Kathakali
കഥകളി कथकळि
Also Story play, Aattakatha.
Dance Kerala
What it is
Kathakali is the dance drama of Kerala: an all night performance in which stories from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are told by actors who never speak. Everything is carried by the face, the hands and the body, while two singers at the back deliver the text and the chenda and maddalam drive it. The makeup and costume are the most elaborate of any Indian stage form and take three to four hours to put on. A single look can take two minutes and the audience watches it the way a concert audience follows an alapana.
How it is built
The characters fall into fixed types, each with its own makeup: pacha, green, for the noble; kathi, knife, for the arrogant and powerful; thadi, beard, in red, white and black; kari, black, for the demonic female; minukku, polished, for women and sages. The chutti, a rice paste frame built out from the jaw in layers, takes hours and is made by a specialist. The vocabulary is the twenty four mudras of the Hastalakshana Deepika, combined into several hundred words, so the hands are a language with a grammar. Navarasa, the nine expressions, are drilled as exercises: the eyes, the cheeks, the eyebrows and the lower lids are each moved independently.
How it is learnt
The question a family actually has
Traditionally a boy entered at eight to twelve and trained for six to ten years in a gurukulam, rising before dawn. The body is prepared by a massage with the teacher’s feet, the uzhichil, done over weeks in the monsoon. The eye exercises are done daily with ghee in the eyes, the eyeballs moved in figures while the head is still. The Kerala Kalamandalam, founded in 1930, now runs it as a six year diploma with a further two for postgraduate work. A performer is not considered mature before forty; the great roles are given to men in their fifties and sixties, which is the opposite of most dance careers.
Whose lineage is whose
Where a claim is contested, by whom
The form grew in the seventeenth century from Ramanattam, composed by the raja of Kottarakkara, which itself answered Krishnanattam at Guruvayur, and behind both stand Koodiyattam and the martial Kalaripayattu, whose body training it borrowed. Two main styles are named, the northern Kalluvazhi line now centred on Kalamandalam, and the southern Thekkan line of Travancore, and they differ in the sharpness of the movement and in the treatment of some characters. Vallathol Narayana Menon’s founding of Kalamandalam saved the form from near extinction and also standardised it, and some southern practitioners hold that the standardisation flattened differences they would rather have kept.
Worth knowing
The green face and the knife
Makeup is not decoration but casting. A pacha character, green faced, is noble and controlled: Rama, Krishna, the upright kings. A kathi, who has a red knife shape curling up each cheek, is powerful, capable and arrogant: Ravana, Duryodhana, Kichaka. The audience therefore knows a character’s moral weather before a gesture is made, and the drama is in what the character does inside that, not in a reveal. A performer’s career is often defined by which type he is given, and a great kathi actor is a different reputation from a great pacha one.
The all night form and the modern hour
A traditional performance ran from about ten at night until dawn in a temple courtyard, lit by a single large bronze lamp, with the audience sleeping through the slow passages and waking for the great scenes. Few modern audiences will sit for it, and most performances now are three hours in a hall with electric light. Practitioners differ about this: some hold that the slow passages were where the art lived and that cutting them leaves a highlights reel, and others that a form which cannot be seen is not preserved by being long. Both arguments are made inside the same institutions.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Kerala
- The home of the form, with Kalamandalam at Cheruthuruthy, the Thekkan style of Travancore and the temple courtyard performances through the festival season.
- Tamil Nadu
- Performed in Chennai and the festival circuit, and the Tamil border districts of Palakkad keep troupes of their own.
Connected to
Deities
Festivals
Temples
Related arts