The beauty of a Body in Motion... Rhythm, Presence, Percussion

Kapila Venu, celebrated Kutiyattam practitioner, delivered a captivating performance at a university campus in Delhi, using the modes of body movement, facial expressions, percussion, adornment, and emotivity. One of India's oldest surviving theatrical traditions, it reminds of the inherent beauty and awe of witnessing highly trained human bodies in motion.

By Aprameya Manthena 

In an age where human capacities are rapidly being outsourced to machines, we need reminders of the inherent beauty and awe of witnessing highly trained human bodies in motion. Performance traditions shaped by centuries of practice still command rapt attention using the limited modes of body movement, facial expressions, percussion, adornment and emotivity.

Kapila Venu, the celebrated Kutiyattam practitioner accompanied by the male actors-percussionists, occupied the stage with her striking bearing and formidable prowess, and we could not be more eager. It does not happen often that a sparse stage inhabited by a few performers produces a compelling visual-performance narrative spanning dawn break, relaying epics and heroic tales of yore.

The performance was scheduled at 2 AM late into the night, on a university campus in New Delhi, in front of a riveted audience comprising students and other civilians. Rooted in the Brahmanic system of purification customs and performance as worship (akin to religious devotion) and ritual body activities (as per criteria elaborated in the Natyasastra), it is believed that the breaking of dawn ushers in the brahm muhurtam or the most auspicious time of day. The chosen time slot contributed to the atmosphere and the performance aesthetic. Professor Mundoli Narayanan, a noted theatre and performance studies scholar, posits however that the appendage of rituals before and after the performance were additions made during the Brahman appropriation of the performance tradition, and share no connections with the performed text.

Ethereal presence of the performer

There was no verbal element to the performance and no melodic accompaniment that offered raga-based codes to interpret. The focus remained on the vivid, ethereal presence of the costumed performer-- trained to exceptional capacity and performing with unabated energy even at unearthly times of night and day. Unlike the elevated ranga-pitha in the kuttambalam in many of Kerala’s temple complexes, the bare ground was the stage, with negligible physical distance between the performers and the audience. This amplified the effect of the make-up, costume, body and gestures of the performer and invoked the sense of a circumscribed ritual space, heightened by the presence of the lit lamp.

The relative staticity of the body and the mobile aspect of the eyes and face made the performance all the more hypnotic; the gaze was arrested in seeing how the tension played out in the poised, stationed stance. The taut positions of the body, then, invited an anticipative energy from the audience who responded, alive to every nuance in the performative regime structured by the performer.

Kutiyattam is usually performed by various members of an acting troupe that include the Vidusaka (jester) and the Sutradhara (director/stage manager) describing the nuances of the drama. This specific performance was, however, carried entirely by one female actor and the ambience created by the drone of the accompanying percussion instruments. 

This was in the tradition of Nangiar Koothu, a solo narrative performance; as we expectantly watched, Venu’s movements and gestures shaped and heightened the dramatic reach of the chosen performative elements. The presence of the lit lamp at the forefront of the make-shift stage drew attention to the history of this performance tradition formed under strict codifications, in temple spaces. This ritual atmosphere enhanced the affect of the performance considering the otherwise secular setting of its staging.

Kutiyattam has been referred to as chakshusayagana (visual sacrifice) by scholars including Bruce M. Sullivan, Farley Richmond and Yasmin Richmond. This nomenclature immediately prefigures the Vedic texts that posit the act of sacrifice or yagna/ yajna as one of the primordial modes of worship and devotion to God, as well as explicate the process of creation. Seen as creating an exchange between Divine Cosmic Presence (Purusa) and the community, Kutiyattam performers and patrons were considered valid players in the relations between this world and the next.

Bruce M. Sullivan reveals the temple being at the centre of an elaborate arrangement of ritual and performance, where sanctity and transference of Sanskrit theatrical codes combine to form a temple tradition that has remained greatly unchanged. The Cakyar community historically practised Kutiyattam, and were considered temple servants or half Brahman bards that had to undergo a Brahmanic process of initiation as actors, including the yajnopavita (thread) ceremony followed by purification by the worshipped water of the deity and the fire.

Walter Pfaff opines that the performance moved out of the temple into public spaces because of the Land Reform of 1970 that changed the relationship of the Chakyars and the Nambiars vis-à-vis their old patrons.  The compulsion to make a living out of a tradition that had served different social purposes in other contexts and time periods, triggered change and upheaval in the community.

Pfaff reminds us that a Kutiyattam performance can be separated into four parts: preplay activities (purvaranga), description of the past in flashbacks (nirvahanam), the performance and elaboration of the text itself, and the final rituals (mutiyakitta). He further states that Sanskrit drama in Kutiyattam is no longer performed in its entirety today. Instead, each separate act is considered an entity within itself, with its own title. The performance of one single act can last from three to 41 days and nights.

