Exploring Bunraku

As part of exploration the theatre style Bunraku we had to first master the canes used to control the puppets. We were given six points :

-One cane

-A paired connection

-No talking

-Maintaining eye contact

-Exploration of the space

-Listen to the music as an inspiration to influence your movement.

At first we just had to balance the cane on one finger as long as we could without dropping it. In order to evaluate whether or not we were successful we set our own personal goals, at first I was very ambitious and I didn’t use my forward thinking as to how hard it would be to balance the stick. So once I had tried it once I set a more realistic goal of 5 seconds, once I had reached that I challenged myself further to 8 seconds.

Afterwards we connected in 3s (we are only three people in the class) and so we had to master 2 sticks at the same time whilst exploring the space.

We then reflected on the exercise and started questioning why it was so hard to balance the stick, we found several points, it was challenging because:

-You lose the connection due to the lack of eye contact.

-You loser connection when changing your focus and get distracted.

-When you are connected with two people at the same time.

-Difficult to find the spiritual or central connection - you have to remember that it's not about the audience but about the presence of the doll, the connection between the puppeteers and the atmosphere created.

-You need good group dynamics, you need to be able to trust each other and be on the same level. 

We figured that it must be important for the puppeteers to train together and always work with the same people in order to have that special connection and understanding of when to move what.

When mastering the puppet you have to be very open minded and flexible in your way of thinking, you have to be able to compromise your own plan for someone else's for it to flow smoothly. You have to be able to think on the spot and listen to your inner voice and your connection with the other puppeteers in order for it to be successful. 

GCSE yr 11 performance- Reviewing a play.

How I felt in the auditorium:

The whole auditorium was very comfortable because the audience was seated in the middle seats of the first six rows, this made the auditorium seem a lot smaller and then it didn’t matter that the audience was kind of small. You also felt very comfortable because of the seats, it felt as if you were sitting at home on your  couch. 

'Harry's Girls' was about a man who loses his wife in the very first scene, we do not know what happens to the kid but she is gone for the rest of the play, and his struggle to get his life back on track.

The play opens with a scene in the car where the daughter is happily telling her father she is winning a computer game. This happy scene is interrupted by a scream from the mother as the car crashes. The crash is shown through slow motion as the actors are moving their upper bodies in circles to demonstrate the car turning. Then there is a freeze broken by the subtle cry of the little girl which wakes up the father who finds his wife dead.

We used our bodies and short sentences to recreate the scorch moments of the play. These included the dinner table where he realized he had taken his wife for granted, his rejection by all the girls and his realization that he needed to change. (this video will be uploaded soon).

Adjectives and verbs that describe the play:

rejection, hurt, regret, attempt, fail, confrontation, realization.

Bunraku

For Bunraku we all had to research different areas, I had to research the historical background as well as the shamisen and the chanter. For the historical background I produced a powerpoint, this is the information it contained:


The History

1590s:

·      Three arts joined together: puppet manipulation, narrative storytelling and shamisen players.

·      They formed commercial puppet theatre troupes.

·      One name for this theatre form was joruri, named after a musical style used to chant the epic, Twelve Tales of Princess Joruri.

17^th Century:

·      It was built around a narrative, sung, chanted and spoken by a single narrator (called the tayu), accompanied by one shamisen player and illustrated by puppets.

·      This remains the basic style of performance today

·      At first the narrator, shamisen and the puppeteer were hidden during performances.

·      But by the early 18^th century when Monzaemon Chikamatsu wrote his first psychologically persuasive ‘modern’ puppet plays, all the performers were visible during the performance.

Monzaemon Chikamatsu:

·      Monzaemon Chikamatsu was a well known Kabuki writer.

·      He began writing Bunraku plays using the Confucia ideas of loyalty over personal feelings which are widespread in kabuki

·      òHe also wrote plays about the merchant class, especially about current events or occurences that affected them.

