How Kudiyattam lays bare the roots of the actor’s art.
What, really, is the art of the actor? Is it about imitating real life? Or is it about creating a fictional life? Becoming the character, or showing the character to an audience? Being in a situation or playing a situation? Believing in a character or situation, or making your audience believe in it? These and other questions came to mind as I sat mesmerised, watching short performances by urban theatre students as a demonstration of the process of learning Kudiyattam. As I watched for three consecutive evenings I began to find some answers and understand the depths that Indian classical and traditional forms seek to attain under great gurus.
Kudiyattam is an ancient form, closest in spirit to Sanskrit classical theatre of 2,000 years ago. It is slow and meditative, and has an elaborate gestural language, as also a very elaborate training that teaches control of each facial muscle, and the eyes. It takes 15 to 20 years to perfect the skills and master the spirit.
Some theatre students at the National School of Drama were privileged to learn aspects of this form for three months from the venerated guru G Venu, who with his modern sensibility was able to engage 20 urban students and bring them to the point, within a limited time, that they were able to interpret a single line of text through the language of Kudiyattam.
The students were taught the gesture language and some exercises with the eyes, and informed how each emotion could be played through breath control. As Venuji explained, this is a highly individual art form and the actor has to discover his right breath to be able to emote on stage.
Most of the time there is only a single actor on stage. The brass lamp that is lit and placed at front and centre on the stage becomes like the second character, and the actor is supposed to act/talk to the lamp. This probably helps the actor both in concentration and in receiving a live energy. The performance is given such extreme concentration so that the actor is able to see and therefore to transmit every detail of what he is seeing or doing while acting.
In the sequence the students were playing, Ravana, who has just defeated his stepbrother and is returning home, finds Kailash Parvat blocking his path. He looks at the vast expanse of that mighty mountain, horizontally and vertically, and then proceeds to pick it up. This takes quite some effort, but finally he not only picks it up, he throws it up and plays with it like a ball. This small segment of the story was played out in one hour, with more than half the time taken in looking at the parvat and then picking it up. The eye movement as it pans from one end of the mountain to the other is supposed to be so slow and concentrated that if the actor imagines or sees even a small pebble amidst the trees, his audience is sure to notice it. The risk is that if this seeing is without belief, the audience is sure to see that too.
So, was the actor actually seeing the mountain, or was he just imagining it? I think he was showing it to us through a combination of both. When the actors struggled to lift the mountain (one of them could not), were they really feeling its weight? Yes, they were. Their body, their eyes, their breath embodied the weight of the mountain, so that every time the actor pulled his/her hand out from under the mountain one released one’s breath at the same time as the actor.
Through his imagination, concentration, belief and skill, the actor creates a reality for us that comes from his innermost being and requires a consciousness of the inner and outer world, simultaneously. The depth of this experience was breathtaking, literally and metaphorically. One suddenly saw the strength of Indian performative traditions that we have ignored for centuries.
