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Performance Tradition in India by Sureśa Avasthī Pdf
This book gives a comprehensive account of various art forms as practiced I different corners of india almost as a way of life.Written in a lucid style, different aspects of the rich performance tradition of the country with its own typical myths, customs, traditions and folk life get unraveled before us in these pages.
Indian Theatre by Farley P. Richmond,Darius L. Swann,Phillip B. Zarrilli Pdf
Indian Theatre expands the boundaries of what is usually regarded as theatre in order to explore the multiple dimensions of theatrical performance in India. From rural festivals to contemporary urban theatre, from dramatic rituals and devotional performances to dance-dramas and classical Sanskrit plays, this volume is a vivid introduction to the colourful and often surprising world of Indian performance. Besides mapping the vast range of performance traditions, the volume provides in-depth treatment of representative genres, including well-known forms such as Kathakali and ram lila and little-knowa performances such as tamasha. Each of these chapters explains the historical background of the theatre form under consideration and interprets its dramatic literature, probes its ritual or religious significance, and, where relevant, explores its social and political implications. Moreover, each chapter, except for those on the origins of Indian theatre, concludes with performance notes describing the actual experience of seeing a live performance in its original context. Based on extensive fieldwork, Indian Theatre is the first comprehensive account of the subject to be written by Western specialists and addressed to the needs of readers in the West. It will be a valuable resource for all students of Indian culture and a standard work in the history of theatre and performance for years to come.
Dhrupad: Tradition and Performance in Indian Music by Ritwik Sanyal,Richard Widdess Pdf
Dhrupad is believed to be the oldest style of classical vocal music performed today in North India. This detailed study of the genre considers the relationship between the oral tradition, its transmission from generation to generation, and its re-creation in performance. There is an overview of the historical development of the dhrupad tradition and its performance style from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and of the musical lineages that carried it forward into the twentieth century, followed by analyses of performance techniques, processes and styles. The authors examine the relationship between the structures provided by tradition and their realization by the performer to throw light on the nature of tradition and creativity in Indian music; and the book ends with an account of the ‘revival’ movement of the late twentieth century that re-established the genre in new contexts. Augmented with an analytical transcription of a complete dhrupad performance, this is the first book-length study of an Indian vocal genre to be co-authored by an Indian practitioner and a Western musicologist.
Traversing Tradition by Urmimala Sarkar Munsi,Stephanie Burridge Pdf
Dance occupies a prestigious place in Indian performing arts, yet it curiously, to a large extent, has remained outside the arena of academic discourse. This book documents and celebrates the emergence of contemporary dance practice in India. Incorporating a multidisciplinary approach, it includes contributions from scholars, writers and commentators as well as short essays and interviews with Indian artists and performers; the latter add personal perspectives and insights to the broad themes discussed. Young Indian dance artists are courageously charting out new trajectories in dance, diverging from the time-worn paths of tradition. The classical forms of Bharatnatyam, Kathak, Odissi and Manipuri, to name a few, are rich resources for choreographers exploring contemporary dance. This volume speaks about their struggles of working within and outside tradition as they grapple with national and international audience expectations as well as their own values and sense of identity. The artists represented here continue to question the uneasy relationship that exists between the insular world of dance and outside reality. Simultaneously, they are actively creating new dance languages that are both articulate in a performative context and demand examination by researchers and critics.
