When a Kanchipuram based kattaikkuttu team visited Chennai

The green room of Alliance Francaise has seen performers of all kinds: contemporary dancers, amateur actors and poets... Today, the mirrors reflect quaint faces painted in blues, yellow and reds. Duraisamy and his co-actors are dressing up for the Kuravanji performance from The Mahabharata, before an eclectic crowd. The boys take a break for chai and resume repainting their faces — sharpening their eyebrows with coal and dabbing red shade of paint on their lips — remembering to take plenty of selfies.

The costume is never simple: the crown alone weighs at least three kilograms. The man who plays Duryodhana has to wear an ensemble which is almost 16 kilograms heavy. “As a performer I should ask myself, ‘Is this me?’ When I am Duryodhana, I should be him, and not Duraisamy,” he says.

Duraisamy is a showman in every respect. If not for Kattaikkuttu, he might have landed a role in cinema. In his village, Perungattur, Kattaikkuttu is as popular as Kollywood. The temple koothu starts at 10 in the morning, and goes till eight in the night. It is as popular as a blockbuster Vijay movie, for which people queue up to buy tickets. “Only difference is you know if the koothu is a hit or not, then and there, when you take money from the audience.”

Kuravanji, with a hilarious exchange between Duryodhan and a kurathi (soothsayer), is his favourite koothu of all. He plays a kattaikkaran (jester), his most favourite character, in the play. “Kattaikkaran is a character with a scope for improvisation. Depending on who I am interacting with, the nature of my dialogue changes. When I speak with the kurathi, I use a lot of slang.”

Raison d’etre

One has to be intuitive while performing koothu, he says. One should be sensitive to the environment and the nature of the audience in front of you. “ I was 16 when I realised that my role was to make the audience happy. Then, I started experimenting with voice modulation, spot improvisation and body language. It became an addiction after a while.”

Duraisamy joined P Rajagopal’s Kattaikkuttu Sangam in Kanchipuram district at the age of 11. “The school was formed in 2002 and I joined the next year. Now I am a teacher in the school. We started off with 21 people. Now there are 16 girls too. Kattaikkuttu normally does not accommodate girls. My guru questioned that. And, since the inception of the institute, we have been inclusive of girls as well.” Though mythology is the conventional trope of Kattaikkuttu, Rajagopal and his team have also explored contemporary themes. They have travelled quite a bit with their koothus, to DakshinaChatra and Santiniketan, and also engaged in a cultural conversation with Carnatic musicians for the First Edition Arts Channel.

The school has been reaching out to artistes from England and Switzerland. Some of them are circus artistes, fascinated by the idea of the kattaikkaran, similar to the clown. “There are also storytellers who collaborate with us. They find elements of their acting methodology reflected in Kattaikkuttu.”

Duraisamy enters the stage as the dramatic mediator between the kurathi and a livid Duryodhana. He intersperses the local Tamil dialogues with English words. He is mildly flirtatious with the kurathi and sounds servile while speaking to Duryodhana. The context is archaic and so are the characters. But, the kattaikkaran’s contemporary language makes the show instantly relatable. At one point, he even tells the kurathi, “Come on”, with a sweeping gesture of his hands like a film hero. After the show, when you meet Duraisamy, he is twiddling with his phone, cracking jokes with his co-performers. It is difficult to say whether it’s the costumes, the head gear or the colour on his face that facilitate such a transformation, from an unassuming young man to the stature of the wise jester.

The actors were in the city to perform at the launch of the book, Reshaping Art.