Notating 1,300 gestures, one mudra, one rasa at a time

STARTING IN THE EARLY 1960S, VENU BEGAN TO CREATE NOTATIONS OF THE GESTURES AND POSTURES OF KATHAKALI

- Dhamini Ratnam

One day in late December, Gopalan Venu, more popular as G Venu sat holding his knees, his back ramrod straight, on the plush sofa of a green room, where shortly, his play, Sakuntalam, was to be performed. Around him the artistes—which included his dancer-daughter Kapila Venu, a virtuoso in her own right—were busy folding pleats into their costumes. They were preparing to go into another chamber to get ready, put on their costumes and jewels, paint their faces, and rehearse to get into the performer's zone. Their five-hour-long Kutiyattam performance would conclude the 2024 Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa. Everyone but Venu, who is 79 years old, seemed preoccupied and busy.

"We can talk now, we have all the time," he said.

The exponent and scholar of this Sanskrit dance theatre from Kerala first devised this play in 2001—with the show on December 22, 2024, it completed 151 performances.

Kutiyattam is an art form whose history can be traced back 2000 years, dance scholars contend. Sakuntalam is based on a play by 5th century Sanskrit playwright, Kalidasa. The conventional repertoire that Kutiyattam performances rely on are classical Sanskrit plays by poets such as Bhasa, Kulashekharavarman or Sakthibhadra. Kutiyattam is typically performed in the kuttapalayam (theatre) located within the temple cloister; but Venu has taken it beyond through solo performances around the world. That is how he came into contact with the Sweden-based World Theatre Project, and was chosen as one of its honorary directors in 2001—the same year Unesco recognised Kutiyattam as a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.

A nearly nine-hour-long version of Sakuntalam was shown in Paris in 2010; the same year, a 10-and-a-half-hour-long performance was shown at the National School of Drama. The following year, the play was shown in Dubai, the performance stretching over four days. The original duration was 13 hours.