·      His plays were a huge success  and are still performed today, because the majority of the audience were from the merchant class

Gidayu Takemoto:

·      Gidayu Takemoto also affected the development of Bunraku

·      He was the creator of the style of chanted narration, which is why it is known as Gidayu

·      He added his own emotive style to the performances

18^th Century:

·      There was a lot of exchange between Kabuki and Bunraku both from a movement and playwright point of view.

·      And number of plays were adapted from one to the other.

·      Bunraku flourished and borrowed elements of Kabuki’s stylized movements to make the puppets appear more real.

·      At the end of the decade there was a decline in the popularity of Bunraku due to a lack of good writers.

How did it get its name?

·      In the early 18^th century Bunrakukken Uemura built a small theater in the area of Osaka where ‘The National Bunraku Theater’ now stands.

·      In 1872 the theatre was relocated and given official government recognition.

·      It is now called Bunraku-za.

·      And this is how it got its name.

Bibliography:

http://www.essortment.com/bunraku---japanese-puppetry-58118.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunraku#The_chanter.2C_.22tayu.22

http://www.artelino.com/articles/bunraku.asp

http://www.osaka-info.jp/en/culture/2007may/03.html

http://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/unesco/bunraku/en/contents/creaters/tayu.html

The Cambridge guide to Asian Theatre by James R Brandon

For the Chanter and the Shamisen I produced a movie using Imovie (which could not be uploaded).






Ms Hurst made two words games for us to learn the area she had to research. For the mechanics she had cut up the sentences and laminated them. The sentences had different colors, but there could be a red sentences followed by a blue sentence and then a red again. This blog: http://alisontheatre.blogspot.com/2011/05/bunraku-research.html shows the process of assembling the sentences. We learned that:

The Mechanism of the Puppets

The  heads  of the  dolls  are carved  of  wood and  are  hollow, and  they  are placed  atop  a special        head-grip   stick (dogushi),  which  is  placed through  a  hole in  the  shoulder board;   it is with this  stick  that the main puppeteer manipulates    the doll.    There are  lengths  of fabric  draped both  in  front  of and  in  the  back  of  the  shoulder board,  and  they are  attached  to bamboo hoops ―  it is a    very  simple mechanism. Loofahs  are attached  at  either   end   of  the  shoulder  board   to   create  the roundness  of  the shoulders.   The  arms   and  legs   are   each  attached separately  to  the shoulder  board by  strings,  but,    as a rule,  female puppets  do  not have  any  legs  at  all  ―  the  foot puppeteer  places his  fists  in  the hem  of  the  doll's robe  and  makes it  appear  as though  she  has feet  and  is walking.  A  long wooden armature (sashigane)  is attached  to  the puppet's  left hand,  through the  use  of  which  the  left-hand puppeteer operates  the doll's  left  arm and  hand.

And the website used to collect this information was:

http://www2.ntj.jac.go.jp/unesco/bunraku/en/contents/creaters/operator.html

Gecko Theatre Company

Who are they?

·      They are an international theatre company based in the UK.

·      It was founded in 2001

·      Amit Lahav is the Artistic Director and the co-founder of Gecko “After finishing my formal training, I was extremely lucky to work with inspirational theatre makers like Lindsay Kemp, David Glass, Steven Berkoff and Ken Campbell. It was this 10 year period that fuelled my passion for visual and expressive theatre and also confirmed to me that a new journey must now begin which would enable me to explore a theatre language. I met Al Nedjari in 2001 and Gecko was born. For 8 years we developed our skills and cultivated a very definite and exciting style through the process of making shows and facilitating and leading workshops relating to our style of devising and performance"


Steven Berkoff studied drama and mime in London and in Paris, after opening his own theatre company in 1968 his plays and adaptations were performed all around the world and in different languages. Among the adaptations was Kafka's Metamorphosis and the Trial. He has also directed and toured many of Shakespeare's plays such as Richard II, Hamlet and Macbeth.

You can see the elements of mime both through the make-up and the movement. The make-up is the original mime make-up with the exaggerated mouth and white face, the movement is very descriptive like it is in mime.

