The art of creating a Kathakali performer’s ‘Presence’

Abstract

This paper examines Kathakali performer training practices. It looks at the craft of creating a Kathakali performer’s embodied ‘Presence’ on stage. This ‘Presence’ is created by integrating the physical and emotional elements of the performer’s embodied being. The paper focuses on one important element of the Kathakali aesthetic – bhava – and critiques existing literature to offer a more nuanced understanding of bhava as an embodied ‘emotional state’. It looks at the craft of embedding bhava into the performer’s body. This process is complicated by what Drew Leder in his work The Absent Body suggests as the phenomenology of the ‘disappearing body’. The paper further highlights individual Kathakali training practices and looks to see how they negotiate the idea of the ‘disappearing body’ and by this contribute to crafting the performer’s embodied ‘Presence’ on stage.

Keywords:

• Kathakali
• emotional embodiement
• Phillip Zarrilli
• Drew Leder

Notes

¹ In the light of the recent excitement in the field of neuroscience about the discovery, nature and function of mirror neurons I use the word ‘mirroring’ instead of imitating or mimicking to describe the Kathakali learning/teaching method. ‘Mirror Neurons’ are premotor neurons that fire both when an action is executed and when it is observed being performed by someone else (cf. Gallese 2009).

² ‘According to the Indian aesthetician Pravas Jivan Chaudhury (1956, 219), 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’.

³ An example of a comprehensive emotion theory: ‘I have defined emotion as a sequence of interrelated, synchronized changes in the states of all organismic subsystems (information processing/cognition, support/ANS, execution/motivation, action/SNS, monitoring/subjective feeling) in response to the evaluation of an external or internal stimulus event that is relevant to central concerns of the organism’ (Ekman and Davidson, 1994, p. 27).

⁴ ‘In short, for behavior, as well as for the neurophysiology of feelings, it becomes useful to distinguish emotional from motivational antecedents. Motivational antecedents imply that the organism is preparing to or actually acting on the environment, whereas emotional antecedents imply only that internal processing, internal control mechanisms are in force’ (Scherer and Ekman (Eds) 1984, pp. 26–27).

⁵ ‘Thus, emotional expression does have a practical influence beyond the emoting organism, but only in a social communicative setting. In such a setting the practical influence is completely dependent on the ability of other socially receptive organisms to sense the meaning of the expression’ (Scherer and Ekman (Eds),1984, p. 27).

⁶ I quote the Natyashashtra via Balakrishnan to highlight Balakrishnan’s need, even as he references the Natyashashtra, to distance Kathakali from it. ‘In fact, the similarities that do exist between Bharata Muni’s treatise and Kathakali are fewer than expected and possibly incidental’ (Balakrishnan 2005, p. 27).

⁷ ‘Each emotion is not a single affective state but a family of related states. Each member of an emotion family shares the eight characteristics I have described. These shared characteristics within a family differ between emotion families, distinguish one family from another’ (Ekman and Davidson 1994, p. 19).

⁸ Finally, an actor playing Bhima in Duryodhana Vadham, preparing to kill Dussanna by tearing open his chest and drinking his blood, will not be helped by thinking of his psychophysical state of ‘being, doing’ but may be by thinking of his bhava as the everyday emotional state of raudra or rage/anger.

⁹ I use his/her here to honour hundreds of young girls learning Kathakali in India today. However, in most parts I stick to the male gender, as right from its origins to recent times Kathakali has been a male-dominated art.

¹⁰ Barba’s ‘recurring principles’ or shared themes of performativity between a number of ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ performance traditions include oppositional binaries such as ‘altered balance, dynamic opposition, consistent inconsistency, reduction, and equivalence’ (Barba 1995, p. 9).

¹¹ Kalyana Saugandhikam is available in an English translation in Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons come to Play translated by V.R. Prabodhachandran Nagar, M.P. Sankaran Namboodri and Phillip B. Zarrilli (Zarrilli 2000, p. 103)

¹² In a padam or dialogue each phrase of choreographed action begins from and ends at the same spot. It is as if the character or archetype or role is released into action, into gesture and meaning and then returns to itself, to the starting point. This point of returning to itself outwardly is a return to the basic form and inwardly a return to a state of neutrality, emptiness or ‘Absence’.