Assam has been a pioneer and the forefront leader in the evolution and development of dramatic traditions and rituals in the northeastern states of India. One such form of folk theatre that has emerged from Assam is Ankiya Naat, which is a collection of single act plays.
The history of Ankiya Naat goes way back into medieval times. It is widely believed that saint and social reformer Srimata Sankardeva was the brain behind these beautiful and intricate one-act plays. The language used in the plays is a careful blend of the Assamese poetic language dominant in medieval times, which is formally called Brajavali. The plays find Lord Krishna as a thematic centre.
There exists a special presentation of the plays in the backdrop of rich melodious music. This is called Bhoana. The play performance comprises dances, live instruments, singers and performers dressed in elaborate costumes.
Ankiya Naat performance begins with an invocation and a benediction in the Sanskrit language which is followed by presenting encomium to the Assamese Gods. The language of the encomium is Brajavali. After this, the performance moves into a prelude which is called Purvaranga. The backdrop of the performance is set up and enriched by the playing of traditional percussion instruments. These instruments are backed up by cymbals. The singers and the musician duo which is called the Gayan and the Bayan work together to produce a rich interactive musical experience.
The music is played in the performance is played at two paces namely the Bor-Dhemali and the Saru-Dhemali. The instruments used in the performance are played with hand movements that are of exaggerated nature. A central point of all the Ankiya naat performances is the Sutradhaar which essentially is the producer and the commentator. The Sutradhaar is omnipresent during the entire presentation keeping the audience affixed. The Sutradhar enters after the end of the prelude, and from this point onward the actual play performance begins.
The main aim behind the invention of the Ankiya Naat was that the art and the stories should be accessible to the common folks in medieval Assam, wherein a majority of the population had very little literacy. To further assist the audience an explanation was added after each scene of the performance ended
Ankiya Naat is the representation of the fine heritage of art and drama that has been endowed from the medieval Assamese period. It incorporates a passion for people and the praise for Lord Krishna.
Theater halls have opened in the UK and Australia, and the lights will shine bright on Broadway after two years. It is too early to say whether the policymakers are being over-optimistic or careless. But for most of the world, specifically, India, theater shows will not go live for at least a couple of years. And even when the theaters open with safety protocols, the theater may not remain a financially viable business. Is it the end of theater as we know it? Is it the end of an art form that has been performed for at least 5,000 years? But then theater has survived the plague and the Spanish Flu. Before we speculate about the future, let’s take a moment to investigate the past.
The first obituary of the theater was written in the 1920s when the talkies ushered in a new era of entertainment. But not only did the theater survive the competition from cinema, the Broadway Book Musicals became a billion-dollar industry around the time. The first real blow to small regional and off-off-Broadway theater came from the television in the 1960s when a television set became a household item. But that did not stop Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller from writing great plays. They forced the audience to return to the theaters. Harold Pinter, Beckett, Albee, and more recently Mamet created scintillating works for the stage despite the competition from the cinema and the television industry. The competition challenged theater to become more daring and intelligent.
Yakshagana
Talking of India, we must first understand that the Indian theater is more diverse than anywhere else in the world. Indian theater is in part sacred, ritualistic, and regional. There is a deep wide chasm between the text-centric theater that is performed in the cities and the traditional theater that exists in rural India. The traditional Indian forms of performance like nautanki, pandavani, bhavai, terukkuttu, yakshagana and even the classical theater Koodiyattam have a significant regional presence and local patronage. Some of these forms are a few thousand years old and we can assume they have survived epidemics, attacks by Mughal invaders, World wars, famines, floods, earthquakes, poverty, and competition from TV and cinema. Did they survive because they spoke to the audience in their dialect? Are they immortal because they tell the local stories of the land? Or did they survive because of their sacred-spiritual nature and patronage by the temples? The temples were the seats of arts and any attack on the temple was an assault on the arts and the artists of the land. Hence this continuity of art forms is no small miracle. But the urban theater has neither local patronage nor loyalty of committed artists. Therefore, it is starting to crumble under competition from OTT and entertainment in the digital space.
