In December every year, the sabhas of Chennai play host to thousands of classical dance and music performances. Audiences hop between multiple venues, exchanging notes about the performances they watch and the delicious food in sabha canteens. Further south, in Kanchipuram, the Kattaikkuttu Sangam, an organisation that works with the rural theatre of northern Tamil Nadu (known as Kattaikkuttu or Therukoothu), hosts all-night performances, attracting huge audiences from surrounding villages. Koothu stays in the villages and the Karnatic remains ensconced within auditoria, shielded by highly-priced tickets and barriers of caste and class. The two worlds rarely intersect, except when performers collude to bring them together. This Saturday, the Karnatic vocalists T.M. Krishna and Sangeeta Sivakumar collaborate with performer-playwright P. Rajagopal and the Kattaikkuttu Sangam on a ‘Karnatic Kuttu’ performance as part of First Edition Arts’ Karnatic Modern II series of events.
Krishna, a Magsaysay awardee for ‘social inclusiveness in culture’, and Sivakumar, are joined by violinist Akkarai Subhalakshmi, mridangam player K. Arun Prakash and ghatam player Guru Prasad. The Kattaikkuttu troupe is made up of professional actors who join the Kattaikkuttu Gurukulam, its residential theatre school, as children, balancing kuttu training with mainstream education. Besides stylistic differences, the performance also highlights the issues of gender, caste and class that layer classical and folk performance in South India.
The 20-something S. Tamilarasi who plays Draupadi in the production joined the Gurukulam in 2003, completed high school, and now teaches younger students and performs professionally. Her text messages are penned by a teenager. “Ok bye good night…have a nice dream…,” she wrote to me. Her aspirations as a Kuttu performer are loftier: “I don’t like to stand and speak. I like to dance. I like to move and act. I want to do more all-night performances.” Her emphasis on all-night performances is crucial, because Kuttu is still a very male-dominated form, with both male and female characters played by men.
The Kattaikkuttu Sangam was the first organisation to train female Kuttu actors and put them on stage. Hanne M. de Bruin, the Sangam’s co-founder and principal facilitator, explained that appreciation for women on the stage is still ambiguous. “Many performers are reluctant to share their knowledge with women. How do you make a living as a Kuttu actress? Is the audience looking at the woman’s body or at their performance? You appreciate watching a female performer but it can’t be your wife, sister, or mother,” she said, listing some of the challenges female performers, Tamilarasi included, have faced. Karnatic music has its own share of gender biases, de Bruin points out, with male accompanists often refusing to accompany female performers.
In Mumbai, the Kattaikkuttu performers will stage two episodes from the Mahabharata, the disrobing of Draupadi, and the 18thday of the war, which brings Duryodhana’s death. Stylistically, an understanding of how music operates in theatre underpins the collaborative process. “We must remember that Kattaikkuttu is theatrical and music therefore has to become part of Kattaikkuttu theatre,” said Krishna about the rehearsal process, adding, “Karnatic music in this experiment becomes Kattaikuttu music (ideationally). It was fascinating to realise that there have been musical exchanges between Karnatic and Kuttu, possibly through the devadasi tradition. This has been lost, and maybe this collaboration is the beginning of a rediscovery. This is a conversation where each art listens to the other. This means that there are places where we will disagree (aesthetically) and at those junctures Kattaikkuttu takes precedence. The creative process was of learning and finding places where each form can flow into the other.”
The meeting of forms such as Karnatic music and Kattaikkuttu also throws up questions of art, labour and aesthetics, de Bruin points out. Krishna couldn’t agree more. “This exchange emerges from the many conversations we have had on art and society. We inhabit very different social, cultural and political spaces and hence our understanding of the body, knowledge, labour, language, caste and form are very different. It is essential that we speak about them and that is what we will attempt. This will help situate the art forms, the communities that practice these forms and society itself in context and hopefully raise important questions,” he explained.
During an all-night Kuttu performance, children run around, playing games and chasing each other. Adults chat with each other, catch up on their sleep, and tune in and out of the performance through the night. There is a casualness to the actors’ demeanour; they play divine or mythological characters, but are also very human, clad in simple cotton sarees and transformed by garish shades of face paint. There is a familiar rhythm to what they do, because they travel for several months in the year, often performing night after night. For the average theatregoer, the socio-cultural context of a Kuttu performance can seem chaotic and far-removed from familiar modes of proscenium performance. These differences are what the collaborators seek to highlight.
Karnatic Kuttu is part of Karnatic Modern II at St. Andrews’ Auditorium on December 16; the production will be followed by a discussion between T.M. Krishna, his co-musicians and the director of Kattaikuttu Sangam, Hanne M. de Bruin
