Seminar by Heike Oberlin (Università di Tubinga)
02 aprile 2025, ore 14, Nuovo Teatro Ateneo, Città Universitaria Sapienza
Ciclo “Teatro Performance Danza. Storia Visioni Memoria Ricerca” - IV Edizione
Prof Dr Heike Oberlin
Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen – Germany
Visiting the Department of History, Anthropology, Religion, Art and Performing Arts from 20 March – 18 April 2025
Host Professor: Vito Di Bernardi
Together with my host Vito Di Bernardi, Professor of Performing Arts, Sanskrit expert Dr Carmela Mastrangelo and other colleagues from La Sapienza, I will be working on the research project “Text to Actress: Female Roles, Textuality and Performance in Indian Kūṭiyāṭṭam Theatre”. Kūṭiyāṭṭam is the only Sanskrit theatre with a tradition dating back at least a thousand years, originating in the south-western Indian state of Kerala, and was declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2001. Since the 1990s, when I lived in Kerala for several years to learn the Malayalam language and to study both the theory and practice of the Kūṭiyāṭṭam Sanskrit theatre tradition, I have been focusing on the subject from both a philological-indological and a theatrical-performative perspective. Kūṭiyāṭṭam is an excellent example of how a living tradition constantly negotiates its margins and boundaries, adapting 'tradition' to 'today', including in terms of gender.
During my visit, I will hold a series of cross-disciplinary seminars, open to students of the Music and Performance and Asian and African Civilisations PhD programmes, on the texts of the Kūṭiyāṭṭam repertoire and the Malayalam-language stage manuals handed down by the actors and actresses. In addition, a theoretical-practical workshop will be held at the Nuovo Teatro Ateneo on the techniques of acting improvisation in classical Indian theatre, on traditional mudrā, and on sattvika-abhinaya, i.e. the representation through physical expression of the major emotions (nava-rasa).