Kutiyattam (Sakuntala & Narasimhavataram)

It is a style of theatre invented in a pre-industrial, pre-urban society, far, far removed from the kind of drama we are used to seeing on television or in films. Its plays are performed in the temple theatre halls called kuthambalam and often last many nights. Though watched by human audiences, they are intended as spectacles for the gods.

Kutiyattam is a hereditary art, whose precise and detailed movement has a vocabulary of some 2,000 individual gestures or mudras each with a specific meaning. These also form the basis of more recent Indian performance genres such as kathakali. The tradition is passed down from one generation of a performing family to the next. The fact that it still exists today is the achievement of one man: the director G. Venu, who rescued kutiyattam from extinction in the 1970s and founded the Natanakairali centre in Kerala to promote its development. G. Venu is the recipient of the prestigious NIKKEI Asia Prize for Culture 2007 from Japan.