Pickle Factory’s Holding Space season included two theatrical productions from south India, both of which excelled in performance but fell short in the textual department.
Adishakti (Puducherry) revisited Kolkata after many years. Following its founder Veenapani Chawla’s untimely death, her disciple Vinay Kumar (now named Vinayadishakti) took over the reins. Their presentation of Urmilā, on Lakshmana’s wife, has a script by the leading lady, Nimmy Raphel, dealing with Urmila’s fourteen-year sleep when Lakshmana joined Rama and Sita in exile. Valmiki does not mention this legend at all, which occurs in southern folk retellings that relate how Urmila voluntarily accepted the goddess Nidra’s exchange offer of sleep so as to allow Lakshmana to stay awake day and night to protect Rama and Sita. Nimmy downplays Urmila’s consent, depicting her lack of agency instead. Either way, her English-and-Tamil text does not dig deep into the possibilities.
Audiovisually, however, Urmilā lays out an arresting canvas led by the actors’ decades-old body control and capabilities, directed by Nimmy in continuous motion. She herself projects Urmila’s anger while constantly fighting drowsiness. Nidra’s two watchmen (Vinay and Sooraj S), funny but sinister, threaten to steal the show from her with their comic antics, a cross between the Kattiyakkaran and Komali jesters of Terukkuttu/Kattaikkuttu. Vinay’s dark, soporific decor is a treat: three mirrors to distort hallucinatory alphabets and spirals, a hero’s giant supine bow tempting Urmila to recline, and glowing eye(?)balls juggled and rolling across the stage.
The Kottichetham Kutiyattam Ensemble’s Saiva Koothu/Kūttu, created by Kapila Venu, theatricalizes the Tamil poetry of Karaikkal Ammaiyar, the 6th-century ascetic devotee of Shiva, and the only woman (some say one of three) among the 63 Shaiva Nayanmars. She wrote the Tiruvalankāttu Mūtha Tiruppathikam, a collection of 143 rigidly metrical compositions.
Through the Nangiyar women’s form of Kuttu solo storytelling, Kapila interprets the character and situation over one hour, embodying a pey ghoul at the cremation ground, asking existential questions yet finding ananda in union with Shiva. Mostly nonverbal, she vocalizes just two of the poems in the distinctive singsong Kuttu technique, leaving us unsatisfied, asking for more. Using Kutiyattam dance with exquisite facial abhinaya, she unconventionally strings a garland of skulls, applies charred wood for kohl, breastfeeds her baby. But one expected more tāndava style, given Nataraja as the presiding deity and a pey as her subject.
The audience, literally in the dark at the openair performance in the Alipore Museum, could not read the detailed explanatory handout, the contents of which should have been communicated to them beforehand. Nevertheless, the narrative seemed eerily appropriate at the former prison, where so many had gone to the gallows—their spirits overhead plopped on the site like the banyan leaves from above. Two drummers on mizhavus and one with an edakka supplied the pounding accompaniment echoing off the jailhouse walls.
14 March 2025