Between Theater and Anthropology

5. Performer Training Interculturally

PERFORMER TRAINING INTERCULTURALLY At the Kathakali Kalamandalam in Kerala, southwest India, where, apparently , an old and traditional way of training is followed, the boys who will become Kathakali performers get up before dawn during the rainy season to begin eight hours of training embedded in a thirteen-hour day (plate 49). I never trained as a Kathakali performer, as some Americans have, but I followed the training routine for several weeks in June and July 1976. All references are to notes I made at that time. This "new" Kalamandalam is of institutional design—not like "traditional" Kerala. The Kalamandalam covers the crest of a treeless hill; its several buildings and brand new theater (built in conformity with ancient formulas laid down in the Natyasastra) hold to that pebbly hilltop. The buildings are mostly small concrete-block houses with cement floors (scandalizing Western dancers, who say the body needs wood, or something giving, to run, jump, stamp against). The training rooms are about 15' by 30' each, and in them boys from eight to about twenty years old sweat through the training. The training during the rainy season consists of a variety of lessons for the B E T W E E N T H E A T E R A N D A N T H R O P O L O G Y 214 feet, hands, face and eyes, and torso. These exercises are, with the exception of an extraordinary full-body massage and some moves based on Kalarippayatt (a martial art), all derived from the actual performances of Kathakali. Training in Kathakali—as in Noh, classical Western ballet, and so many forms that own a living repertory—is fundamentallya repetition of whatever it is that the training is training for, a very logical preparation but one fundamentally different than that used for contemporary Euro-American theater, mainstream or experimental. Imitation is the core of Kathakali training—imitation at all levels. A performer is free from imitating only relatively late in his life, and then only under special circumstances. This is different from what Stanislavski saw as the essence of theatrical art (and training)—and from Stanislavski through to almost every nook and cranny of the Western theater world: Meyerhold, Brecht, Strasberg, Spolin, Chaikin, Benedetti, Scheduler, Grotowski . . . just about everybody.Stanislavski: Let us now return to the definition of the creative road of the actor. Are there any generally accepted and recognized rules which can teach you how "to act"? If I have just told you that an actor can be said to have embarked on the road of creative art only when he finds in himself the never changing, unshakable, unquenchable loveof art which thrives on difficulties, and failures, and which always burns with a steady flame, then will you please tell me this: do you think it is possible to lay down generally accepted rules, according to which every actor can learn "to act," that is, to express his feelings, in the same way as any other actor? Every man discovers for himself his own germ and his own love of art and sets them free for his creative work by a special and unique method, which constitutes his individual uniqueness and his own secret. For this reason the secret of the creative work of one man is of no earthly good to another and cannot be handed to anyone as a model for imitation. For imitation is the most deadly sin of all. It is something that is completely devoid of any creative principle. And by imitation I mean teaching someone to imitate someone else's voice, or manner, or results, or to give an exact copy of the deportment of a well-known actor. That is not the road of individual creative work, that is to say, it is not the way to awaken in an actor an ever new perception of life and its problems, but the choking up of the purely organic thought by an accidental mode of expression which has become the established manner of one actor. [1962, 162] Following Stanislavski's dictum, few Euro-Americans imitate Stanislavski,his way or his exercises; but many use his ideas as "jumping-off places." Stanislavski did have a method. Or "system," as some prefer to call it, wanting to distance themselves from the particular interpretation of Stanislavskl 's training procedures developed by Lee Strasberg of the Actors' Studio. AgainStanislavski: But how are we to iind something of a general nature that is applicable to...