The Teaching of Kathakali in Australia

Mirroring the Master

Arjun Raina

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This book tells the story of teaching Kathakali, a seventeenth century Indian dance-drama, to contemporary performers in Australia.

A rigorous analysis and detailed documentation of the teaching of multiple learners in Melbourne, both in the group workshop mode and one-on-one, combined with the author's ethnographic research in India, leads to a unique insight into what the author argues persuasively is at the heart of the art's aesthetic- a practical realisation of the theory of rasa as first articulated in the ancient Sanskrit treatise on drama The Natyashastra. The research references the latest discoveries in neuroscience on 'mirror neurons' and argues for a reconceptualization of Kathakali's imitative methodology, advancing it from the reductive category of 'mimicry' to a more contemporary and complex mirroring which is where its value lies in Australian actor performer training.

The Teaching of Kathakali in Australia will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and dance, intercultural actor training, practice-led research, and interdisciplinary studies of neuroscience and performance.

1 Mirroring not mimicking the master

In a traditional Kathakali performance, when, after finishing his makeup and costuming, a Kathakali actor looks into a mirror, he sees looking back at him the precise image of a god, a demon, an epic hero or heroine. This specific image or social presence has taken the performer four hours to create, and six to eight years of actor training to embody (Figure 1.1). The performer has learnt this art from a guru or a master practitioner. He has worked for years as a shishya or disciple observing his guru while imitating his actions. This observation and imitation of a guru is central to Kathakali actor training.

Figure 1.1 Made-up, costumed and ready for performance: Hanuman the monkey god (Madavoor Vasudevan Nair). (Photo courtesy of Sreenath Narayan.)

In an introductory Kathakali actor-training workshop conducted in Melbourne, a student actor asked if the practice of a Kathakali actor was similar to that of a Filipino impersonator of a famous performer like Elvis Presley. To him, both seemed similar forms of mimicry. A consequent reading of academic literature on Kathakali offered the repeated use of the word mimicry to describe its teaching methodology.

In India, a traditional Kathakali teacher has no need to explain Kathakali’s imitative pedagogy to a learner. Imitating a master practitioner is an accepted part of traditional Indian dance and acting culture. On the other hand, in Australia, explaining what Kathakali is, and how it is taught, is a performative act, in the English language. While communicating in English with learners, I, a Kathakali teacher, found asking learners to mimic me not a very accurate word for the act of imitating me. In the same introductory workshop in Melbourne, when an actor did actually mimic me, and imitated and repeated what looked to me like a generalised and artificial version of my action, I found it inappropriate to ask for an improved, or a more precise mimicry of my action. Even a request for a more specific imitation felt inadequate. In contemporary western culture, to mimic or to imitate someone is not considered high art. Drama schools in Australia, for example, follow the western pedagogy of encouraging actors to interpret and improvise both text and character, while individualising their creative interpretations. In contrast, Kathakali actor training (Zarrilli 1984, 1992, 2000a, 2000b, 2004, 2009, 2011; Zarrilli et al. 2013) works itself through a teacher-led program of imitative learning, preparing the learner to embody archetypical characters. As a Kathakali performer and teacher, my own experience of Kathakali actor training suggests a more complex and nuanced “mirroring” than a reductive mimicking by the learner of the teacher’s actions. By “mirroring” I refer not to the inversion of an image in the mirror, but to the functional value of “mirror neurons” within the mirror neuron system in the human brain. The latest research in neuroscience on mirror neurons¹ (Gallese 2003, 2009; Gallese and Sinigaglia 2011; Gallese et al. 1996) suggests a deeper evolutionary link between the act of observing and doing.² It is through a sustained mirroring, then, of the Kathakali guru or master that a student receives what I argue for throughout this book as the central offering in this intercultural exercise, i.e., the performer’s rasa or taste of aesthetic pleasure. This book documents and shares the process of this transfer of rasa from master to disciple locating the research exercise primarily in Melbourne, Australia, where the author now lives.

1 This “mirroring,” as defined by the linkage of the act of observation with that of doing, is different to the traditional usage of mirroring in contemporary theatre training wherein one participant mirrors the action of the other, i.e., the right hand of one imitates the left hand of the other.

