sarma

Maybe it's because Western Europe copped out when it came to ritual dance theatre that I get so excited by examples of it from other countries. I'm not alone. The audience assembled at Hunter last Friday night to see the company of the Kerala Kalamandalum perform the Kathakali version of the "Ramayana" seemed deeply excited and cheered loudly after the performance (condensed from the possible 12 hours it might have run in India to an acceptable Western three and a half).

I have yet to read a completely satisfactory account of the origins of Kathakali. In its present form it can be traced back to the 17th century and a company owned by a poet-prince of Calicut. However, the style was clearly not his brain-child; he made use of, combined, and further refined some much older traditions of South Indian theatre and dance. Some of the positions used in Kathakali can be seen in medieval art work, and some of its traditions date back to the famous treatise of the 2nd century B. C., the "Natya Sastra".

Kathakali can be taken on several levels. It is meant to be popular theatre, depicting the body of Indian religious mythology in a colorful and comprehensible way. Yet the way the great performers embellish their roles by improvising around the simple chanted text gives the balletomanes and scholars a more complex experience.

The dramas were designed for courtyard performance. Usually a huge oil lamp provides the illumination. (At Hunter, a small lamp was used as a symbol of this.) The actors may be visible to you, but a scene does not start until two assistants drop a rectangular silk curtain from in front of the performers. Certain characters (mainly demons or animals) have a battle with the curtain first -peering over it, shaking it from side to side. The costumes and makeup are overpowering if you've never seen them before: the huge headdresses with bits of mirror flashing on them, the starchy white skirts, the knee bells, the heavy long-sleeved jackets, the jewels, the white neck scarves with the ruffled ends that contain mirrors, the white rice paste beards, the painted faces (green for heroes, green with red for demons with a touch of nobility, black and red for monkeys, etc.).

A conch shell is blown eerily in the distance to signal the start of the performance. Except for that, there are no blown or plucked instruments in a Kathakali performance. It's all percussion -two kinds of drum, gong, cymbals, a squeeze box to provide a drone. Two singers chant the text of the play. The dancers illumine the text with gestures that have specific meaning (about 24 basic hand positions that can combine to produce a large vocabulary), facial expressions, and body attitudes. Certain demonic, animalistic, or primitive characters are allowed to howl and shriek (which can be frightening or comical). There are also passages of pure dance, and footwork to accompany descriptive passages.

The dance style is so extraordinary that it is hard to describe clearly. The performers spend a lot of time in a deep second position plié with the knees rotated outward; the feet, however, turn forward or even inward and are clubbed. The dancer actually stands on the outside edges of his feet. Most of the footwork moves through this splayed position. Not only are the lines of the body squared, but often the patterns move in a square, showing you the movement from four angles. Although head, arms, hands, and feet perform independently much of the time, sometimes in dance passages the whole upper body rolls or sways from the waist -head held still or doing a follow-through snap. The effect is beautiful, but it can also suggest great power or a kind of pomposity.

I found that it was almost necessary to sit close or use field glasses in order to get the full impact of the facial expressions. V. M. Govindan, playing Ravana, the demon-king, made rapid and minute rotations of his eyeballs that were truly terrifying. The two rather ignoble monkeys, Bali and Sugriva, (Padmanabhan Nair and Nelliyode Vasudevan Namboodiri) had round fangs attached inside their upper lips which they could pop in and out during their very funny battle -first a real combat, later a seated war in which they flung howls and lice at each other.

Even from a distance, however, the whole thing is impressive. You can sit on the edge of your seat while Hanuman, the white monkey (Ramakutty Nair), fights an evil counsellor with flaming torches. You can be moved when the heroic bird, Jatayu (Sankaran Namboodiri), lies dying with one wing cut off, and Rama and his brother Lakshmana kneel to stroke his feathers. You can admire the skill of Kunchu Nair, an actor of great renown in India, as he shows you Rama stalking through the forest, attempting to catch a young deer for his wife, Sita. You see clearly the stalking, the coaxing, the repeated flight of the deer, Rama's increasing vexation that finally leads him into shooting the deer; it doesn't matter at all that you don't understand the meaning of the specific gestures.

Someone who hadn't seen any of the plays the Kerala Kalamandalum company (reputedly the best Kathakali troupe in India) was performing here asked me if the evening seemed long or if I was bored at times. Strangely, although I was very tired, and the theatre was overheated, it took me only the first scene to get onto the right wave-length. If you can accept the fact that each play contains not only action, but description of that action or plans for it, you can relax and stop that inner pressure which we in the West have in relation to the theatre -that is, to get on with the plot as quickly as possible.