·      

They have toured in 20 countries with their 4 award winning productions and now has the foundation to become a leading international physical theatre group.

Amit Lahav - Artistic Director

Kate Sparshatt - Producer

Helen Baggett - Associate Director

Eleanor Hartwell - General Manager

New Wolsey Theatre - Associate Theatre

Dave Price - Music Collaborator

Jackie Shemesh - Lighting Collaborator

Richard Haughton – Photographer

Their Style

(taken from 1^st website)

Physical theatre:

·      goes beyond verbal narrative, incorporating physical and visual elements on a level at least equal to verbal elements

·      is more than simply abstract movement – it includes some element of character, narrative, relationships, and interaction between the performers, not necessarily linear or obvious

includes a wide variety of styles, approaches, aesthetics – can include dance-theatre, movement theatre, clown, puppetry, mime, mask, vaudeville, and circus

Some helpful quotes:

·      "Audiences today want a real experience in their live performance, because they can get great script based entertainment at home, through various new media sources.  Traditional theatre, which appeals on a mental, and hopefully also emotional level, has not been enough to compete with other media, and audiences have been declining.  Physical theatre, by contrast, appeals to the audience on a physical and emotional level, providing a much more immediate experience than traditional theatre, and audiences here have been growing.  Today physical theatre is a broad term which covers the range of circus theatre forms, clown, mime, mask, commedia, visual theatre, and dance theatre." - from www.artmedia.com.au - a physical theatre website from Australia

·      "It is NOT that the body says what the voice is saying.  I start with what it is not because I find that most people (even folks in the biz) think it IS that you can say with your body what the voice is saying and I think that is redundant.  Physical theatre allows the voice to explain the details and the body to control the atmosphere and changes in the metaphysical temperature of the space.  In so doing the body (and body is not simply the actor's body but all the physical bodies that the theatre creator controls the shape of: ie her/his own, the stage space, the sound scap, etc.) creates the perpendicular.  This perpendicular creates the intersection of the anecdote and the event.  The anecdote coming usually from the text and the event coming from all that surrounds the anecdote (all those bodies)." - from Daniel Stein of Dell'Arte, via network member Kali Quinn

·      "Theatre is a physical and visual medium, but the play's not always the thing. There is a strand of theatre - the physical and the visual - that speaks a completely different language from the traditional well made play and spans theatre, puppetry, dance and visual arts.  This work uses the language of gesture, an area of theatre that in the past was dubbed mime and thought of as entirely silent. Nowadays such pieces frequently include spoken text, but the body speaks as eloquently as the voice, and one of the great strengths of this form is that it can often mine the emotions that fall into the silences between words. Much of this work is devised not scripted, and although many of the UK companies working in this area have been influenced by European traditions, increasing numbers of young companies are developing their own distinct and excitingly high voltage styles." - Lyn Gardner, the Guardian (UK)

Inspiration

·      Amit Lahav is the Artistic Director of Gecko “After finishing my formal training, I was extremely lucky to work with inspirational theatre makers like Lindsay Kemp, David Glass, Steven Berkoff and Ken Campbell. It was this 10 year period that fuelled my passion for visual and expressive theatre and also confirmed to me that a new journey must now begin which would enable me to explore a theatre language. I met Al Nedjari in 2001 and Gecko was born. For 8 years we developed our skills and cultivated a very definite and exciting style through the process of making shows and facilitating and leading workshops relating to our style of devising and performance.”

How they create theatre

·      “Workshops and residencies play an important part in Gecko's ongoing development as a company - they affirm our style and our process of making work. Education projects focus the company on it's central ideas of performance and play, particularly the emotional physicality of performance. We are able to refine our working methodologies. Occasionally we test out images and ideas in workshops which we hope will surface in future work.” Amit Lahav

The Gecko theatre company explore theatre through workshops and through physical improvisation, this is how they create new theatre, they get ideas from the workshops and further develop these ideas into performances.