During the rendition, the performance and elaboration of the text took centre stage where Venu expressed herself through hasta mudras and body gestures. The performance was constructed through a series of held postures accompanied by the drum. Kutiyattam practitioners, over time, developed a “comprehensive codified language for the hands” where different emotions evoke a range of codified facial expressions and corresponding body movements, evident to a discerning connoisseur, to create the intended meaning and rasa or affect. Many segments of the performance are scaffolded on the movement of facial expressions, the gesture-language i.e. defined gestures accompanying every word of the text and the power of the eyes to emote and convey.

Visual Imagery

The costume and adornment include crown-like headgear, ankle-length white saris with gold borders in the traditional Kerala style, reddish maroon blouse and a make-up palette that shows earthy shades of ochres, yellows, black and white, creating captivating visual imagery. The characters appear ahistorical, reflective of time gone by while escaping our contemporaneous understanding of context, time and culture. They are meant to appear sublime and otherworldly, belonging to a cosmic, mythical and mystical world that we are only passing spectators to.

The make-up of the actor heavily enhanced the power of the eyes. In the absence of spoken narrative intervention, the eyes took on a significant role in creating meaning. The headgear also accentuated the affect by drawing attention to the expressivity of the face, eye movement and hand gestures. The gaze could be differentiated on what I would call the “strength of hold” and the minor variations in the movements had to be adequately translated in real time. This unearthed allusions to epics, mythologies or simply an explication of bhava in the mind of the spectator.

Special Scenography

Scenography is an important element of the staging before the audience. The stage alignment was in the shape of the triangle with the performer at the apex and the two percussionists at the base- this symbolized the visual hierarchy of the performance. Richmond et al reminds us that, in keeping with ritual events, fire is a witness to the “sacrifice” enacted on stage. Traditionally, before the performance is to commence, a drummer goes to the sanctum sanctorum of the temple where the priest lights the wick of a lamp with the help of the burning flame placed before the temple deity. This fire is then borne to the dressing room and the actors undergo a “ritual transformation” in the glow of its “holy flame”.

In this context, it is important to note that this performance tradition, alongside many others with origins in temple economy, does not depend on the Western realistic conception of scenography. Richmond et al offer that the ritual delineation of space and the requirement of the artist, before the performance, to be ritually sanctified through procedures outlined in the Natyasastra, that direct the artist to symbolically step out of the social, profane world of his existence to the ritual, sacralised space of performance, ensures that the space is inscribed within mythical time.

However, Mundoli Narayanan takes a contrary position where he believes Kutiyattam emerged as a secular performance in the court of King Kulasekhara Varman in the 10^th century. He lays bare the claims made by Sullivan and Richmond et al regarding the “over-ritualization” of Kutiyattam. He claims a manual Vyangyavyakhya was written by a contemporary of King Varman which reports the first few Kutiyattam performances staged by the King and his actors on a canon of Sanskrit plays written during the “Golden era” of literature in India. This argument undercuts the excessively ritualised aspect and the location of the Kutiyattam tradition within the Brahmanic system, which according to him, is only a development of the later centuries.

He also speaks of how different rituals (“self-contained rituals” and “associative rituals”) have different purposes even under their respective codes and generalizing their function is forgetting the significance of the larger history, use, context and the specific role of the performance text. He refers to pre-existing Orientalist theoretical frameworks and a tendency to deny Non-Western societies access to their own history and cultural practices as the core reason for the existence of excessive ritualization.

He undercuts the premise of Kutiyattam being called a “chakshusayagana” and the arguments presented by Bruce M. Sullivan and claims Kalidasa as having referred to all drama as a “visual sacrifice” not “any particular art form per se”. The sacralization of performance is to vitalize an “intangible economy” or provide a strong ideological underpinning for strengthening the position of the King and the Brahman as the mediators of the relationship between God and the community and thus, legitimizing caste hierarchies in vocations in temple-based societies.

In addition, there have been numerous scholars that contend that any performance which achieves “efficacy” of the expression of the community’s values, would involve that performance being a “means” to the fulfillment of core social functions. Through this fulfillment, the act of performance regains a validity in the eyes of the audience who are not just spectators but also the medium for the overall translation of community experience effectuated by the performance. Thus, time, space, gesture and affect become the means through which this is experienced.

Being a “classical” form, popularly considered the bearer of a 1000-year-old tradition, there has been some debate in regard to performance time. “Performance time” is an important component in Kutiyattam when action takes on a purely subjective temporality, and moments in the narrative can be locked and explored for an extended period of time. The flexibility and endurance of the actor’s body movements in holding physically gruelling postures (the knee bend) and the precise quality of the hand gestures only certify the before-period, i.e. the “extra-daily” (as explained by scholars Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese) practice of locating the narrative in the body.