Modern theater, such as we see in the cities, lacks the spectacle of traditional theater and sometimes even entertainment. The traditional theater is non-realistic and highly stylized. The costumes, make-up, body movements, gestures, music and accentuated abhinaya/acting create a performance that is moving, surreal and mesmerizing. The modern theater relies heavily on dialogue and story-telling through realistic verbal acting. The sitcoms on TV and binge-worthy shows on the OTT are also pivoted around the story and dialogue. Why would someone watch a dramatic performance cramped in a theater when they could watch drama on their phones sitting on their couch or even the toilet seat? It isn’t just the ease of watching drama on the phone, but the addiction to the phone that has become an impediment. Not to fault the story-telling. The shows are gripping and fast-paced. But then it is so easy to manipulate the audience and keep them hooked till the end. There are formula sheets, beats, and tricks that every writer in the industry uses to keep you glued to your phone.
The straight plays in Delhi and even Mumbai theaters be it English or the regional languages are laced with activism. Polemics has replaced aesthetics. Left-leaning plays have so much propaganda thrown in the script that the audience can see through it. Can we really blame the audience for not wanting to watch social activism on stage? Directors think they can compensate aesthetic appeal with lighting but they forget the audience is not here to watch a sound and light show. The audience craves good stories. It wants to see life through a clean lens. The audience is done watching Brecht, Beckett, Karnad, and Tendulkar. Bedroom comedies are passé. OTT gives the audience enough sex, comedy, and violence. What can you give them on stage that TV and cinema can’t?
The irony is the directors and actors who are flag bearers of socialism in the theater circle abandon their ideals to work for the commercial OTT and Cinema. The crew and extras are treated as third rate citizens in Bollywood, worse than apartheid, but the champions of social equality on stage never raise their voice against the injustice. And let’s not even discuss the underbelly of theater where fresh actors are made to sweep floors in the name of training. While the artists in traditional art forms are committed to the tradition and the art, the modern actors distance themselves from the theater as soon as they break into the TV/OTT industry. Without fresh ideas and dedicated theater practitioners, theater as we know in Indian cities, is at the brink of extinction.
The pandemic has given us distance and time away from the theater and rehearsal halls to re-imagine our future. It has been a time to experiment and create many futures of theater. Theater companies and individual practitioners moved the theater online within a few months into the pandemic. Broadway HD has been streaming ace-quality theater productions shot on multiple cameras since 2015. National Theater and the Royal Opera House streamed their old productions at the start of the lockdown in UK. The Melbourne Theater Company has recently launched its Digital Theater version where they stream their running shows for a limited time. Going forward, all their productions will be available to watch online for $25. While the digital productions are a great option for the theater aficionados, but a good digital production needs multiple cameras and sophisticated editing.
Watching theater production with limited camera movement can be a tad boring because our minds compare it to the cinema and TV shows. Our minds are accustomed to two second shots. Watching an hour-long play set in the same space, in more or less the same frame becomes tiring unless it’s a fast-paced comedy like ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’, by National Theater. The musicals lose their grandness on the small screen. Lest we forget, the audience goes to the Musicals for live music. The experience of watching a musical on a small screen is unsatisfying.
Independent theater groups experimented with and adapted short stories for online presentations. It started with some artists performing or even reading short stories and plays live on Zoom. The production quality of the online plays was worse than YouTube content because they were shot on phone without professional lighting and sound equipment. The shows were under 30 minutes to accommodate the audience’s attention span. Story-telling was restricted by time and technology. As time passed these experiments faded away and it became clear that the future of theater is not online.
One future of theater could be virtual reality theater that has been in the making since 2016. National Theater has launched a studio where they will use virtual and augmented reality to create shows for a communal virtual experience. It’s the high-tech, AI technology used for immersive story-telling. But this future requires a capital investment of 100 plus cameras, edit suites, and technical crew on top of the cast and the musicians. How many companies can produce this kind of theater? How many of us can afford a ticket to this show?
