December 8, 2002 at 5.00 pm

"Samavesham - Gender transformation in South Indian Performing Arts"

Session II
Current Practitioners: Kattaikoothu, P. Rajagopal

P. Rajagopal was born in the village of Perungattur (northern part of Tamil Nadu, India) on 15 August 1953. He is a third generation Kattaikkuttu (Terukkuttu) actor, who started his professional career at the age of ten. After the death of his father, C. Ponnusami, in 1971 he became the head of his father’s theatre company, the Perungattur Ponnusami Nataka Manram. At the age of twenty he became the company's principal actor. Since the beginning of his professional career in 1963 he has performed more than two hundred different characters, which can be found in the Kattaikkuttu repertoire. These include male and female characters as well as the role of clown.

In addition to playing at traditional, religious village festivals, he has performed at cultural festivals inside and outside India, both as a solo-performer and together with a full cast of Kattaikkuttu actors and musicians.

Rajagopal is the co-founder of the Tamilnadu Kattaikkuttu Kalai Valarchi Munnetra Sangam, a grassroots level association of professional Kattaikkuttu actors and musicians (www.kattaikkuttu.org). He was the elected president of the Sangam in 1990 and again in 1993 and 1996; since 2001 he works as the executive director and artistic leader of the Sangam. In 1989 Rajagopal started a theatre school for children in Perungattur with a small grant from the Royal Netherlands Embassy in New Delhi. In 1990 the school merged into the Sangam. This led to the development of a broader evening school theatre training programme that extends yearly into six to eight villages. The Sangeet Natak Akademi in New Delhi has financially supported the training programme through a number of grants-in-aid. In addition to initiating basic Kattaikkuttu training for (working) children and young people in villages in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu, he has organized advanced training for young Kattaikkuttu actors and musicians aspiring professionalism.

Furthermore, Rajagopal is instrumental in the organization of an annual Kattaikkuttu festival. The aim of the festival is to introduce the different styles of Kattaikkuttu to local Tamil audiences and other interested spectators (tourists, research students). The festival is a demonstration of the fact that the Kattaikkuttu theatre is very much alive. Furthermore, the festival serves as a platform where performers can meet and discuss their professional interests. In 2000 the Sangam organized the South Indian Theatre Festival 2000 in Kanchipuram, a five nights long festival to celebrate the its ten years in existence.

As a teacher, playwright, director, organizer and social activist Rajagopal is one of the creative and moving forces in promoting contemporary Kattaikkuttu as a rural theatre form in its own right and as an effective medium for the communication of messages that he thinks are relevant to a changing society. He has written and directed a number of innovative plays for adults and children in which he explores the boundaries and conventions of this traditional theatre style. In 2001 Rajagopal stepped down from his position of president of the Sangam in order to devote himself full-time to the artistic side of the theatre and to the establishment of a youth theatre school in Kanchipuram. Rajagopal is married to Hanne M. de Bruin, a research student originally from the Netherlands and now working as a facilitator for the Sangam.

On Samavesham:
'I did a lot of female roles as a young actor - Tozhi, Radha, Rukmini, Subhadra, Mohini, etc. Later on I got to do mostly male roles, because of the requirements within my company and also because my voice was more suited for this type of roles. The Perungattur tradition and other related styles of Kattaikkuttu emphasize that a performer should be all round. Even though he may specialise in a particular category of roles, ideally he should be able to perform male roles, female roles and the role of the Kattiyakkaran or herald-cum-clown. In this way he is not only an asset to the company, but it also forces him to understand better his (gender) opposite number on stage and to refine his own performance of a role accordingly.

For me doing a female role is part of my profession. I pay the same attention and care to the impersonation of such a role as I do in the case of embodying a kattai (male) character. Perhaps the performance of female roles requires technically and personally an even greater effort on the part of the performer as the female roles in contemporary Kattaikkuttu do not know an elaborate entrance part, such as the curtain entrance, used by male characters. This means that the final transition from self into embodying the female character has to be more instant and has to take place without much obvious support from the performance context. I try to interpret and (re)present all my roles in such a way that the audiences should be visually and imaginatively tempted to believe that the 'real persona of the story' has appeared in front of them. When acting a female role they should think of me as a woman - even stronger: that particular woman in that particular story.