This book deals with various aspects of performance in India; especially that related to dance and dance-drama. Rather than being a description of the various dance forms of India, it attempts to discuss the social equations and cultural ideas that a performance attempts to portray. In this sense, a performance is a narrative. At the same time, performances also deal with well-known narratives from the religious traditions of India, often redefining and recounting them in the process of performance. A study of these aspects is important to understand the kind of equations that define these discourses on the performance narratives. Chapter I shows the different forms of dances that are described in the iconographic canons and also the famous dance treatise the Natyashastra, correlating them with the sculptures of dance available in the temples. Here, the temples of south India datable to 6th- 13th centuries have been studied for this purpose. Attempt is made to study the gender equations that are expounded through these dance images and texts, as also the correlation between the audience and the performance and how these ideas are intertwined with the religious images. Chapter II deals with four Sanskrit burlesque plays written in the ancient period, which reverse social equations and classical dramatic representations through the genre of satire. Almost every elite-class person, generally idealized in the classical Sanskrit plays, is lampooned here. Issues of audience perception and the reception of this kind of reversed images of the ideal figures of the society are discussed in this chapter. Chapter III deals with the aesthetics of eroticism that form the basis of many Indian classical dances, how they are intertwined with the notion of devotionalism in Hinduism and how they are negotiated in the Indian classical dances in our contemporary period. A case study is done here of Odissi, the classical dance from the eastern state of Orissa, which draws extensively from the temple sculptures of dance. Chapter IV shows that sacred narrative in India is not always a means of glorifying the divine. Rather, sometimes it is also used to satirize the established notions of religiosity and of divinity. This forms the basis of this very interesting semi-classical dance-drama form called Ottan Thullal from the southern state of Kerala. Kathakali, the classical dance-drama and Mohiniattam, the classical dance from Kerala have dominated the scene so much that this form of dance-drama has been overshadowed and it is little known to the world outside Kerala, even in India. There is not much scholarship on Ottan Thullal. This chapter deals with this form and the manner in which it uses the idiom of satire to narrate the religious legends. Chapter V is a study of the Mithila narratives from the eastern region of Mithila in Bihar to understand the ways in which gender equations in the Mithila society influence the making of these narratives. There is a discussion of the nature of “folk narratives” in this chapter. Chapter VI takes some folk forms of performance and visual narratives from different states of India to show how social equations such as power hierarchy, gender and caste dimensions are negotiated. All these use the traditional religious space to work out these equations. Chapter VII on one hand is a comparative study of two Hindi films made in 1960s, based on the lives of two women dancers from ancient India. One of them is a historical figure and the other is a figure. On the other hand, this is an attempt o show how the narratives of these women dancers are remodeled in literary as well as the cinematic medium, every time these narratives are retold. Effort is made to show how the cultural memory of the ancient history of India that the modern narrators of these stories have been received as a process of acculturation, which influences this recasting of narratives in literature as well as in film. It is also shown that this process of narration through cultural memory is not a new phenomenon, since it occurred even in the ancient period when narrative was being remodeled to present in a new form before the audience.
Folk performances reflect the life-worlds of a vast section of subaltern communities in India. What is the philosophy that drives these performances, the vision that enables as well as enslaves these communities to present what they feel, think, imagine, and want to see? Can such performances challenge social hierarchies and ensure justice in a caste-ridden society? In Cultural Labour, the author studies bhuiyan puja (land worship), bidesia (theatre of migrant labourers), Reshma-Chuharmal (Dalit ballads), dugola (singing duels) from Bihar, and the songs and performances of Gaddar, who was associated with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana: he examines various ways in which meanings and behaviour are engendered in communities through rituals, theatre, and enactments. Focusing on various motifs of landscape, materiality, and performance, the author looks at the relationship between culture and labour in its immediate contexts. Based on an extensive ethnography and the author’s own life experience as a member of such a community, the book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the politics and aesthetics of folk performance in the light of contemporary theories of theatre and performance studies.
Postdramatic Theatre and India by Ashis Sengupta Pdf
This book revisits Hans-Thies Lehmann's theory of the postdramatic and participates in the ongoing debate on the theatre paradigm by placing contemporary Indian performance within it. None of the Indian theatre-makers under study built their works directly on the Euro-American model of postdramatic theatre, but many have used its vocabulary and apparatus in innovative, transnational ways. Their principal aim was to invigorate the language of Indian urban theatre, which had turned stale under the stronghold of realism inherited from colonial stage practice or prescriptive under the decolonizing drive of the 'theatre of roots' movement after independence. Emerging out of a set of different historical and cultural contexts, their productions have eventually expanded and diversified the postdramatic framework by crosspollinating it with regional performance forms. Theatre in India today includes devised performance, storytelling across forms, theatre solos, cross-media performance, theatre installations, scenographic theatre, theatre-as-event, reality theatre, and so on. The book balances theory, context and praxis, developing a new area of scholarship in Indian theatre. Interspersed throughout are Indian theatre-makers' clarifications of their own practices vis-à-vis those in Europe and the US.
