Reviews
Authors: Arya Madhavan and Sreenath NairAbstractMy Tears, My Dreams (trans. Sindhu V. Nair), V. T. Bhattathirippad (2013) New Delhi: Oxford University Press, xxxvi+112 pp., h/bk, Rs. 295.00, ISBN: 0198089627
Critical Essays on British South Asian Theatre, Graham Ley and Sarah Dadswell (eds) (2012) Exeter: Exeter University Press, x+276 pp., p/bk, ISBN: 9780859898355. £25.00
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