The painted faces, rich costumes and elaborate headgear of Kerala theatre and dance have been so liberally sprinkled through tourist literature that, spectacular as they are, they have almost lost their power to command our attention. To see such theatre in action, though, is to be mesmerised all over again.
At 13 hours—spread over four days—Sakuntalam Kutiyattam bears comparison with the Bayreuth Festival’s Ring Cycle. Entry is free and open to anyone who can find their way through the backlanes of a small town near Thrissur to Natana Kairali, a centre for traditional arts set up by Gopal Venu. The theatre is in Venu’s backyard. This being Kerala, the backyard is a tangle of banana, coconut and betel nut trees bordered by a large tank; the theatre itself consists of a banana-leaf roof supported with bamboos, from which hang spotlights and electrical wiring. The make up artist’s role is assumed by younger pupils and the actors themselves, who use small handheld mirrors to effect their transformation.
Kutiyattam, like most of India’s dance and theatre forms, grew out of temples and retains its religious significance. The drummers who provide the music for the performance—alongside two young girls with small cymbals—pray before they begin. The first entrance of each actor is a ceremony itself in which, screened by a red and white cloth, he turns first to the drummers and then, takes position behind the screen, ready to be revealed to the audience.
The play from which this Kutiyattam performance is adapted is the fourth century AD Abhijnana Sakuntalam (The Recognition of Sakuntala), the most famous and probably the most beautiful of all Sanskrit plays by India’s most celebrated ancient poet, Kalidasa. Much of kutiyattam is non-verbal, and involves only small movements: the swivelling of the eyes from target to bow, target to bow as an archer takes aim, or the dance of eyebrows. Actors assume many different roles, sometimes all the roles, including those of animals; they use no props. Mudras or sets: hand formations are used to signify, where needed, which role the actor is playing at present. Some are obvious —like the sign for the deer—but others are difficult for the uninitiated to understand, along with much of the other complex dramatical language employed throughout. Few could watch Duśyanta’s charioteer enacting the happily grazing deer suddenly alerted to danger as the king starts the chase and then fleeing, crazed with fear, without feeling the deer’s terror.
The play is punctuated with sparingly selected verses and dialogues from the Sanskrit (and Prakrit—for non-Sanskrit speakers like women) original. The drums —which are continuously playing otherwise—fall silent for the delivery of these lines, which are stretched out in a sort of half-chant. It is the combination of the pulsing drumbeats and the wordless acting that has the greatest power to move the audience. The drummers watch the actors intently and create a verbal echo for every flicker of the eyes and dart of the finger, so that it is almost as if the actors’ movements produce the sound. The range of sounds the drums—two mizhavus, large bronze urns with leather stretched over their mouths, and one smaller edakka—can produce belies their seeming simplicity. The power of the mime is thus doubled—we can almost see and hear the bee that Sakuntala tries to fight off.
As the only living form of Sanskrit theatre, kutiyattam was recognised by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Kerala has successfully marketed kutiyattam, along with so many of its other assets, to the foreign holiday makers who flock here. While such recognition does of course help, it is these small, devoted bands of its proponents who will hopefully keep this form of classical theatre truly alive .