Bibliography:

·      http://nycphysicaltheatre.com/definition.aspx

·      http://geckotheatre.com/

The Positive Hour by April de Angelis

Over the last week we have been working on "The Positive Hour" by April de Angelis, I am the character of Miranda hurst who is a social working in London in the 1990s and has just come back to work after a mental break down.

First Cassie researched the cultural, social and political context of the time the play was set, so the 1990s in London.  I then took certain points that suited my character:

Cultural:

• The different cultures you could find in London in the 20th century are - Jewish, French, German, Caribbean, Chinese, Russian, Belgian, Italian, Serbian, Australian, Canadian and African Troops.
• Internet, email, home  computers, mobile phones all became common in the 1990's. 

Social:

• Younger Population compared to the rest of England
• Depending on where you lived also showed the type of class/status you were in society.
• Between 1991 and 2001 the population of Greater London increased by 492337 and it increased in Inner London by 261524.

Political:

• Employed more women and Ethnic people into work
• Changing status of women in society, have equal rights.
• Marie Stopes birth contraceptive - to help poor families
• Higher divorce rates, single parent families = smaller homes and more homes because everyone was living on their own.
• Birth outside of marriage - 35% in the 1990s
• Politicians also decided to try and make London slums into a cleaner environment. In the war they were destroyed, so they built public houses to accommodate the less fortunate.

From this research I concluded that Miranda had a mental break down because of the added stress of equalizing women because she didn't actually want to work. She also had to learn about many different cultures in order to understand all her clients who suddenly were from many different countries, she also had a lot more clients because the government were attempting to clean up the slums and so a lot of people were sent to counseling. There was a lot of births outside of marriage and so she had a lot more single mothers like Paula to deal with on top of the stress of learning how to use all the new technology they were expected to use. 

We also got the setting of the play from the historical background, as mentioned London was very cramped at this time, and so we decided to have Miranda's office in a small cubicle with a very small table and chair to show how cramped everyone was living and to illustrate how Paula was trapped in her situation and couldn't get out.


Character profile sheet

By doing the character profile sheet i discovered that i imagined Miranda as a touchy, changeable, sober, unsociable, reserved, quiet, careful, reliable and controlled character. 
I was then influenced by Emma Pillsbury from Glee, her character has OCD and is very insecure about herself. She wants to be professional but is lacking the confidence to appear professional. 


Whilst reading through the script I wrote down her aim in each sentence i said, they were either: trying to be professional, trying not to break down, trying to calm Paula down. This helped me detect her change in objective as well as gaining a better understanding of her personality and developing a deeper character. 
I tried to portray Miranda as both a very controlled and strict character as well as an insecure, weak character and by trying out both we found that the insecure, weak character creates a bigger contrast from Paula who is a very out-going and demanding character. This creates comedy because it gives more power to Paula who is the one who's life has completely fallen apart and should be the weaker character, and Miranda who is the upper class character with a job and good money is the one who portrayed as the weaker and more threatened link in the relationship. 


In the rehearsal process we used Utah Hagen's Object Exercises, we asked ourself these questions :
1. Who am I?
Character.

2. What time is it?
century, year, season, day, minute.

3. Where am I?
country, city, neighborhood, house, room, area of room.

4. What surrounds me?
animate and inanimate objects.

5. What are the given circumstances?
past, present, future, and the events.

6. What is my relationship?
relation to total events, other characters, and to other things.

7. What do I want?
character, main and immediate objectives.

8. What's in my way?
obstacles

9. What do I do to get what I want?
The action: physical, verbal.


In order for this to work you have to be very personal, very descriptive and dig very deep. You have to be completely honest and overanalyze the situation so that you really realize how you act in real life and it'll then be easier for you to use it on stage. (check examples in portfolio). 
Here are my answers for Miranda:


1. I am a 30 year old social worker who is scared of the empowerment of women as she feels inadequate to go into the workforce. i am very high maintenance and very afraid of germs after her recent collapse which I blame on a virus as I don't want to look weaker than my clients even though I am in most cases. I am very reserved and try to avoid personal conversations with clients and I try to stick to the books and what I have been taught. I am married but I have no kids because I am afraid of the responsibility as well as the pain from child birth. I grew up in an old fashioned family as an only child in a middle classed family. 


