In musical circles, the term fusion is bandied around rather indiscriminately. It is much more than just the overlaying of musical elements willy-nilly. The essence of true fusion lies in the building of a relationship over time. Bridges between cultures don’t just spring up on demand.
When it comes to theatre, modes of performance influenced by international productions have always existed. But much of them can be called a kind of unlicensed cultural appropriation that is almost aspirational in character. We borrow with impunity to create derivative works that are often shoddy facsimiles of the original. Cultural contexts are frequently and too easily uprooted. Similarly, a kitschy version of Indian culture — colourful, riotous but utterly false — is the flavour of many so-called global productions. A true confluence is rarely achieved. Perhaps, the theatre of the Thrissur-based auteur Sankar Venkateswaran, which remains strangely rooted despite its reliance on a foreign idiom, exhibits a semblance of an actual exchange.
Last week in Thrissur, I was fortunate to have witnessed the early origins of an endeavour that is tantalisingly poised to become an international collaboration of note in future. Custodian of a vintage form, Usha Nangiar is one of our foremost exponents of Nangiarkoothu — a form of Sanskrit theatre, Koodiyattam, enacted solely by female performers. The number of exponents in the art can be counted on one hand.
On the other hand, Russian playwright Ivan Vyrypaev is a contemporary master of the written form. Both represent two disparate and seemingly dissonant performing cultures.
Theirs was a meeting not by the river, but in similarly verdant settings: at a performance space tucked away behind the ancient Chathakudam temple where Nangiar also has her home.
The previous evening, Nangiar had performed an excerpt from her acclaimed performance piece, Draupadi , in which she enacted an episode from the Mahabharata featuring the game of dice and the vastraharan (the disrobing of Draupadi in public). Over several centuries, the feminine voice has been slowly erased from the traditional Koodiyattam repertoire. Nangiar has worked assiduously to restore the balance with a series of contemporary pieces in which the female persona (whether it is Mandodari, Sita, Ahalya or Draupadi) is once again placed centre stage, without deviating in the slightest from the intricately gestural grammar that is the form’s mainstay.
Although she corporeally evoked a constellation of characters with great dexterity, it is always in the nirvahana — or the flashback in which Draupadi reflects upon the past — that the feminine psyche comes majestically into its own. For Nangiar, performing the piece in a space she also lives as a woman in has always been especially empowering.
Vyrypaev, who has also been an actor for over 20 years, drew considerable emotional energy from the performance even if he wasn’t able to locate all the cultural references. His own works are accessible and employ simple social language, but have deep spiritual underpinnings. In Nangiar’s work he was able to discern the inheritance of an ancient knowledge that described quite potently the very nature of being. Words, or text, and how they’re represented, are an integral part of his theatre. He eschews the psychological model in which actors want to be characters. Instead, they present the text as themselves and the words become a living and breathing ‘body’ on stage.
It’s not unlike the wall of percussion on mizhavu (a copper drum) that gives shape to Nangiar’s performance so precisely. Nangiar herself maintains that her mudra s, or patterns of physical performance, with their range of meanings and emotions, can be described as a kind of literature in itself.
Added to the mix was the Japanese light designer Ryoya Fudetani, a technician who can create entire worlds and experiences with light alone. Without a common lingua franca, the interaction was tempered by the pace of translation from Russian to English to Malayalam and back. The Thrissur-based Theatreconnekt’s Kesavan PN and the Vienna Festival’s artistic director Stefan Schmidtke doubled up as translators. This rhythm of voices and tongues added a compelling quality to a session which is the first step towards creating a larger work, in which Vyrypaev’s words and Nangiar’s gestures can be brought together to relay an essential humanism that they already share.
