Kathakali - a harmonious triad of dance, music and prose!

I recently had the fortune of attending a Kathakali performance. It was a first for me. Thanks to my wife (who hails from Kerala) for introducing me to this intricate art form. I went with high expectations and was pleasantly surprised to learn more than I expected.

For the uninitiated like me, in my middle school History textbooks I had learned that Kathakali is a dance form, among other renowned dance forms in India. The books mentioned only in context of dance but in reality it is so much more. It is closer to a play with equal importance for the prose and the musicians.

With roots in Kerala, the plays are written in Sanskritized Malayalam.

I’ve not studied either of Sankrit or Malayalam but the event organizers were kind enough to put up translations along with English pronounciations of the words being sung by the performers. Thanks to that I was able to keep up with the words being sung by the vocalists while not losing to capture the gestures and expressions being performed by the dancers on stage.

There is a lot of symbolism involved, including the face paint color, and the gestures or hand signs called mudras. One soon starts to grasp the presence of a complicated sign language in use by the dancers to enact the scenes that are being sung by the vocalists. The dancers demonstrate a wide array of strong emotions including despair, valor, anger through their dance. There are eye movements, facial expressions, fingers, and even raised toes at play at the same time.