Space, Time and Ways of Seeing

The Performance Culture of Kutiyattam

Mundoli Narayanan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000425260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume explores the constitutive role played by space in the performance of Kutiyattam. The only surviving form of Sanskrit theatre, Kutiyattam is distinctive in terms of its performance conventions and its unique culture of extensive elaboration and interpretation. Drawing upon the concepts of phenomenology on the processes of perception, particularly on the works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, it analyses the role of space in the communicative structures of performance of Kutiyattam and its contribution to the production of meaning in theatre, especially in the context of contemporary theatre.

The book explores the theatrical event as a phenomenon that comes into existence through a triangular relationship among the 'ways of being' of the performers, the 'ways of seeing' of the audience, and the space which brings them together. Based on this formulation, Kutiyattam is approached as a 'theatre of elaboration, ' made possible by the 'intimate, ' 'proximal' ways of seeing of the audience, in the particular theatrical space of the k?ttampala?s, the temple theatres, where Kutiyattam has customarily been performed for more than five centuries.

This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of cultural studies, theatre and performance studies, cultural anthropology, phenomenology and South Asian studies.

1
Space and ways of doing/seeing in performance

What makes theatre and performance so vital and compelling is undoubtedly its liveness. The fact of liveness – that actors and spectators physically co-exist in the same time and place to engage in an activity that cannot ever be reproduced or repeated in exactly the same manner – is also what distinguishes performance fundamentally from other arts and other forms of representation. In other words, the fact that performance requires the live presence and interaction between actors and spectators and that it ceases to be just as it comes into being is what gives it its eternal charm. Not surprisingly then the recognition that liveness is the first principle of performance is shared by many practitioners and scholars, even as their practices and priorities vary vastly. With the experience of a lifetime behind him striving to fashion a political theatre that could bring about social change, Brecht states, “Theatre consists in this: in making live representations of reported or invented happenings between human beings and doing so with a view to entertainment” (1964, 180; emphasis added). Though he was primarily interested in the performer and his experience, Grotowsky declares, “The theatre is an act carried out here and now in the actors’ organisms, in front of other men” (1969, 118; emphasis in the original). In a more philosophical vein, Peggy Phelan goes further and situates the very ontology of performance in its liveness, by virtue of its necessary irreproducibility:

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being … becomes itself through disappearance.

(2005, 146)

For Phelan, it is the aspect of time, the unrecoverable “present-ness” of performance, the fact that disappearance is structured into its appearance, that death is inscribed in its very being, which is the primary ontological condition of performance.

Even as this aspect of time – the simultaneous live presence of both actors and spectators – is essential,¹ the first physical condition for liveness – indeed for any performance to come into being – is a space in which the actors and spectators can come together and consciously engage in an activity both know to be performance. As McAuley asserts, “If theatre involves communication between live actors and live spectators, then they must be present to each other within a given space” ([2000] 2003, 3–4; emphasis added). Grotowsky’s phrase “here and now” captures this notion of concurrent time-space most succinctly because without a shared “here,” the shared “now” of performance is impossible. It could be any “here” – indoors, outdoors, temporary, permanent, custom-made, adapted, used for other purposes at other times and so on – but a “here,” a specific space, is needed which at the time of performance unites the actors and spectators in a specifically conscious activity that implicitly assigns specific functions for both and institutes a specific relationship between the two. It is precisely the understanding of this primacy of space and the specific functions and relationships that the performers and the spectators enter into in that space that prompts Peter Brook to make his oft-quoted statement, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged” (1968, 7).

The live(d) space

Eloquent and evocative though it may be, Peter Brook’s metaphor of “empty space” nonetheless raises several questions. Is the space into which a man walks really empty? Initially, it may indeed appear to have been empty before he walks in, but during and after the walk, does it remain empty? Is it just an empty receptacle to contain the bodies of the man who walks and the man who watches – a passive, static space unaffected and unaltered by the walking and the watching in any manner? Even further, was it really empty even before the walk? Or is it a space already walked in by another man, several men, and in expectation of being walked in again? Or is it a space that was defined by another activity and then altered by the activity of walking?

