Power of Performance : Actors Audiences and Observers of Cultural Performances in India

Contents Introduction/Heidrun Bruckner and Elisabeth Schombucher. I. The Performer power and presence in the enactment of the performer 1. Spectacle and power in the organization of Kingly ritual the case of Jodhpur Rajasthan/Marzia Balzani. 2. Devadasis and village Goddesses of North Tamil Nadu/Hanne M. de Bruin. 3. How to attain heaven The Vajapeya sacrificial ritual/Karin Steiner. 4. Cakyar initiation in the Kutiyattam Theatre of Kerala The Arannerram performance/Bozena Sliwczynska. II. The Audience The interplay between performer and audience 5. Empowering performance the choreographic techniques of Uday Shankar/Joan L. Erdman. 6. Between performance and competence exploring the idea of audience according to Indian classical views/Mirella Lingorska. 7. The power of listening giving meaning to divine words in possession performances/Elisabeth Schombucher. III. The observer Reconsidering the categories of the observer 8. The faculty of the voice/Saskia Kersenboom. 9. To enjoy playing with play/Heike Moser. 10. Embodying the Lion's Fury Ambivalent animals activation and representation/Phillip B. Zarrilli. 11. Creating presence performing the oral narrative of Devnarayan/Aditya Malik. Contributors. The volume aims at examining the transformative power of performances from three perspectives that of the performer of the audience and of the observer. In Part I different rituals are studied from the perspective of the performers their physical enactment and their techniques of empowering a performance and creating presence. What makes their performance meaningful true efficient. How do they empower a performance. Is it words action charisma or merging the individual personality with the enacted character. The papers in Part II switch over to the perspective of the audience. The meaning and the impact of power cannot be derived from the actor alone. The decision about the authenticity of a performance or about its failure is to a large extent taken by the audience. The contributions to Part II show that there might be an objective meaning in a performance but it is also subjectively made by each member of the audience. In Part III problems of cultural translation and representation are dealt with from the perspective of the outside observer. Assuming that actors participants and audience understand a performance in accordance with their respective cultural and personal background it becomes essential to consider the observer's perspective. It is demanded that not observing and describing but acting oneself is the way to obtain new insights into how the power of performance is obtained. This has resulted in another approach observers learning to be performers themselves. Three scholars cum performers provide new insights into what exactly empowers a performance what it means to give up one's own individual personality what it means to taste emotions and make the audience taste them as well. 290 pp.…