4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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magnitudes of performance
her/his own performance. Thus the performance – the psychophysical
score of a scene, dance, piece of music, etc. – occupies a space between
the performer who is doing the action and the spectator who is receiving
it. The performer performing can be the “objective correlative”
T. S. Eliot finds in the enunciable literary text. 14 Reading the Natyasastra
and studying the dance-theater forms using it reveals that abhinaya –
acting – is not only the means by which the audience gets the performance
but also the way in which the actors get it – the “it” being not
only gestures but the feelings as well, feelings which are aroused by the
practice of the proper gestures.
Take kathakali, for example. 15 The basis for becoming a kathakali
performer is mastering a certain body configuration with its attendant
steps, gestures of the hands, feet, torso, and face – especially the mouth,
forehead, eyebrows, and eyes – in what to an American appears to be a
very mechanical way. Boys begin training between the ages of 8 and 16,
the younger the better. They train for six or more years as their bodies
are literally massaged and danced into shapes suited to kathakali. Even as
they are learning the stories – taken mostly from the Ramayana, the
Mahabharata, and the Puranas – their faces, feet, hands, and backs are
learning by rote the sequences that add up to the finished performances.
These sequences do not “make sense” by themselves; they equivocate
concerning Ekman’s assertions of universals. But these sequences can be
thought of as aesthetic ritualizations of already ethologically ritualized
“natural” displays. To a person educated in kathakali’s face and hand
language, the dancing makes sense, gestures convey specific meanings –
as concrete and definite as American Sign Language. As they begin their
training the boys have little idea, except as spectators, about these finished
performances. But somewhere along the way the training “goes
into the body” (as the Balinese, who use similar methods of training,
say). An illumination of sorts occurs: what is being written in the
bodies of the dancers is read from the inside by each of them.
What was rote movement, even painful body realignment, becomes
second nature – a full language capable of conveying detailed and
subtle meanings and feelings. The maturing performer now begins to
internally experience his role with a force every bit as powerful as what
an American Stanislavsky-trained actor might experience. I believe that
if such a kathakali performer were tested for ANS variation the results