Rigour of performance

For an audience member, the rigour of the performance would itself call attention to the performative index of the Kutiyattam movement repertoire. Pfaff suggests that the “stationary hip positions” and “firmly vertical spine” were meant to achieve a point of balance in the body in opposition to the “everyday body” mechanisms. Through extensive periods of rigorous training, the body finally achieves a “precarious balance” most suitable for the optimal expression of textual signification through hastamudras, eye movements, body gestures and rhythmic accompaniment.

Drumming is a carrier of aesthetic information and percussion in the performance reveals aspects of the emotion (bhava) sought to be expressed. The slow drone of the tempo reveals either a karuna or a sringara rasa or is a cumulative expression toward the vira or rudra rasa. The two drums /percussion instruments are called mizhavu and idakka. The gestures, body and eye movements work within an economy of effectiveness in time i.e. each Sanskrit morpheme has a corresponding semantic hand/eye gesture and thus the range would be very wide but to be expressed within the same beat as the spoken word.

The rhythm provided structure to and was a constant reminder of the storytelling, complementing and enhancing the energy combine of the actor’s body and the theatrical mise-en-scene used to achieve utmost expressive potential. Rolf Groesbeck speaks of how drums are chosen specially to enhance the tension that the training process engenders in the actor’s natural body, especially the idakka. He claims that the small “Kerala tension drum accompanies songs that praise the warlike god Ayyappan” and is “fierce”. This would bolster the argument (one that Groesbeck also makes) that percussion is as important as the spoken narrative, in that the timbre, depth, volume and duration constitute “a link to the external world” through sonic variations. 

These sonic variations complement the story as “perceptualization’s primary instrument” without “informational consciousness” i.e. where an acoustic impression is made without an awareness of the historical or aesthetic information conveyed by the performance.

The story being enacted through gestures, the superlative percussive performance and the hypnotic mood captivated the audience; however, the nuances of the story perhaps remained unacknowledged during the performance due to the “gesture-language” being extremely stylized. Though the mudras were reminiscent of other dance traditions like Bharatnatyam, Kuchipudi etc., it was difficult to recognize the mythical/religious theme that was being performed (also because of the lack of the Vidusaka’s presence).

In the absence of narration

The role of the Vidusaka has been acknowledged as one of the primary contributions to the performance, usually given to the oldest and most experienced actors of the Kutiyattam repertory. He intersperses myth with the contemporary, asks questions of the text that need to be understood in greater measure by the audience and creates an extempore narrative of wit, irony and satire drawing from many sources. 

Speaking as he does in Malayalam, providing the counter to the highly Sanskritised speech, he serves to engage the audience by bridging the time gap. In this particular performance, since the gestures and eye movements were the only indication of a progressing storyline, it became a little difficult to keep track of. While the bhava or some concepts could be guessed at, the rapid succession of movements and stylized rendition created more awe than comprehension.

Additionally, the paradigm of Sanskrit theatre being to produce rasa in the audience supersedes the effect the nuances in the narrative can provide. I remember watching the facial muscles of the performer contort and provide the narrative focus, acting on the cues of the percussion instruments while simultaneously using her body to situate an idea. Since it was also the first performance of Kutiyattam/Nangiar Koothu I had ever watched, and I had come with no prior understanding of the art form, it served as an abstract rendition of a mythical narrative that I had previously experienced as unfolding through the presence of many characters, and the medium of spoken narrative, dance, gestures and music.

Also, there were certain moments in the performance that gave one pause- the performer would face the audience, enact a sequence following which, would turn around with her back to the audience. This left the audience guessing about the idea sought to be communicated. In temples and ritual performance spaces, the showing of one’s back (to the image of the God) is generally considered disrespectful and so also, during a performance.

Memories of my early stage performances came to mind when the stage director would drill into the minds of the performers that they were, at no point, to show their backs to the audience. Therefore, this particular gesture carried a strange resonance.

    The artist’s body is the fulcrum on which the expressive register of the performance depends- the gestural language, symbolic signification and percussion remain the pivots of a Kutiyattam performance.  Even though ideas of tradition, ritual and performance posited by Euro-American and Indian scholars are heavily contested, the effort to locate Kutiyattam as one or the other, is to deny the claims of historical validity and/or the aspiration toward transcendental ecstasy that every extant performance tradition strives to achieve.

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Aprameya Manthena is a lawyer and cultural studies scholar interested in the intersections between multiple disciplines. 

Pictures courtesy Kapila Venu