Dr. Bharat Gupt
Richard Schechner
Of the many futures of theater, one future could have its origin in the past. Richard Schechner, a performance theorist and a veteran performer has been working with Natyashastra for over four decades. Dr. Bharat Gupt, a classical theorist and Natyashastra expert, is mentoring students in Greece, Romania, India and the US to create performances using the principles of Natyashastra. These performances are an organic convergence of music, movement, myth, abhinaya and story. Theater makers could look to Irish story telling as one kind of performance. This is our time to study the past so that we can shape a meaningful future.
Whatever form the theater takes from here, it has to become more immersive, aesthetic, poetic, non-realistic, surreal, intense, and communicative. The stories have to break fresh ground. The writers have to muster courage to experiment with the shape and the structure of the story. The performers have to make a connection with the audience. Theater has to go beyond activism and entertainment to become truly transformative and cathartic.
The Dilemma of Chhau – Problems of Being Folk by Gouri Nilakantan
Chau Dance on The BL Piazza
To categorize and delineate any dramatic performance as being folk, traditional or modern would be simply dispensing them off that can endanger our readings and interpretations for it. All dramatic performances display set codes and conventions such as costumes, makeup, text, use of diction prose or poetry and evolved choreography, movement or premeditated action. My attempt in this thesis is to look at Chhau as one such dramatic genre that goes beyond such simplistic compartmentalization. Chhau is definitely one such performance that uses tradition as its material, however it does not conform to any one set standard or benchmark which can be seen by the introduction of females as performers in an all male form.
A new identity are thus being assumed by the participants while there is a fair amount of continuity in the subject and it has seen some amount of stability in its dramatic content, costumes, music, plot and carefully choreographed movement. At the same Chhau can be said to be traditional as it has a quazi-religious status as it is performed during the Chaitra Parva ( March-April months of the year) and is calendared. However it goes beyond the simplistic traditional mould as it is being increasingly being performed all over the globe which is unrelated to any ritual, religion or calendared time.
Chhau is thus in a constant state of flux and is always reinventing itself in variety of ways. It cannot be denied that Chhau has its roots way back in time but at the same time to define it as being traditional, folk or classical as noted differently by scholars would simply reduce the innovation being by the presence of the females in this form. Chhau is traditional, yes, but it is as current as today as it was before. It can be said as one having a “traditional process” as pointed out Brynjulf Alver.
By definition it is the process of tradition which creates, alters and renews, chooses and works in new topics in an endless chain, by the interaction between the individual bearer and the community. (Alver, 47)
Thus Chhau can be said to be a cultural process where individuals play an important role and in particular the female. Therefore the agency of the female performer and her interconnections with the larger society and the process of Chhau has to be seen and understood . As Elias puts it,
In order to understand and explain the civilizing process one needs to investigate…the transformation of both personality structure and the entire social structure. (Elias, 247, 1982)
Folk drama is said to often belong to the common and non literate people. It is time to go beyond the ‘folk’ or the common and rethink about this dramatic form as an ongoing concern of contemporary life. As in the words of Steve Tillis,
…folk drama might be present throughout a culture, employing of any social rank who use texts that might either be freshly composed or have a basis in literature, and whose performances are an ongoing concern of contemporary life. ( 35)
The categorization of Chhau as a pure folk form becomes even more problematic and complex as its performance techniques are difficult to master. It requires years of rigorous discipline and training giving it a semi classical status that especially holds true for both Seraikela and Mayurbhanj Chhau. It is commonly believed that folk drama belongs to peasant societies however in truth it cuts across boundaries of class and caste and constantly achieves new values. According to Susmita Poddar, Chhau “arose from a certain ethnic aspirations and in its whole it is described with life struggle activities, totem taboo concept and beliefs of a certain ethnic group.” (16). It would be incorrect to assume such simplistic positions as Chhau is a complex phenomenon involving many regions, namely Purulia, Seriakela and Mayurbhanj and is now assuming both national and international characteristics with the presence of performers such as Shagun Bhutani and Sharon Lowen. It is thus not only ‘ethnic identity specific’ (Poddar) and truly is global. It will be important here to note that I am choosing to concentrate only at the participation of females in both Seraikela and Mayurbhanj Chhau.
