G Venu: Notating 1,300 classical dance gestures, one mudra, one rasa at a time over decades

The exponent and scholar of this Sanskrit dance theatre from Kerala first devised this play in 2001 — with the show on December 22, 2024, it completed 151 performances.

Kutiyattam is an art form whose history can be traced back 2000 years, dance scholars contend. Sakuntalam is based on a play by 5th century Sanskrit playwright, Kalidasa; the conventional repertoire that Kutiyattam performances rely on are classical Sanskrit plays by poets such as Kalidasa, Bhasa, Kulashekharavarman or Sakthibhadra. Kutiyattam is typically performed in the kuttapalayam (theatre) located within the temple cloister, but Venu has taken it beyond through solo performances around the world. That is how he came into contact with the Sweden-based World Theatre Project and was chosen as one of its honorary directors in 2001 — the same year UNESCO recognised Kutiyattam as a masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity.

A nearly nine-hour version of Sakuntaḷam was shown in Paris in 2010; the same year, a 10-and-a-half-hour performance was shown at the National School of Drama. The following year, the play was shown in Dubai, the performance stretching over four days. The original duration of the performance was 13 hours.

“Kalidasa wrote about kings and women differently. In Sakuntalam, for example, she (Shakuntala) expresses her anger towards the king Dushyant, who is himself depicted with the motif of a bee that hops from beautiful flower to beautiful flower,” says Venu. Seeing Kapila Venu, who plays the titular character, scream “Anaariya” thrice (it means an ignoble, unjust person) when the king casts doubt on her fidelity, is something “that we could never imagine in Valmiki’s story,” says Venu, comparing his source material with that of the famous poet who authored the Ramayan.

“Usually, the Sanskrit playwrights would make a woman’s character speak in Prakrit. It was the same in Sakuntalam too. But my father felt that in the scene when she displays her anger, she should speak in Sanskrit, as his equal,” explained Kapila.

Perhaps its biggest innovation is that the play is performed by non-Chakyar performers like Kapila and till 2010, Venu, and not within the precincts of a temple. Classical dance performances cannot be separated from caste and social stratification: the Chakyars, traditional performers of Kutiyattam, are a subgroup of Brahmins; for a non-Chakyar to learn and perform Kutiyattam was itself a rupture. To this day, non-Chakyars rarely perform inside the kuttapalayam.

Like all masters, Venu started young. Born in 1945, he began learning Kathakali at the age of 11, first under Keerikattu Sankara Pillai Asan and later, under Guru Gopinath when he joined the Viswakala Kendra in Vattiyoorkavu run by the well-known dancer. He turned lithe and supple and developed a fascination for the 24 mudras that, like the alphabet, form the components of the various hand gestures of the dance form.

“We were regularly made to do all the 24 basic mudrās,” he writes in his 2023 book, Mudra: The Language of Kutiyattam, Kathakali and Mohiniyattam. “It was done sitting down cross-legged, with the back held straight, elbows raised parallel to the shoulders and the energy (Vāyu) focused on the palms. After a few weeks, we were taught the applications of these mudrās to portray notions like the sun, king, elephant and so on. This new language of mudrās fired my imagination. Our home on top of a hill in a place called Vanda was a vast and desolate place with no other houses in the vicinity. Every day, as I sauntered through this lonely landscape, my fingers would deftly play with mudrās, magically creating elephants and snakes in my path for the company.”

Kathakali originated as a temple performance in the 16th and 17th century, as a ritual practice. The purpose of the ritual performance is devotion. There is less scope for the enactment of bhāvās or rasa. Kūṭiyāṭṭaṁ, by comparison, is more theatre and actors enact stories based on the plays of classical Sanskrit poets with the objective of evoking aesthetic pleasure (rasa) in spectators. “Moreover, it is mandatory for the performer of the ritual to appear to devotees as truthfully embodying a supernatural power and not playing a character,” Venu explains.

Like the spoken language, Kathakaḷi gestures offer a complete vocabulary for communication. It is possible to express our thoughts and emotions more forcefully with mudrās than through words, yet these were passed down only orally, teacher to students, Venu writes in Mudra. There are also variations between the north and south Kerala styles of Kathakali, and with time, gestures transform too. Thus, documentation of the technique was necessary.

Starting in the early 1960s, Venu began to create notations of the gestures and postures (head and leg positions) of Kathakali: it was a fevered, passion project that took up all of his waking hours. “In school, I was a very bad student, and I would score quite badly. But when I began working on the notations, I would stay up each night creating symbols. My health began to suffer too,” Venu says. He travelled across cities, met different gurus and notated all the gestures he saw them practise. He gave up his job, first in Guru Gopinath’s repertoire and later teaching dance at Mithraniketan in Vellanad to pursue this work.

