KK Ramachandra Pulavar

Ramachandra Pulavar belongs to the 11^th generation of puppeteers belonging to the Tholpavakoothu tradition of shadow puppetry of Kerala. He has had extensive training in the Ramayana, Puranas, Koothu songs, interpretation of texts, puppet making and manipulation. While keeping the sanctity of the Tholpavakoothu as a temple art form, he has also been facilitating its revitalisation in contemporary contexts for audiences outside of the temple precincts. He has participated in numerous national and international puppetry festivals and is the recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi award. This grant supports Ramachandra to organise an intensive residential workshop over six days that will enable an exchange of knowledge and experiences between traditional shadow puppeteers and contemporary projective shadow theatre practitioners.

The panel that reviewed IFA’s Practice programmes in 2013 had recommended that IFA facilitate discourse building in the performing arts. Following their advice, IFA supported three such projects in puppetry between 2014 and 2019. This support recently culminated in the creation of the first foundation course for puppetry in India. Taking ahead our engagement with puppetry, IFA is now supporting Ramachandra’s project with the aim of further contributing to the growing discourse on this form in the country.

The workshop will bring together shadow puppeteers from six puppetry traditions to explore contemporary approaches to conceptualising, devising and performing shadow theatre. The traditional puppeteers who will participate in this workshop will be Chidambara Rao from the Tholu Bommalata tradition of Andhra Pradesh, Muthugopal from the Thol Bommalattam tradition of Tamilnadu, Gaurang Das from the Ravanchhaya tradition of Odisha, Belagal Veeranna from the Togalu Gombeyaata tradition of Karnataka, and Parashuram Vishram Gangavane from the Chamadyache Bahulya tradition of Maharashtra. Kerala’s Tholpavakoothu will be represented by Ramachandra Pulavar himself. Each of these masters will be accompanied by one junior puppeteer from their respective traditions. Contemporary shadow theatre practitioner, Evan Hastings and his Shadow Liberation team, and, contemporary puppeteer Dadi Pudumjee will collaborate with the participating traditional puppeteers on this exploration of potential future directions for India’s traditional puppetry forms. The six-day workshop has been imagined as an open laboratory that will help cross-pollination of ideas, techniques and knowledge between the traditional and contemporary masters.

The workshop has been conceptualised around four artistic inquiries. The narrative inquiry will use the Ramayana as the anchor and explore variations on classic episodes by asking critical questions about gender, conflict, kinship, politics, state and so on; the aesthetic inquiry will generate conversations around themes such as compositions, lights, colours and use of cinematic language in puppetry; the social inquiry will explore ways in which the traditional forms can be re-envisioned to reflect our current society and its changing values; and an inquiry into techniques will look at shadow masks, shadow props, scenography, projection, body as puppet and so on.

Internal evaluation is woven into the project. There will be reflection and evaluation sessions everyday. Towards the end, there will be an internal summative evaluation as well. Some important segments of the workshop will be video documented along with interviews with participants. There will also be videos of group work, which will later be compressed and distributed on phones, so that every puppeteer takes back home a video of their work. This material will be shared with the larger community of puppeteers for archival and educational purposes.

Deliverables to IFA from this project will include still and video documentation from the workshop and notes from the reflection and evaluation sessions. The budget is commensurate with the proposed activities.