Contested Narratives on and off the Kathakaḷi Dance-Drama Stage

Contested Narratives on and off the Kathaka!i Dance-Drama Stage PHILLIP B. ZARRILLI Kathaka!i which once mainly functioned in the palaces of rajas and kings. has now stepped down and is performed among the common people. (Aricatasumedaran's Jetter to the editor of the Malayalam daily, Kerala Kaumudi, 28 March 1987.) Folklorist Richard Bauman noted long ago that traditions of performance like Kerala, India's kathaka!i dance-drama, have always stood available to participants and spectators "as a set of conventional expectations and associations" which can be "manipulated in innovative ways, by fashioning novel performances outside the conventional system, or working various transfonnations and adaptations which tum performance into something else.'" A system of cultural performance such as kathakali is, like the concept of culture itself, not a set of fixed conventions and attributes, but rather, a dynamic system of human action constantly in an ongoing process of negotiation. By the end of the eighteenth century, most of the distinctive performance traits that still characterize kathakali today had evolved.' On a bare outdoor stage cleared of underbrush and defined only by a temporary canopy of four poles with cloth hung overhead, using only a few stools and an occasional property, three groups of performers collectively create kathakali performances : actor-dancers, percussionists, and vocalists. Traditionally an all-male' company of actor-dancers, the performers use a highly physicalized performance style embodied through years of training to playa variety of roles including kings, heroines, demons, demonesses, gods, animals, priests, elc. Each role is easily identifiable to a Malayali audience as a particular character type with its own inhering characteristics by the codified make-ups and elaborate, colorful costumes. The actor-dancers create their roles by using a repertory of dance steps, choreographed patterns of stage movement, an intricate and complex language of hand gestures (mudriis) for literally "speaking " their character's dialogue with their hands, and a pliable use of the face Modern Drama, 35 (1992) IOI 102 PHILLIP B. ZARRILLI and eyes to express the internal states (bhava) of each character. The percussion orchestra consists of three types of drums (cellta, maddalam, and itekka) each with its own distinctive sound and role in the ensemble, and brass cymbals which keep the basic rhythmic cycles around which the dance-drama is structured. The two onstage vocalists keep the basic time patterns on their cymbals and sing the entire text including both third person narration and first person dialogue in a vocal style where elaboration and repetition are common characteristics. Performance traditionally began at dusk and it took all night to perform a 30 to 40 page text written in highly Sanskritized Malayalam enacting one bf the many familiar episodes from regional versions of the panIndian religious epics and pUrciJ.13S.4 In addition to the potential delight of tasting aesthetic bliss (rasa), experiencing virtuosic perfonnances, and the pleasures of narrative elaboration of familiar stories, katlzakali also makes available the experience of what theatre semiotician Patrice Pavis has called macrostructural narratives which sum up "a whole scene or even the whole play.'" One of the major macrostructural narratives implicit in many katlzakali plays which conclude with a battle in which a figure embodying evil is killed by a figure embodying divine righteousness , is the story of the triumph of good over evil. As South Asian scholar of religions David R. Kinsley notes, when faced with combat "one gets the impression that the gods are really never in trouble at all, that they condescend to battle the demons simply because it is part of some cosmic script or because they enjoy it.'" With its superhuman, divine/epic characters, . many kathaka!i plays make available a performative reaffirmation of this cosmic script in which the forces of good "played" for awhile, allowing the forces of evil to have their moment on the cosmic stage. Since I930 when the best known Malayali poet, Mahakavi Vallathol Narayana Menon founded the now well-known Kerala State arts school, the Kerala Kalamandalam, katlzakali has been adapted both by practitioners from within the tradition and by (Malayali, Indian, as well as Western) artists and entrepreneurs from without. These experimental adaptations, transformations, and/or translations have included the...