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Abstract
The ‘Kathakali Mirror Box’ frames Kathakali’s traditional one-on-one teaching methodology within Dr V.S. Ramachandran’s ‘Mirror Box’ ‒ invented to relieve patients of their phantom limb pain. Building on the author’s personal experience of being a ‘special needs’ Kathakali learner after a mental breakdown, the ‘Kathakali Mirror Box’ offers an ideal platform for the care and integration of the broken body and self. This integration, a value for any performer, helps the body gain a sense of itself, of body ownership and unity. To help validate the ‘Kathakali Mirror Box’ as an appropriate site for intercultural actor/performer training, the author references his own experience of teaching Kathakali, one-on-one, to performers in Australia.
Notes
1 As Ramachandran suggests with reference to a patient’s pain in the phantom limb, ‘Moreover, these ideas imply that pain is an opinion on the organism’s state of health rather than a mere reflexive response to an injury’ (Ramachandran and Blakeslee Citation1998, p. 54).
2 For example, while my movement training at LAMDA often had the head leading the body movement and in any/every direction, Kathakali training, on the other hand, required me to keep my head steady and stable while lowering and grounding my body. By this I suggest my experience at LAMDA made me question the logic of the Kathakali training.
3 Through a mental recognition of the physical/biological action of the observed, the conventional ‘mentalist’ view had the mind of the observer reading into and interpreting the mental state of the other as represented by the specific motor act ‒ i.e. if a person is smiling it can be inferred from that smile that internally in the mind there is a representation of happiness.
4 A phantom limb is an arm or a limb that lingers indefinitely in the minds of patients long after it has been lost in an accident or removed by a surgeon. Its vivid presence may further include terrible pain ‒ phantom limb pain.
5 Imitation is typically effector-specific; we imitate hand movements with our hands rather than our feet, and foot movements with our feet rather than our hands (Brass and Heyes Citation2005, p. 491).
6 The language of hand gestures or hasta mudras illustrate the words of the sung text ‒ words like king, house, tree, warrior, war are expressed, each by a specific hand gesture.
7 ‘As one masters basic preliminary exercises the neophyte goes on to learn more advanced techniques – in kutiyattam and kathakali these include learning dance steps/choreography, movement patterns necessary to play various roles in the repertory as well as an entire system of hand-gestures (mudras) and facial gestures (rasa-abhinaya)’ (Zarrilli Citation2011, p. 249).
8 Marking the longevity of traditional performers in Asia, Kathy Foley suggests ‘Most traditional artists once they have invested years in the stretching of body/mind then grow in the regular performance that is shared with others and audience ‒ something few western artists fully experience the way performance structures are’ (Kathy Foley, personal communication, 1 March 2016).
9 While the seated teacher is common to a lot of Indian dance and performance styles such as Odissi, Bharatnatyam, Kuchipuddi, Mohiniattam, some of which would have women gurus, I use the term ‘he’ throughout this article, as the majority of teachers in Kathakali are male.
10 This singing differentiates Kathakali learning from other non-verbal training methodologies like ‘mimetics’ (see Trowsdale and Hayhow Citation2015). In Kathakali the learner imitates or mirrors non-verbally but the teacher both sings and enacts the parts to be taught.
11 Simulation is the re-enactment of perceptual, motor and introspective states acquired during experience with the world, body and mind. As an experience occurs (e.g. easing into a chair), the brain captures states across the modalities and integrates them with a multimodal representation stored in memory (e.g. how a chair looks and feels, the action of sitting, introspections of comfort and relaxation). Later, when knowledge is needed to represent a category (e.g. chair), multimodal representations captured during experiences with its instances are reactivated (Barsalou Citation2008, p. 618).
12 Progress in understanding the cognitive and neural processes involved in joint action has been slow and sparse, because cognitive neuroscientists have predominantly studied individual minds and brains in isolation. However, in recent years, major advances have been made by investigating perception and action in social context (Sebanz et al. Citation2006, pp. 71–76).
13 I use guru/shishya here as in the Western teacher/student. For a more traditional take on the guru/shishya relationship see Chatterjee (Citation1996, pp. 68‒91).
14 It has been proposed that mirror neurons by mapping observed, implied, or heard goal directed motor-acts on their motor neural substrate in the observer’s motor system allow a direct form of action understanding, through a mechanism of embodied simulation (Gallese Citation2009, p. 521).
15 Taking personal ownership of problems and finding their own individual solutions makes the learner work within their own ‘psychophysicality’, changing the ‘sociopsychophysical’ nature of Kathakali learning wherein the social informs the learner through the embodied presence of the teacher.
16 To illustrate my point I reference the part played by the performer imitating Kathakali in the video of the 1979 Odin Teatret production of The Million. The phrase that describes that performance for me would be ‘Charlie Chaplin attempts tragedy ‒ A Cartoon of Pootna Moksham in Kathakali’. Perhaps it was such artificial appropriations that made Eugenio Barba reject the use of Eastern techniques in Odin Teatret’s work.