Kathakali: makeup as character

A kathakali performance starts hours before it starts. In the dressing room, which is open to the public, an actor sits while a colleague builds a ridge of rice paste along his jaw. The paste is applied in layers, dried, smoothed, and added to again, until there is a raised white border framing the face. Then the colour goes on. Then the beard, if the character has one, is tied on. By the time he walks out, every person in the courtyard knows whether he is a god, a king, a demon or a woman, and knows it without a single word.

That is the whole design. Kathakali does not ask the audience to discover character through action. It publishes character on the face and then spends the night showing what that character does. It is a different contract from almost any theatre built on suspense, and once you see it, the four hours of preparation stop looking like elaborate vanity and start looking like the most efficient part of the production.

The code, and how few entries it has

The system is called vesham, and it sorts characters into a small number of classes. Pacha — green — is the noble and the divine: Krishna, Rama, Arjuna. Kathi, green with a red streak rising from the cheek and a white beard-like frame, marks the great but flawed: Duryodhana, Ravana, Kichaka. High status, high temper, and a red line where the composure breaks. Chuvanna thadi, the red beard, is violence: demons, and characters whose function is destruction. Karutha thadi, black, is the wild and the forest-dwelling. Vella thadi, white, is the devout and the powerful-but-benign, of whom Hanuman is the type. Minukku, a smooth radiant finish with almost no build-up, is for women, sages and brahmins — characters who are not required to project force.

Six or seven classes, and a rule for each: the greener and smoother the face, the more the character operates within order; the more the face breaks into ridge and colour and hair, the further the character is from it. A viewer who knows nothing else about kathakali can, by the end of one performance, predict the moral alignment of any character who walks on.

Why the build-up is physical, not painted

The chutti is the detail that separates kathakali from a mask tradition. It is not painted on; it is built. Rice paste mixed with lime is applied along the jaw and the brow in successive layers over hours, each one dried before the next goes on, until a raised white wall stands off the skin. In lamplight, from twenty metres, in a courtyard where the only illumination is a oil lamp or a modern bulb, a painted line disappears and a built edge casts a shadow.

So the four hours of preparation are not a ritual of devotion to the art. They are the time the material needs. A thin painted line would be faster and would not read. The ridge exists because the performance happens at a distance, at night, with no amplification, and the face has to carry information that in another theatre would be carried by the voice or the script.

The stage the form was built for

That points at the second constraint. Kathakali developed for the courtyard of a temple, performed against the backdrop of a koothambalam or in the open ground, starting after dark and running to dawn. The lighting was whatever the lamps gave. The audience sat close and on three sides. There was no curtain, so the dressing was done in view and became part of the night's entertainment.

The repertory follows from the length. A full night allows a single episode to be stretched across hours: an entrance can take forty minutes, a lament can be elaborated for as long as the singer and the drummer can sustain it. That is the opposite of the two-hour concert format that bharatanatyam adopted, and it explains why the modern three-hour kathakali is a compression rather than a survival. What gets cut, always, is the elaboration.

Who pays for a night of this

A full traditional performance is expensive in the way a festival is expensive: a company of a dozen or more, a chenda and maddalam ensemble, a singer, a makeup man, and a night of everybody's time. It is traditionally commissioned by a temple committee for a festival, which makes the patron a congregation rather than a customer. The tourist-facing performances in Kochi and Ernakulam run to a compressed format with a makeup demonstration at the front, because that is what a ticket-buying visitor can absorb in an evening.

The two economies now coexist, and they pull in opposite directions. The temple circuit pays for length, the ticketed circuit pays for comprehensibility. Which means the form's current problem is not authenticity — the code is intact, the training is institutionalised, and the standard of performance is high. The problem is that one of its two funding models is seasonal and shrinking, and the other requires it to explain itself in ninety minutes.

Kerala Kalamandalam, founded in 1930, is the hinge. By turning a hereditary village training into a residential school with a syllabus, it preserved the technique and standardised it at the same time — which is the same trade every form in this pillar has made. What it could not standardise was the night.

This is entry 02 of Arts & Performance in About India. The next entry steps back from single forms to the two systems that divide Indian classical music — and to the historical event that put the border between them.