To understand any folk drama the ‘social context’ (Ben Amos) of the form has to be defined. Here the “possession, representation and creation and recreation” ( Ben Amos, 5) of Chhau needs to be studied and understood. The category of the form being truly folk is thus problematic as its recreation and representation has to be further seen in the wake of globalization and modernization. Folk arts has to be seen in the wake of ‘commercial possibilities inherent in the new media ( Appadurai, 472). One has to go beyond the folk mass category and see Chhau in the light of government support and declining traditional patronage. Tradition thus appears in hybrids and transgresses limitations and boundaries (Schechner 2004:5).
Chhau as a folk tradition involves continuity of performance and has symbolic connections between the past and the present. It no longer belongs to ‘bounded or homogenous cultural groups or territories due to technological change and global capitalism ( Pallavi Chakraborthy, 178). It is a part of the rich public culture of India or is the “ the public modernity y’ that is both contemporary and new. This performance can be described as a national culture that seeks to co-opt and redefine the local, regional and the folk cultural forms. With the wake of commercialization, folk forms are now going beyond simple categories and are becoming much more complex in its nature of representation. As correctly observed by Appadurai,
Commercial culture ( especially in the cinema, television and audio industry) seeks to popularize classical forms. Mass cultural forms seek to co-opt folk idioms. This zone of contestation and mutual cannibalization in which national, mass and folk provide both mill and grist for one another-is the very heart of public modernity in India. ( Appadurai and Breckenridge 1995:50)
Folk arts especially drama is seen as ‘little tradition’ as opposed to ‘great tradition’ that is popularly believed to be more sophisticated. Great tradition is classified as representing high levels of intellectual and artistic achievements of the society. Chhau is one such unique form of performance that has seen the participation of the royalty as performers. In both Seraikela and Mayurbhanj Chhau we see the distinctive participation of the princes in this form. It thus has had strong representation of the intelligentsia who have successfully transmitted to the form to generations. Now with independence and the decline of the royalty and emergence of the middle class, Chhau exhibits fluidity and has thus developed ‘new traditions or invented traditions ( a term proposed by Eric Hobswan and Terence Ranger). Chhau thus is one major form that moves beyond such definitions of being truly “folk” and is an ‘invented tradition’ that mediates between the sophisticated to the common.
Chhau is thus a local, national and international practice. I hope to see Chhau as being embraced by middle class women becoming the site for emerging cultural identities inIndia. This dance form can thus hope to become a space for women whereby they can achieve new meanings and their participation can hope to establish some kind of agency and create new potentialities for female performers. It would be thus correct to conclude in the words of Wimal Dissanayake,
The recuperation of human agency then has both theoretical interests and practical political consequences of great import. What is urgently needed is a theory of agency that recognizes that agents are shaped irreducibly by social and cultural discourses and that they have the potentiality to clear cultural spaces from which they could act in accordance with their desires and intentionalities. ( 1996:xvi)
Thus this introduction of females in Chhau is indicative of transformed gender identity of Indian women as performers in the arts. The participation of the females inChhau may be indicative of a new self worth, their own personal signification, and the public presentation of transformed gender identity for an Indian woman. The Chhaufemale artists are reshaping their history by their participation in the performance. This participation is entrenched in the social life and spatial imagination of the artist. The metaphorical space, of self-worth of the artist, helps the process of negotiation between the artist and her external spaces, her home, troupe members and community to occur.
