One need not be a connoisseur of Kathakali to find Kalamandalam Gopi delectable on stage. The master may be a purist’s delight, yet it actually takes only minimal sense of beauty to sense the extraordinariness of his performance. This sweet irony of being both the entry-level charmer and the ultimate virtuoso of the dance-theatre makes Gopi special. That remains unchanged even as he turned 84 this week.
Pleasant paradoxes
At least a couple of more pleasant paradoxes decorate Gopi’s career spanning seven decades. Both have contributed to his stardom for half a century now. One, the painted face that presents an ideal mix of masculine and feminine features. Adding, Gopi’s grammar which uniquely blends method acting with the right dose of realism.
Ask him, and the patriarch would laugh off such observations. “These are for viewers to bother,” he would say. Likely he cannot reason. For two factors: one, self-analysis is typically not the artiste’s forte; two, Gopi has not been purposely trying to establish a school.
Kalamandalam Gopi showing lotus mudra.
Sometimes a mere three minutes can betray the exact sources of his absorptions and inspirations. One set of CDs a cultural body brought out in 2002 slotted Gopi in all the four weighty Kottayam plays considered the bedrock of Kathakali’s classical Kalluvazhi style. There, a particularly slow-paced love song he essays tends to reproduce seconds of movements that are unmistakably a cue from four icons — Kalamandalam Krishnan Nair, Ramankutty Nair, Padmanabhan Nair and Keezhpadam Kumaran Nair. Well, the first and last on the list never formally taught him.
Organic acting
Gopi’s kind of eclecticism is seldom a piecing together of his predecessors. So organically have their stock movements got ingrained in him that the successor is oblivious of any. No different have been instances of Gopi smartly borrowing trades in melodrama generally attributed to the Kaplingadan idiom of Travancore.
If his visage fuses male and female looks intriguingly, the ‘abhinaya’ treads an unwittingly tight ropewalk. A bit more of natural acting can make the show look less like Kathakali; a bit less of that can erase his signature.
Gopi has been off his busy schedule for the past 15 months. The pandemic has made his life home-bound. On his 84th birthday, fans did wish him over the phone and social media, hiding their anguish over the ‘shatabhishekam’ not turning festive as did his 80th birthday. One factor why the world of Kathakali is waiting for the pandemic to end is to see Gopi return to the circuit.