Performing Artistes in Ancient India by Iravati Pdf
The Book Studies The Evolution Of Ancient Indian Theatre: It Deals With The Dramatic Troupes, Abhinaya, The Stage And Auditorium And Visuals Depicting Scenes Etched On Temples And Caves. It Examines The Kinds Of Performing Artistes And Their Contributions.
Performing the Ramayana Tradition by Paula Richman,Rustom Bharucha Pdf
The Ramayana, one of the two pre-eminent Hindu epics, has played a foundational role in many aspects of India's arts and social norms. For centuries, people learned this narrative by watching, listening, and participating in enactments of it. Although the Ramayana's first extant telling in Sanskrit dates back to ancient times, the story has continued to be retold and rethought through the centuries in many of India's regional languages, such as Hindi, Tamil, and Bengali. The narrative has provided the basis for enactments of its episodes in recitation, musical renditions, dance, and avant-garde performances. This volume introduces non-specialists to the Ramayana's major themes and complexities, as well as to the highly nuanced terms in Indian languages used to represent theater and performance. Two introductions orient readers to the history of Ramayana texts by Tulsidas, Valmiki, Kamban, Sankaradeva, and others, as well as to the dramaturgy and aesthetics of their enactments. The contributed essays provide context-specific analyses of diverse Ramayana performance traditions and the narratives from which they draw. The essays are clustered around the shared themes of the politics of caste and gender; the representation of the anti-hero; contemporary re-interpretations of traditional narratives; and the presence of Ramayana discourse in daily life.
Tellings and Texts by Francesca Orsini,Katherine Butler Schofield Pdf
Examining materials from early modern and contemporary North India and Pakistan, Tellings and Texts brings together seventeen first-rate papers on the relations between written and oral texts, their performance, and the musical traditions these performances have entailed. The contributions from some of the best scholars in the field cover a wide range of literary genres and social and cultural contexts across the region. The texts and practices are contextualized in relation to the broader social and political background in which they emerged, showing how religious affiliations, caste dynamics and political concerns played a role in shaping social identities as well as aesthetic sensibilities. By doing so this book sheds light into theoretical issues of more general significance, such as textual versus oral norms; the features of oral performance and improvisation; the role of the text in performance; the aesthetics and social dimension of performance; the significance of space in performance history and important considerations on repertoires of story-telling. The book also contains links to audio files of some of the works discussed in the text. Tellings and Texts is essential reading for anyone with an interest in South Asian culture and, more generally, in the theory and practice of oral literature, performance and story-telling.
Cultural Forms and Practices in Northeast India by Kailash C. Baral Pdf
The present book examines cultural diversities of Northeast India. The sixteen essays included in the volume cover various aspects of cultural forms and their practices among the communities of Northeast. The present volume is expected to serve as a bridge between vanishing cultural forms and their commodification, on the one hand, and their cultural ritual origins, evolution and significance in identity formation, on the other. The book analyses continuity of cultural forms, their representations and often their reinventions under globalisation. Further, the book underlines historical forces such as colonialism and religious conversion that have transformed communities and their cultural practices. Yet some of the pre-colonial, ritual-performative traditions hold on. Through insightful analyses, this book offers an informed view of the region’s historical, ethnic and cultural practices. It is expected that the volume will be useful for scholars and students interested in Northeast studies.
Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre by Siyuan Liu Pdf
Routledge Handbook of Asian Theatre is an advanced level reference guide which surveys the rich and diverse traditions of classical and contemporary performing arts in Asia, showcasing significant scholarship in recent years. An international team of over 50 contributors provide authoritative overviews on a variety of topics across Asia, including dance, music, puppetry, make-up and costume, architecture, colonialism, modernity, gender, musicals, and intercultural Shakespeare. This volume is divided into four sections covering: Representative Theatrical Traditions in Asia. Cross-Regional Aspects of Classical and Folk Theatres. Modern and Contemporary Theatres in Asian Countries. Modernity, Gender Performance, Intercultural and Musical Theatre in Asia. Offering a cutting edge overview of Asian theatre and performance, the Handbook is an invaluable resource for academics, researchers and students studying this ever-evolving field.
