Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry on shaking off the familiar, welcoming the strange

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

Many years ago, I saw the rehearsal of a traditional performance where the shishya stood in front of the guru and copied each gesture, each expression and each footwork of the guru, almost akin to a mirror exercise. Sharing and passing of knowledge from one generation to another orally is part of the guru-shishya parampara, but to see a grand tradition being imitated in a repetitive lifeless way was distressing.

Recently, I was at Kerala Kalamandalam where I saw ‘Kutiyattam’, the ancient Sanskrit theatre, being rehearsed by young actors with their guru. It was a terrific change from my earlier experience. I noticed that the sharing of traditions was not done with blind reverence and mindless repetition. It seemed as if a deep and spiritual communication flowed between the two. The transference of knowledge from the guru’s body into the shishya was as if an invisible sutra had made them part of the same continuum. Meanings were shared, as were gestures. Meanings do not belong to the past. They travel through time into the performer’s body and emotions, rejuvenating both the present and the past.

These two experiences made me recognise that even when we deal with a canonised form of training, it has to be revitalised and internalised. Technique is significant but passion is the driving force. The system of learning a traditional art form with a highly developed iconography cannot be simplified and neither can the process be bypassed. It has to be constantly rechecked in every performer’s present experience. Otherwise, it can descend into an external artifice with its inner core dead. The same vigilance is required in contemporary theatre practice from both the student and the teacher. This demands a magnifying glass and a microscope for constant checks and balances on what is being transmitted and how it is being received.

Every performer, said the British actor Sir Laurence Olivier, comes with “a bag of tricks” that he dips into constantly. Anger, horror, love, yearning, pain, brutality, bravery, courage and so on and so forth are emotions that are documented and catalogued in the memory box of the actor. He pulls these out and uses these for the specific emotional moments required for the characters. When he does that, the characters become boring, static and artificial.

The actor is bewildered by the lack of response and adrenaline rush and starts to blame the venue, the script and the lack of enthusiasm in the audience. Konstantin Stanislavski, the great Russian director and theorist, said that “cliché is the death for any actor”, and further advised to “always look for what is fresh in the arts”. Cliché and stereotype are two words that are constantly brandished by a director: ‘Stop, you are stereotyping the emotion.’ ‘I don’t want to hear this speech in such a clichéd manner.’ These two words always intrigued me, and I wanted to explore the genesis of these words.

While rummaging through various dictionaries, I came across the etymology of the word ‘stereotype’. It comes from the Greek word ‘stere’, which means solid, and ‘type’ comes from the word pounding. In French, the first printing press was called a stereotype; it was the plate cast from the printing surface. The word ‘cliché’ comes from the sound of the metal, jumping when the ink dye is stuck between the metal during the printing process.

As one printing plate prints many copies, with each copy being a duplicate of the previous one, this term was borrowed by artists and entered the theatre lexicon somewhere in the 20th century. It had negative connotations and was generally used to express uncritical judgement and perpetuation of a standardised and generalised form.

Most artists in their work challenged these assumptions and expressed an uneasiness about resorting to the cliché and the stereotypical. Fearful of settling into a situation that may not be original or new, as well as carrying the baggage of cultural stereotypes, took my mind to ‘Traditional and the Individual Talent’, an essay by TS Eliot. “The artist’s work should not be judged by its novelty and newness, but rather how the artist handles the tradition he or she inherits,” he wrote.

This quote made me recognise that, in life, we are prisoners of our habits and routine. The quotidian is our comfort zone, our safety net. But as an artist, we have to shake off the familiar and welcome the strange, as Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright and theorist, said: “to un-define and un-tame what has been delineated by our belief systems and conventions. To welcome the discomfort of doubt and transform the familiar into the unfamiliar”.

How do words, forms, visual material, theatre performances, habits, eating choices, fashion proclivities, installations, music, books and dance get labelled as cliché and stereotypes? In life, as in art, we are submerged in clichés. Yet, a cliché qualifies as a cliché through constant usage. ‘All that glitters is not gold’. ‘Don’t cry over spilled milk’. ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away’ — aphorisms that contained non-negotiable truisms, but an excessive use in language made the words sound jaded and lacking in punch!

We are assaulted by clichéd and stereotypical behaviour in every sphere of life. A candlelight dinner suggests romance — a man bending on his knees with a ring box is visual imagery that carries no ambiguity. A similar scenario plays out in a theatre performance. The moment a director casts an actor as Shakuntala, Kalidas’ eponymous character, the actor goes into a tribhanga. Similarly, you mention the name of Ram and a beatific visage replaces the normal expression of the actor. An actor playing the role of Bhima expands his body in a show of hypermasculinity. These images have been frozen in time and a guesswork construction is made through either a hunch or through imagination, along with theatrical memories.

Works of contemporary directors Anuradha Kapur, Maya Krishna Rao and Anamika Haksar and a host of younger directors, including Deepan Sivaraman, Abhilash Pillai and Mohit Takalkar, to name a few, did not set out to break rules. Their imagination was untrammelled, making them soar in unexpected directions. They stepped out of the proscenium arch and performed in warehouses, abandoned buildings, football fields or under a tent. They broke the rules of the game and created their own genre beyond the subscribed norm. Their plays were peopled with epic characters and everyday folks, mapped with precision and depth, crafted with empathy and interiority.

We recognise that the purpose of art, whether traditional or contemporary, is to wake us up. To shake us out of the slumber of routine. To remind us that our perceptual mechanism needs to be sharpened, chiselled and nurtured. Can art do that? Or is it too much to expect? I wonder.