Indian kathakali overview

“It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen.. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic.”

From Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

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Chronology

1645-1716 Reign of Kottayam Tampuran who writes a set of 4 plays based on stories from the Mahabharata, which become the elite repertoire of kathakali. With the addition of the Kottayam plays to the repertoire, there was a shift of emphasis from narrative to more refined aesthetics. This attracted more Namboodiri patronage. During this period, masks were first replaced with facial make-up for demons and monkeys and the convention of singers for the text and actors restricted to hand gestures began.

Late 18th c, System of hand gestures expanded based on kutiyattam (a dance-drama with close links to the ancient Sanskrit drama) and Hastalaksanadipika, an important Sanskrit manual of gesture language. Princes of two of Kerala’s three most powerful kingdoms patronize and write for kathakali. There is a rise in popularity of rajasic (knife-type) anti-hero characters. Close study of the Natyasastra leads to a growing emphasis on subtlety of expression.

1815-61 Utram Tirunal Maharaja reigns. Under his patronage, Nalanunni develops the Kidangoor style in Travancore, southern Kerala, which emphasizes rasabhinava (the expressive use of the face in performance). The importance of this is reflected in the emphasis placed on such expressiveness in kathakali training, which includes intensive training of the eye and face muscles and mastery of 9 basic facial expressions connected to different rasas.

1850 Unnir Panikkar, under the patronage of the Olappamanna Mana household in central Kerala, develops the Kalluvayi composite style, which placed an emphasis on the “technical virtuosity” demanded by the four Kottayam plays. With this style, there is also considerable emphasis on ilakivattam (interpolations that the performer elaborates into the text of the play, such as the elaborations of Simhika grooming herself in scene 8 of The Killing of Kirmira.)

1930 After 7 years of fundraising (including a national lottery) led by the Malayali poet Mahakavia Vallathol Narayana Menon, the Kerala Kalamandalam opens, a government-sponsored institution initiating “a new institutional and patronage framework to support traditional kathakali teaching and performance.” (30) The Kerala Kalamandalam adopted the Kalluvayi style and kathakali began to be marketed among Malayalis as a marker of their identity and at a national level as a marker of a distinctive Indian national identity.

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Rasa/Bhava and the non-duality of kathakali

As students from World Theatre 1 will hopefully remember, rasa is the flavor, taste or sentiment that a spectator is supposed to experience as a result of the actor’s performance. The word bhava is used to describe the actor’s experience, what the actor does and feels to produce in the spectator a corresponding experience of rasa. Whereas Aristotelian theatres are justified by their moral social function, theatres of the Sanskrit tradition are typically described as providing the spectator an “experience” that he can savor like the many different flavors in a good meal. For this reason, theatres of the Sanskrit tradition use rasa and bhava to make a distinction that is often unclear in European theory: the experience of the actor is not the same as the experience of the audience. The actor does not experience sadness to make the audience feel sad. Instead, he performs the appropriate bhavas that generate the experience of sadness in the audience. This leads many critics to understand Indian acting as ‘external’ in its approach compared to Western ‘internal’ acting. Phillip Zarrilli, however, argues that it isn’t as simple as that.

In his book on kathakali dance-drama, Zarrilli analyzes a famous passage from the Abhinayadarpanam, a medieval Sanskrit text frequently cited as the most important commentary on the Natyasastra, the foundational work of Indian Sanskrit dramatic theory. Like all the neoclassical commentaries on Aristotle and Horace we’ve been mentioning, the Abhinayadarpanam tries to clarify the key terms of its ancient source to make them more useful in describing contemporary theatre practice. It contains a famous passage often described as the best description of the concepts of rasa and bhava. Zarrilli translate the passage as follows:

Where the hand is, there is the eye;
Where the eye is, there is the mind;
Where the mind is, there is the bhava;
Where the bhava is, there is the rasa. (91)

The student actor begins by learning where to put the hand, where to focus the eye and how to direct the mind. Insofar as it has not yet become natural to him, his actions are always intentional, always “moving towards” the goal. For the master actor, there is no experience of a separation between body and mind, nor between craft and genuine experience. The master’s gaze follows his gesture. He is breathing and feeling the emotions fueled by the breath. He is crafting the performance and experiencing the performance all at the same time.

This is not, however, what the ideal spectator experiences. The ideal spectator is involved enough to savor the experience of the actor’s performance, and at the same time detached enough to appreciate the artistry and skill of the performer. He experiences delight while never really forgetting that he is watching a play.

The kathakali actor does “become” and “represent” the character, but these terms mean something a little different than our assumptions rooted in Stanislavsky and Aristotle.

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General characteristics

Katha (story) + kali (dance/play) . A style distinctive to the state of Kerala in South India. Developed in the 16th and 17th centuries and is still popular today.

Most of the stories are adaptations either from the Mahabharata or Ramayana or from the puranas (encyclopedic collections of traditional stories or knowledge)

There is an active repertoire of approximately 60 plays out of about 500 that have been written (think about this in comparisons to the conditions of French renaissance acting troupes). Most of these plays were written by royal author-patrons or other authors working under their patronage, though a small number of plays have been added in the past century. Traditionally, performances would last all night.

The acting companies were traditionally all-male. Boys would train traditionally from the age of 7, nowadays they start at around 10. They would undergo an intensive training in a kalari, a family compound where they would learn the kathakali repertoire and basic acting techniques alongside basic physical training based in the martial art form known as kalaryipayattu, which was once a proprietary skill of the Nayar soldier caste. Thanks to this connection, kathakali is based in a high degree of athleticism and such basic concepts of martial arts as centering and connection of action to breath. As in many of the other forms we’ve talked about, there are stock characters and specific actors are chosen by their teachers to train for specific types because of their natural looks and aptitude and many actors become famous for specific types and roles.

There have been female kathakali troupes and foreign women have studied at the official institutes, but there is still resistance to training Indian women and accepting the legitimacy of female performers.

Since the 18th century, musicians sing the poetic dialogue, whereas actor-dancers express emotion through facial expressions and verbal language through sign language (mudras). The hand-gestures and physical movements are so demanding, as are the precise movements of the facial features, that it would be hard for actors to speak as well. Spectators always see a split image of performer and musicians who are speaking.

Traditionally, beginning in the 17th century, patronage of kathakali depended on the caste system (jati) with the high caste Namboodiri Brahmins and Nayars taking it as a duty and privilege to write plays, sponsor and support performances and sometimes even to perform themselves. The base-unit of “house and its land” defined the relationship. Royal Namboodiri patrons were expected to be protectors of the social order and to patronize the arts as one of many ways of acquiring “good fruits” for family and kingdom, and ensuring general prosperity. (21)

At the same time, members of the Nayar soldier caste trained in the indigenous martial art, kalaripayattu, which was closely tied to the sentiment of vira (heroism) and became a major cornerstone for kathakali actor training. Under the early patrons, “actor/dancer” became a new social role associated with the middle-ranking Nayars. And so acting became a jati-specific activity for the Nayars, supported by the Namboodiris. The heroic state embodied by the paccha (green) make-up type became a central concern of kathakali. The paccha style reflects “basic moral uprightness, inner refinement, and calm inner poise, the ‘royal sage’ of Sanskrit drama whose task as a Ksatriya is to uphold dharma” (23-4).

The Namboodiri patrons came to be known as rasika (connoisseurs, or those who experience rasa). “Namboodiri interest and patronage brought gradual changes to kathakali, strengthening its movement towards literary, poetic, and aesthetic refinement.” (23)