Kathakali means a story play or a dance drama. Katha
means story. Belonging to the South-Western coastal state of Kerala,
Kathakali is primarily a dance drama form and is extremely colourful
with billowing costumes, flowing scarves, ornaments and crowns. The
dancers use a specific type of symbolic makeup to portray various roles
which are character-types rather than individual characters. Various
qualities, human, godlike, demonic, etc., are all represented through
fantastic make-up and costumes.
The world of Kathakali is peopled by noble heroes and demons locked in
battle, with truth winning over untruth, good over evil. The stories
from the two epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, as well as the
Puranas constitute the themes of the Kathakali dance dramas.
The macro and micro movements of the face, the movements of the
eyebrows, the eyeballs, the cheeks, the nose and the chin are minutely
worked out and various emotions are registered in a flash by a Kathakali
actor-dancer. Often men play the female roles, though of late women
have taken to Kathakali.
The pure dance element in Kathakali is limited to kalasams, decorative
dance movements alternating with an expressional passage where the actor
impersonates a character, miming to the liberetto sung by the musician.
A cylindrical drum called chenda, a drum called maddalam held
horizontally, cymbals and a gong form the musical accompaniment, and two
vocalists render the songs. Using typical music known as Sopanam,
Kathakali creates a world of its own.
The most striking feature of Kathakali is its overwhelming dramatic
quality. But its characters never speak. It is danced to the musical
compositions, involving dialogues, narration and continuity. It employs
the lexicon of a highly developed hand-gesture language which enhances
the facial expressions and unfolds the text of the drama.
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