2 Recent excitement in the field of neuroscience suggests there exists a “mirror mechanism” in the human brain supporting the intersubjectivity involved, for example, in the intimate social interaction as in the mirroring process, i.e., the mirroring by a learner of a teacher’s actions. This intersubjectivity the mirroring mechanism mediates by integrating the act of observing with the act of doing, “[m]irror Neurons are premotor neurons that fire both when an action is executed and when it is observed being performed by someone else” (Gallese 2009:520).

Over the past four centuries, Kathakali has been taught both in the group classroom teaching mode, with the teacher present with other singers and musicians, and in the more private one-on-one space, often in the teacher’s home. This book works primarily with the one-on-one space. In the Kathakali one-on-one teaching space, the teacher repeatedly demonstrates the actions to be learnt while singing the text and keeping rhythm or tala with a wooden stick, beating time on a wooden stool. The student dancer-actor learns the dramatic actions by imitating the teacher’s demonstrations of these actions. This includes embodying and illustrating with hand gestures the sung text, as well as imitating the embodied dance choreography. The learner embodies the song, allowing the bhava or the emotional state that exists in the song to inspire and possess him. The teacher expresses the bhava through singing the text or padam, keeping rhythm throughout the performance with the rhythm stick or taalam. The dancer-actor expresses the bhava through an enactment of the padams interspersed with pure dance pieces or kalaashams. This stage action is then received, realised and appreciated by the audience as an embodied emotional experience of aesthetic pleasure or rasa³ (Pollock 2016; Krishnamoorthy 1979; Kumar 2010; Vatsyayan 2008; Shwartz 2006).

3 According to the Indian aesthetician Pravas Jivan Chaudhury, rasa is “originally a physiological term and figures in the medical literature (Ayurveda) of India. It means the physical quality of taste, and also any one of the six tastes, vis. sweet, acid, salt, bitter, astringent and insipid” (1956:219). Rasa in the present context is then a “taste” of aesthetic pleasure.

Kathakali actor training: key aesthetic features

Kathakali actor training is based on foundational principles of Indian aesthetics that guide the four key elements of an actor’s representation: angika or body; vacika or speech; aharya or costumes; and satvik or the inner emotional. Kathakali’s performance culture includes all four kinds of abhinayas or expressions of the act of performance, features found in all so-called “traditional” Indian dance-drama forms. These include angika abhinaya, the art of enactment relating to the movement of the anga or limbs including hand gestures and facial expressions; vachika abhinaya or the art of the spoken word or, as is the case with Kathakali, the sung text; aharya abhinaya or the expressing of character and mood and feeling though elaborate costuming and makeup; and finally satvik abhinaya or the art of expressing the inner emotional world of the characters. All these four forms of abhinaya commune with each other, offering for the viewer or audience an aesthetic experience defined traditionally as rasa or a taste of aesthetic pleasure (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Pachcha (green) Divine Kingly character (Kalamandalam Gopi). (Photo courtesy of Sreenath Narayan.)

Rasa theory in Indian aesthetic explores the place of emotion in art. For more than a thousand years, Indian intellectuals have debated the location of emotion in art. Does emotion exist primarily in the poet or writer, in the character or text, in the artistic object on stage, or does it exist in the audience? Rasa, or a taste of aesthetic pleasure, suggests both that which is tasted and that which tastes. In drama, is the dramatic poet or writer the first taster of the emotion or is a taste of rasa reserved for the audience? This book engages with these traditional ideas of rasa while attending to a significant gap in rasa scholarship, offering the neglected experience of the performer’s body and its pleasure as another vector in the rasa debate. Through the bodies of the master practitioner and disciple, and through an appreciation of their pleasures, the one-on-one site of Kathakali actor training offers an opportunity to engage with and nuance the traditional understanding of rasa.