2. It is the spring of 1997, a monday morning and I would say it's around noon. The sun is starting to warm up and people are coming in without jackets on. 


3. I am in my office in Lewisham, London. I am in the far corner of the office in my cubicle, furthest away from the door and any windows. 


4. I am surrounded by three walls, it is a very small cubicle and I can hear the writing on keyboards and phones ringing in all the cubicles around me. The room is quite dark because of all the extra walls set up and it creates a very grey atmosphere despite the golden sun outside. I only get the light the white lamps hung around the room. On my table there is a phone and a new PC which I am learning how to use because all my old paperwork has been taken away in the time I was on leave.


5. Since I last went to work there has been a lot more immigration and so I now have to get familiar with many more cultures and religions, I find it very difficult to understand anyone who cannot speak proper English and therefore very hard to communicate with them. Over the past 10 years there has been an increase in births outside marriage and so I have to deal with a lot of single mothers, most of whom are very inadequate of looking after a child. I am now expected to use all the new technology as this has become very fashionable.


6. I find it hard to deal with other nationalities because I don't understand what they are saying or where they are coming from. I find it hard to have respect for single mothers because I don't understand how they can be so irresponsible and have no fear at all, I think I am a little jealous of their independence because I am very dependent on my Father and Husband. I do not understand technology, I would rather use my old paperwork. I think Paula is very strange and rude, I don't understand why she thinks she is good enough to look after her child but I'm afraid of telling her she is inadequate to look after her child because she gets very scary when she is angry.


7. I want to get through the day without too much stress and recreate a professional image for myself because I want to fit into society as I don't like to be different and I don't like to disappoint people.


8. Paula's anger and my fear of having another collapse.


9. I talk her down when she has a blade in her hand and I convince her that I'm on her side so that I can go back to the script and do what I've been instructed to do.




http://alisontheatre.blogspot.com/2011/05/positive-hour-april-de-angelis.html
These are the pictures from our performance.
I think once we got started our energy was very high and the comedy came quite natural. I exaggerated my insecurities with the technology, I showed this by typing with one finger and hitting the table very hard. I also stuck my nose very close to the screen, as if i was trying to look "through" the screen whilst sticking my tongue out of my mouth to show I was concentrating. I exaggerated my facial expressions and kept emphasizing on my OCD by cleaning everything around me and pulling my hand away when Paula tried to touch it. When Paula lit a cigarette I started coughing into my hankie with very big eyes. 
I think we had very good dynamics and once we started performing the comedy came quite natural because we had both studied our characters very well and so we both had very in-depth characters. This made the contrast between the characters very apparent without us having to try to make it clear, which is where the comedy came from.

Kathakali

The storyline never changes, the way its presented changes due to different interpretations.

Content

1.     Introduction to Kathakali.

2.     Costume and Make-up.

3.     The mudra.

4.     The 9 basic facial expressions used in Kathakali.

5.     Training.

6.     The instruments

7.     The performance.

8.     Bibliography

Introduction to Kathakali

Katha= story                 Kali= playing

Kathakali= story playing or in other words the playing of a story.

Kathakali dance-drama is a distinctive genre of South Asian performance that developed during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries in the south-west India which is now known as Kerala state. Kathakali has become internationally known over the past thirty to thirty-five years because troupes have been regularly touring the world as part of government-sponsored international cultural exchanges or through private initiative.  Most of these performances have been kathakali’s dance-drama versions of episodes from the Indian epics (Mahabharata and Ramayana) or stories from the puranas, which are encyclopedic collections of traditional stories and knowledge.