Even while fully appreciating the purpose of Brook’s use of the term “empty space,” which is to draw attention to what he considered the most elemental aspect of theatre, namely, the active relationship between the actor and the spectator, what these questions alert us to is the fact that no space is ultimately empty, but that as Lefebvre observes, “(Social) space is a (social) product” (1991, 26; emphasis in original). Every space becomes what it is and acquires the qualities it has through the human bodies that inhabit it and the practices that take place in it. An open ground becomes a playground, a fairground or a performance place, not because it is originally so but because it has been defined so by the uses that it has been put to and the social practices that occur in it. No space is empty or innocent of such social inscriptions. In this sense, every space is also lived space, it is always already inhabited and defined by the social nature of that inhabitation. Being so inhabited, every space is always in expectation of activities and practices that are in accordance with the nature of that social inhabitation and are reflected in the structure, configurations and architectural features of that space. In other words, every space is a concrete, physical expression of certain ways of walking, talking, watching and a spectrum of such other human activities. At the same time, every space also carries within it the inscriptions and knowledge of other spaces – spaces that define it in terms of similarity or contrast – and hence is always at any given point of time part of a particular class of spaces that expects to be used, occupied and negotiated in specific ways. Consequently, every activity that actually occurs there can be a further confirmation, a variation or a rejection of that expectation, and in its turn validate or alter the expectation as well as the space.

The idea of performance space as social space is certainly not new. Marvin Carlson, who situated theatre buildings in their larger architectural, social and economic context (1989), and David Wiles, who analyzed theatre-going as a social practice (1997, 2003), have contributed substantially towards theorizing theatre spaces and buildings and in establishing that they are not fixed containers or given realities but socially mediated entities. As McAuley puts it, “Theatre is a social event, occurring in the auditorium as well as on the stage, and the primary signifiers are physical and even spatial in nature” ([2000] 2003, 5). The idea of performance space as “lived space,” occupied by human beings and transformed by their activities, has also received considerable attention. Wiles, for instance, indicates how the performance event can transform the space when he states, “The play-as-text can be performed in a space, but the play-as-event belongs to the space, and makes the space perform as much as it makes the actors perform” (2003, 1). Lisa Marie Bowler, in her work on theatre architecture, affirms that the space is not independent of the performance and that a space as it is experienced in performance is a radically different perceptual entity than the same when it is dark and empty. Interestingly, her work opens with words that seem be a subtle retort to Brook where, quoting theatre director Dominic Dromgoole, she states rather pithily, “An actor walks into a room, and the room changes” (Bowler, 2015, 1).

Even as it goes some way in amending Brook’s notion of empty space and establishing that the occupants’ actions transform the space, Bowler’s metaphor of the actor walking into the room and changing it also raises several questions. Does the room affect the actor’s walk? Will he walk the same way if he is walking into a smaller room as he is into a larger one? Will there be a change in his walk if there are spectators in the room? Will he walk the same way if the spectator is just six feet away as he would if the spectator is 100 feet away? What if we were to change the action from “walk” to “talk”? Will there be a change in the volume, pitch and tone of the actor’s voice if the room were to be smaller or larger, or if the spectator was to be closer or farther away? And, as for the spectator, how does the room affect his watching? Will the focus and ways of his watching change from a smaller to a larger room? Will he see/look the same way if he were six feet away from the actor as opposed to his being 100 feet away?

These questions open up a third possibility, that along with being “social space” and “lived space,” transformed by the presence and actions of the actors and spectators, performance space is also “live space,” actively impinging upon the actors and spectators and affecting and altering their doings, behaviour and their inter-relationships. A salient feature of recognizing the liveness of space in theatre is that, far from seeing it as an empty receptacle or a static background, it acquires the status of a constitutive presence determining the actors, the spectators, their practices and consequently the very nature of performance at all its different levels. A couple of simple examples will suffice to prove the point. Take the case of a person speaking to another person sitting next to her. With such close proximity, the volume of her voice will be low, the pitch will be regular and the accompanying physical gestures and movements she uses will be small in extent and slow in pace. The responses of the listener will also be of a similar kind. However, if the same two people are separated by a distance of 100 feet, the volume and pitch of the speaker’s voice will rise, the accompanying physical movements and gestures will become more expansive and rapid and the listener also will respond likewise. Here, even as the speaker, listener and content of the message are the same, the change in the space in which their interaction takes place brings about a corresponding change in their speech and actions. Now, take the case of a person viewing a painting in a gallery. When looking at it from, say, 30 feet away, the viewer will see not only the whole painting in its frame but also a host of other things, such as the paintings adjacent to it, the wall on which they are hung, the lighting arrangements, other viewers nearby and so on. However, as she gets closer to the painting, the other things gradually disappear from her field of vision until she reaches a point where she sees only the painting. At that point what she sees in the painting will be much different from what she saw in it 30 feet away because at closer range much greater detail becomes apparent. And when she moves beyond that point and gets even closer, she will cease to see the whole painting and will start to see the fine grain of the paint, the details of the brush strokes, the particulars of the lines and colours and so on, all aspects which were not perceptible to her when she was farther away. What is apparent here is that, with a change in the space that brings together the viewer and the viewed, the focus, modalities and intensity of the viewing also changes, effectively altering not only the act of seeing but also the thing seen. Along with the vision, the object of vision too is transformed by the space.