A key concept extending rasa into the realm of actor training is rasaabhinaya. In Kathakali, the training of embodied emotional states or bhavas is called rasaabhinaya. There are nine bhavas, namely shringar (desire), hasya (laughter), karuna (sadness), raudra (rage), veera (heroic), bhayanaka (fear), vibhats (disgust), adbhuta (wonder) and shanta (peace). The actor is trained to embody these formal emotional states not only through facial expressions, but even through a preparation of the entire body. Traditional scholarship on Indian aesthetics has bhava as the actor’s embodiment of emotion and rasa as the audience’s taste of aesthetic pleasure. The term rasaabhinaya sets up a contradiction, suggesting as it does the actor’s tasting of aesthetic pleasure. This book works to negotiate and resolve this contradiction, offering evidence to suggest that the performer too tastes aesthetic pleasure or rasa.

The sociopsychophysical and “the old social” in Kathakali training

Over the last century, a large number of western practitioners have been influenced by non-western⁴ processes of actor training inspired by the work of Russian acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavsky, one of the first western practitioners to engage with yoga, creating psychophysical exercises for actors (Hulton and Kapsali 2017). Psychophysical is a term Stanislavsky used early in his work⁵ to highlight a significant problem of the western actor – the split Cartesian duality of a separate mind (psycho) and body (physical), i.e., the psycho physical. The psychophysical represents, then, an integrated body and mind.

4 As Zarrilli documents, “Stanislavsky, Michael Chekhov, Meyerhold, Artaud, Brecht, Grotowski, Barba, Copeau, Tadeusz Kantor, Herbert Blau, Suzuki Tadashi, Ypshi Oida, Ariane Mnouchkine and Anne Bogart have been influenced in some way by non-Western traditions ranging from Japanese noh, Indian yoga or kathakali dance-drama, to Beijing opera, among others” (2009:8).

5 This book references Stanislavski’s early work with text-based realism as here is where he had the strongest impact on 20th-century actor training in the west. His later writings on his work with actors, much of it translated and disseminated long after his death, and particularly his method of physical actions, brings western actor preparation into greater alignment with Kathakali actor training.

In contrast to the psychophysical, I frame as sociopsychophysical, Kathakali’s actor training processes. In Kathakali, the guru and shishya both work with their integrated body/minds, their psychophysicality. The social element in my original construct sociopsychophysical is defined by the social relationship between the teacher and learner best realised within the one-on-one actor training space. The significant trilogy of terms then adds up to the psycho physical, the psychophysical and the sociopsychophysical. Departing from an interest in the individual and psychophysical, the sociopsychophysical works with the “joint action” (Sebanz, Bekkering and Knoblich 2006:70) of master and pupil.

To further elucidate the idea of the “social” I differentiate the “old social” as one that frames Kathakali’s social world in India/Kerala (Gough and Schneider 1961), as specific to Kathakali texts created in the seventeenth century. This includes both the time-tested culture and practices of the traditional Kathakali acting pedagogy that have survived to this day, including the guru shishya parampara or the master disciple tradition. The old social frames the social weave that informs Kathakali’s text and stories created in the seventeenth century, a social weave informed by the Indian caste system (Dumont 1970; Das 1977; Guha 2013). While acknowledging the tumultuous change in its social world especially since Indian Independence from colonial rule in 1947, the framing of the old social works to stay bounded within the context of seventeenth-century Kathakali texts and their social world, and not reflect more generally on Kathakali over the centuries, or on the social life of the state of Kerala. Further, the old social references culture and practices embedded within the body of the practitioner researcher. Within this practitioner-led work this Indian social weave is in part embedded into the body of the master practitioner/author and, as the body is carried from the old social in India where the practitioner lived most of his life to his new life in the new social in Australia, this distinction between the old and new social has specific meaning for the practice and its relocation. The book also assumes no hierarchical bias or prejudice between the “old” and the “new.”

In contrast to the old social, the new social references the teaching of Kathakali to contemporary Australian performers in Melbourne, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Mirroring not mimicking the master
• 2 The guru shishya or master disciple relationship
• 3 From mythology to reality: Western perceptions of the exotic Kathakali body
• 4 Teaching multiple bodies in Australia
• 5 Working one-on-one with Helen Smith and Peter Fraser
• 6 Caste, Kathakali and its “gestures of embodied aggression”
• 7 Performing Kathakali in Australia
• 8 Kathakali for the global performer and researcher
• Bibliography
• Index