In 1968, his first book, Alphabet of Gestures in Kathakali was published with a foreword by the redoubtable scholar Dr NV Krishna Warrier. In 1977, the Kerala Sangeet Akademi published his book, Kathakaliyile Kaimudrakal (hand gestures of Kathakali) with more notations and a foreword by Dr Kapila Vatsyayan, renowned cultural scholar and practitioner. Over the years, Venu has collected and notated 1,341 gestures. Using a symbolic system of his own making, his notations have gone beyond Kathakali to include Kutiyattam and Mohiniattam too.

In the past 400 years, there have been a handful of attempts to notate dance forms around the globe—such an effort requires not only a deep immersion in the dance form but also a view of the endgame. In the mid-1980s, the US-based Starvinsky-Diaghilev Foundation held an exhibition of 55 of the most successful efforts of dance notations; Venu’s work was included. Accompanying him was the early 20th-century Labanotation system devised by Rudolf Laban and Thoinot Arbeau’s 16th-century study of Renaissance social dances.

Venu’s journey as a scholar ran parallel to his work as a dancer, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, as an institution builder. Towards the late 1970s, he came into contact with Kutiyattam maestro Guru Ammannur Madhava Chakyar, and the meeting had a transformative impact on him. After seeing him perform, Venu’s journey as a student resumed, but this time, he was keen to learn Kutiyattam. “I did not ask him directly if he would teach me because if he said no, then there would be nothing else to do; I just started doing small bits of work for him and gradually, after a few years, he agreed to teach me,” Venu says. This made him the first non-Chakyar to be inducted as a performer in this historically closed community of performers.

Once out of the kuttapalayam, Kutiyattam took wing ably aided by Venu. In 1979, Venu organised a few performances for Madhava Chakyar in New Delhi. One took place at the Triveni Kala Sangam and saw the likes of Vatsyayan, handloom and traditional arts evangelist Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and dance and music scholar Premlata Puri among others, attend. Madhava Chakyar’s masterful depiction of Arjuna imagining the ornamentation of Kṛiṣhṇa’s sister Subhadra using all nine rasas (emotional states) captivated the audience. In 1982, Madhava Chakyar received the Padma Shri, and his troupe was invited to perform at the Festival of India in London, organised by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations. On Kamala Chhatopadhyay’s intervention, the Sangeet Natak Akademi started a scheme to preserve rare art forms, and Venu together with members of the Chakyar family, opened a school, Ammannur Chachu Chakyar Smaraka Gurukulam in Irinjalakuda. The Chakyar family had to adapt, the gates had to be opened to ensure the art form survived.

To run this institute, Venu quit all his other pursuits and shifted his trust, Natan Karali, to Irinjalakuda. His wife, Nirmala Paniker, a Mohiniattam exponent, taught dance at The Lawrence School, Lovedale in Ooty, and for a while, was the only earning member of the family. Kapila then was barely six months old. Nirmala also imparted training in Mohiniattam, Nangiar Koothu and Thiruvathirakkali through Natana Kaisiki, an addition to Natan Karali founded to research female dance and theatre traditions of Kerala, in 1979. In 1983, Natan Karali published Mōhiniyāṭṭaṁ – Āṭṭaprakāravuṁ Mudrakaḷuṁ, a bilingual English–Malayalam book with a notation of 207 mudrās and postures. This was the first of many books Venu and Nirmala took it upon themselves to publish. “Government grants were far and few in between. Even today, it’s very difficult to get money for cultural projects,” he says.

In 2010, Venu decided to leave the stage for good. However, Venu continues to influence generations of performers. At Natan Karali, he now conducts a training module called Navrasa Sadhana, which is based on practices from traditional theatre and the Natya Shastra — specifically, the use of breathwork and the depiction of the nine rasas (emotions). He first taught a variation of this module at the National School of Drama and at the Intercultural Theatre Institute in Singapore in the 2000s, as a faculty. Now, the module includes multiple phases, and Venu only takes a few batches in a year. Performers range from Bharatnatyam, Kuchipudi and Mohiniattam dancers to theatre and film actors, including Aadil Hussain and Sandhya Mridul.

“In my youth, when I was employed by the Madhya Pradesh culture department as a Kathakali performer, I had the arrogance to think that I would notate other dance forms from the north, like kathak. I soon dropped that idea. Now I know it’s not for me to say what needs to be done. It is for the true student to step up and do what is needed,” Venu says.