These two examples clearly demonstrate how one aspect of space – distance/proximity – impinges upon what/how one does and what/how one sees/receives in that space. It would be fairly apparent that in like manner all the other aspects of a space – physical as well as societal – will have their own specific and relative effects on the modalities of doing and seeing that happen in it. The significance of this cannot be overstated for theatre and performance because it would provide a veritable opening to why some theatres are more gestural than verbal, why there is a greater onus on physical acting in some and on rhetoric in some others, why masks are used in some performance forms while some others rely more on facial expression, why some theatres are much more slow-paced and elaborative than some others and so on. In fact, it could go a long way in providing material explanations in the form of spatial rationale for the development of certain performance styles and modes in connection with certain theatres and the evolution of the formal structures of certain performance forms.

No doubt, there has been acknowledgement of the constitutive nature of space in performance. As Ubersfeld observes, theatre space (lieu théâtral) is that which “brings together actors and spectators in a relationship which depends essentially on both the physical form of the auditorium and the form of social organization” (Quoted in McAuley. [2000] 2003, 19). Or, as Richard Knowles states, “Space and place impinge directly on both production and reception … silently inscribing or disrupting specific (and ideologically coded) ways of working, for practitioners, and of seeing and understanding for audiences” (2004, 62–63). However, despite the clear recognition that the performance space affects the actors, the spectators and their actions, there has not been much effort hitherto to systematically analyze that effect and its bearing on the performance at large. My attempt in this work is precisely that: to develop a method to explore the effect of the performance space on the actors and spectators and their relationship, as well as its consequent effect on the methods, modalities and form of the performance. Liveness here is not an attribute of the actors and spectators alone but of the space as well, whereby it enters into a triangular relationship with live actors and live spectators, determining what actors do and how spectators see in that space.

The positing of theatrical practice in terms of this triad, where live actors and live spectators come together in a live space, and in terms of the possibilities offered by that space engage themselves and one another in a conscious activity that is distinct from other quotidian activities and is based upon interdependent action and perception, opens the possibility of a phenomenological understanding of the theatrical event. Phenomenology, with its emphasis on conscious perception and experience, will be able to provide the theoretical framework to examine the nature of the relationships among space, performer and spectator and how they constitute one another.

Phenomenology of theatre

Phenomenology, as the name clearly indicates, is the study of phenomena, or the appearances of things as they emerge in our experience. It seeks to examine the nature of the world as we experience it, or as “it manifests itself to consciousness,” whatever the object of that experience may be, including ourselves, our thoughts, other people, their actions or the things in the world. Husserl, the founder of continental phenomenology, famously called for a return to “the things themselves” (2001, 168), by which he aspired to bring philosophy, and even the sciences, to focus attention on the structures through which the world is experienced. In that sense, phenomenology is “a science of experience” that

does not concentrate exclusively on either the objects of experience or on the subject of experience, but on the point of contact where being and consciousness meet. It is, therefore, a study of consciousness as intentional, as directed towards objects, as living in an intentionally constituted world.

(Edie, 1962, 19)

Opposed to the objectivist approach that characterizes the scientific attitude, where the lived, experiential nature of a subject’s apprehension of the world is systematically discounted and the world construed as a set of objective facts, the phenomenological approach returns the world and its objects to the lived, experiential field and refocuses attention on the mutuality/inherence of consciousness and the world. Its primary objective is to explain how perception, cognition and experience result from interactions of the subject with the material and social environment, which interactions “determine not only how we experience the world, but also what we experience of it” (Bleeker et al. 2015, 1). Following Husserl’s initial work, Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the classical phenomenologists, along with others such as Jacques Derrida, extended and enriched the field of phenomenology by bringing in questions of being, existence, body, consciousness and language into the field.

Experience, for phenomenology, encompasses the entire range of its possibilities, including the different modes of perception, imagination, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Note on diacritical marks
• Introduction: the spatial turn
• 1 Space and ways of doing/seeing in performance
• 2 Historical contexts of Kutiyattam: incorporation into temples
• 3 Physical space and the culture of elaboration
• 4 Performance time: digressions and dissonance
• 5 The training space: the body as live archive
• 6 The socio-cultural space: structures of ideology and knowledge
• Conclusion: contemporary spaces
• Glossary of frequently used terms
• Bibliography
• Index