Seminario di Heike Oberlin (Università di Tubinga). Solo in presenza al Teatro Ateneo
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).