Transcending reality

Source --http://www.hindu.com/fr/2008/09/12/stories/2008091250730300.htm

Transcending reality

DAVID SHULMAN

The staging of ‘Ashokavanikangam’ proved to be a unique, evocative experience for teachers and students of the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

What happens on the stage is so thick with associations, layers of meaning, memories, dramatic action...

Team work:Koodiyattam is a complex interactive work utilising the synergy of actors, drummers and the spectators who put their own imaginations to play .

It was in many ways an exquisitely unique experience. For 15 nights we, the teachers and students of Sanskrit and Malayalam from Hebrew University, Jerusalem, and one actor and playwright from New York watched the unfolding of the single act ‘ ;Ashokavanikangam’ from Shaktibhadra’s play ‘Ascharya-chudamani’ in the Koodiyattam tradition of Ammannur, with Margi Madhu taking the lead, primarily in the role of Ravana. Madhu embodied gracefulness, precision, fined-tuned sensitivity and an astonishing richness of feeling and imagination.

Synergy

But Koodiyattam, is not the work of a single performer but rather a complex interactive work utilising the synergy of actors, drummers and the spectators who put their own imaginations to play in the space opened up by the performers on stage. Over these 15 nights, our own sensibility deepened and expanded.

We felt that Koodiyattam is an art of great intricacy and complexity, at times reaching levels of perception and emotion that are far beyond any ordinary intellection.

Koodiyattam, at times, is thought of as a ‘slow’ art form with each night’s performance lasting between two to four hours.

But, in our experience, the time involved was actually short, indeed too short, a mere 50 hours or so.

What happens on the stage is so thick with associations, layers of meaning, memories, dramatic action, allusions, inter-textual references, segments of text, the expressivity of abhinaya and laya, and sheer visual wonder, that our attention was fully engaged throughout and the time passes very rapidly.

Saktibhadra’s play is named after the Chudamani jewel that Sita was given by sages in the forest. The jewel allows its bearer to distinguish whoever he or she touches in their true form or true self. Thus, when Ravana, who has turned himself into a Maya-Rama, attempts to touch the kidnapped Sita the Chudamani dispels the deceptive surface and reveals his true nature.

Theme

This theme of piercing the veil of surface reality and seeing through to a deeper truth is also enacted by the Koodiyattam style itself, which brings the hidden recesses of the mind and the heart into a very tangible, visible form. Within this strangely intensified space flitting between the future and the past, a reality is allowed to emerge that resists the usual, somewhat trivial questions such as: Is this true (or false)? How true? Is there illusion operating in our minds as we watch? Where are we, inside the drama or outside it? And so on.

This particular dramatic reality, a glimpse into the world of the gods slowly materialising before our eyes, is probably never achieved in Western drama. Except, maybe in ancient Greek tragedy where the god Dionysus sat in the midst of the audience as the prime spectator. It is also something quite different from the classical (Kashmiri) modes of analysis of Abhinavagupta and rasa theory.

Koodiyattam is a profoundly serious medium requiring the utmost discipline of its performers and its spectators, but it also is replete with moments of humour, direct and highly accessible dramatic events, and a recurrent lightness of touch and heart. Over the 15 nights, there was a constant accumulation of emotional and cognitive experience, a kind of ripening into a state of lucid receptivity. We witnessed a performance mode that in some ways goes back to the earliest levels of Sanskrit drama as recorded in the ‘Natyashastra,’ but in other ways has cut itself free from the ancient theoretical norms and has evolved its own highly charged system in which the actor’s freedom to improvise and play is central.

Indeed, this degree of freedom, within the strong visual and aural language and meticulous training demanded by the tradition, is perhaps unparalleled in other, more modern forms of theatre.

(The author is a Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.)