The Ant and the Stone: Learning Kutiyattam

Abstract

Within the framework of our four-year project, "The Meeting," Parate Labor studied the basic techniques and elements of the old Sanskrit theatre form kutiyattam at the Ammanur Chachu Chackyar Smaraka Gurukulam in Irinjalakuda (Kerala, India) from September 1993 to April 1994. I had founded the Parate Labor in 1989 as a place for researching performance technique. The Parate Labor organizes its work into projects, each project lasting from three to four years. Our work center in Europe is at the Centre de Travail de Recherches Theatrales (CTRT) in Burgundy, France, and this is where the group also lives. The project we called The Meeting lasted from 1992 to 1995 and was held alternately one year in Europe, then one year in India. It included actors and actresses from India, Europe, and Mexico. In The Meeting, our aim was to investigate whether the methods, techniques, and instruments developed in experimental European theatre research and those from the ancient kutiyattam theatre would elaborate and compliment each other. In the first year (1992-1993) the project group had worked in Europe on the play La vida es sueno (Life Is a Dream) by Calder6n de la Barca, using instruments and techniques from an earlier project, Paratheatrical Work (1989-1991), and exploring the methods of the affective memory and of physical actions in the tradition of Stanislavski. In the second year (1993-1994) we traveled to southern India and studied the elements and techniques of kutiyattam. In the third year (1994-1995), back in Europe, we experimented with the European and Indian elements and techniques on a parallel basis.' In this article I shall concentrate on the description of our practical encounter with kutiyattam, the work we did in the second year of The Meeting project.