The performers, musicians, writers, singers and directors are known by the institutions they come from, not their names. Most of the performers who came to give us the workshop came from the Kalanilayam institution and it is located in Irinjalakuala. Another major institution is Kalamanda, which is located more north in Cheruthusuti.

Kala= art            nilayam= temple        manda= world

Kalanilayam= art temple           Kalamanda= world of art.

Three elements within Theatre:

1.     Natam: Pure acting (no dance or rhythm/music).

2.     Nrithyam: Blend of acting, dance and rhythm/music.

3.     Nritham: Pure dance (no acting or rhythm/music)

This is a south-Indian theory about world theory and through further reflection I found that this can in fact be applied to western theatre as the Nrithyam is used in musical theatre as well as Ballet and Natam can be used in Tragic comedy whereas Nritham can to a certain extend be applied in physical theatre.

There are four elements of the enactment of Kathakali:

1.     Ahryam: Costumes and make-up.

2.     Angikam: which only deals with bodily movements in all their subtle intricacies.

3.     Vachyakm: refers to the vocal delivery (done by the singer behind).

4.     Sathbivikm: the accurate representation of the entire range of mental and emotional feelings sought to be conveyed by the actor through physical expressions.

“Where the hand goes, there the eyes follow;

  Where the eyes go, the mind follows;

  Where the mind goes, the mood follows, and

  Where the mood goes, there arises the sentiment”

This acting theory detailed by Nandikeswara in his Abninaya darpana, is followed in its entirety in Kathakali acting.

I saw this in the workshop when they were demonstrating the hand gestures using their entire bodily movement because wherever his hand went his eyes followed and it looked as if he was in a trance, which I found very fascinating.

Costumes and Make-up

In Kathakali the characters dealt with are superhuman and semi divine and therefore Kathakali accepted a special imaginative pattern of make-up and costume to project these epic characters. Because of this, the characters are classified into different categories based on their nature and personality and given unique costume and make-up patterns. There are five basic make-up categories and they are known as pacha, katti, kari, tadi and minukku. For the make-up on the face they use; chayilyam (red pigment), manayola (yellow pigment), mashi (a black paste), rice paste, caustic lime, manjapodi (a pink or red powder) and indigo.

In Kathakali the characters wear headgears  (kirita-s) and ornaments that are made of wood, carved and gilded and jeweled, with creative use of glass pieces, peacock feather and even the shell of beetles. The size of the crown worn by the actor determines the size of the skirt worn. To make the size of the skirt  a number of strips of cloth are worn one over the other, this is called uduttukettu. However all the minukku characters wear special skirts made of folded cloth and they wear uttariyam, which is cloth folded, shaped and with a small round looking glass fixed to it over their shoulders.

The mudra

The mudra is like the ‘basic alphabet’ the actors use to speak the text and therefore in the delivery follow the word order of the story they are telling.

“mushti” is the name of a hand gesture, and the 24 basic hand gestures  create an alphabet. Once the performer has learned the basics, their movements become stylized and they use their eyes and body to support the idea expressed. They draw the picture in the air using their gestures and their eyes follow the movement to put emphasis on the movement, for example if they are portraying fire the eyes twitches a lot whilst follow the hand to show the fierceness of the fire. When the animals are presented they are portrayed in their wildlife form not their captived form. I found this fascinating and odd at the same time, the eyes moved very fast and it was impossible to understand how they did it but it made me realize how much training they have to do before they can perform. The fact that the animals are shown in their wildlife form shows how old Kathakali is and that it has not been majorly modified to fit society.

Hastalakshanadeepika is a reference book which the Kathakali mudras come from, and it is writing in samskrit which is the oldest Indian language. It means: the light on the expression of the hand.

 

The 9 basic facial expressions used in Kathakali

Bhava	Corresponding rasa
Rati bhava	The erotic, love or pleasure
Hasa bhava	The comic, mirthful or derision
Soka bhava	Pathos, sadness
Krodha bhava	Fury, anger, wrath
Utsaha bhava	The heroic, vigorous
Bhaya bhava	Fearm the terrible
jugupsa bhava	Repulsive, disgust
vismaya bhava	Wondrousu, marvelous
Sama bhava	Peace, at-onement

Training

To become a reasonably good actor you need atleast 12 years of unbroken training and the best period of training the pupil is between the ages of 12 to 15. The pupil lives with his guru or teacher. Pupils with well built bodies and a taste for acting are slected, they go to the kalari (the centre of training) and  give an offering to the guru. The guru blesses him and presents him with a four and a half metres long and twenty centimetres wide cloth. The pupil wraps it around himself according to the instructions of the teacher.

In the workshop we attended they told us how their daily routine went at Kalanilayam.

·      The practice sessions start at 4.30 am everyday.

·      First they put Ghee (natural cow fat) in their eyes, and then they start their eye exercises for half an hour.

Whilst doing this they hold their eyes open with their fingers.

They start crying because they are exercising the eye muscles which squeezes the tear glands, not because it hurts.

·      Second they apply oil to their bodies.

·      They then start their body exercises: it is split into upper and lower body exercises. All their jumps are stylized even the warm-up exercise jumps.

The leg exercises are done with rhythms which gradually increases, this also prepares them for the rhythm exercises later.

·      You need a high stamina because the shows are 3-4 hours long and the costumes are heavy.

The eye exercises looked very bizarre when just looking at them but when I attempted to do it I realized how hard it is as my eyes started watering and itching. I gained more respect for them because I realized how much training you have to put into this style of theatre and how hard all their exercises are. When I looked at the warm-up exercises they looked easy and smooth but as we attempted to do them I saw that it was very hard because of the core strength, balance and flexibility required.  When they were doing their leg exercises they hit the floor with the outside of their foot so they don’t get the shock up through their body and I found out that (zarrilli) (Venu) (Phillip b Zarrilli)when you clap the rhythm you keep the slow rhythm you started with, you don’t follow the increasing speed, to understand where it ends.

When the pure dance training, which takes two years, is completed, training to act the part of various characters begins. After practicing that for about four to five years, the pupils follow the teacher to witness actual performances and are given minor parts to enact and thereby gaining practical experience.

The Instruments

The instruments are heavy and so the men who are playing them have to be strong and have a high stamina as they are holding them (standing) throughout the performance which is 3-4 hours long. They approximately practice for 15-20 years before becoming professionals and performing in shows.

The chenda weighs 9 kg and is held on one shoulder. It is made of cylindrical wood and both the ends are covered, usually in cowskin, and it is played with two wooden sticks. (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 2010)

The Maddalan weighs 22 kg and is carried on the hip. It is made of solid wood and has leather straps across it which are as hard as metal and they are made by hand. On the musicians right hand they have a fingerpiece which is made of rice moulded together to the form of your thumb and the two sides of the Maddalan make two very different sounds.

The performance

In traditional style performances were conducted in the open specious compounnds of temples. However now-a-days a slightly raised platform is made with a roofing for it. The stage is called arangu. On the stage they only need a couple of stools and the curtain. A big lamp about four feet tall is filled with coconut oil and the stout wicks provided are lit, this is what provides lighting for the show. The main acting area is just behind the lamp, but when fighting scenes and similar events are enacted, the actors run about among the audience through the temple precinct.

The stage of Kathakali never changes it always stays the same! The right singer is the lead singer (ponani) and the left singer is the minor singer (sinkidi). “Kathakali music has developed into a distinctive type of singing known as the sopana style. There is neither raga nor any elaborations like niraval or swaral singing.” (Nair, 2007)

Bibliography

Courtney, D. a. (2011, 01 04). Kathakali. Retrieved from Chandrakantha: http://chandrakantha.com/articles/indian_music/nritya/kathakali.html

maddalam. (n.d.). Retrieved from keralavadyakala: http://keralavadyakala.com/index.php?id=29

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