Tracing minor gesture in Maya Krishna Rao's kathakali-influenced performance | Karin Shankar (29.2)

Laughing in the "interstices of major tongues"¹

Dressed in a faux leopard skin-print miniskirt and a hot pink halter blouse, her long white hair catching the stage lights, New Delhi-based performer, Maya Krishna Rao (b. 1953), begins The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, her seventy-five minute long, one-woman, live kathakali-influenced comedy-cabaret with a segment titled, “Stress of City Living. Living Beauty. Driving Beauty. Beauty Living” (Figure 1). In it, she parodies a scattered, upper-middle class, hyper-sexualized talk show host offering advice on luxury cars and facial yoga. Rao triumphantly presents her tip of the day for skin care: “Never remove a blackhead from the backseat of a black Opel Astra. It NEVER works” (Rao 2013). Her fingers, hands, and arms gracefully simulate the motion of the piston of a car while also suggesting a sexual act, before fluidly moving to her temples to perform a destressing facial massage.

Figure 1. Maya Krishna Rao, The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, 15th Bharat Rang Mahotsav, New Delhi, 2013. Credit: S. Thyagarajan.

Rao’s opening monologue muddles and defamiliarizes dominant neoliberal urban values of surface and profit to bizarre, comedic, and unsettling effect while queering conventional performances of gender and age. In The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, Rao shapeshifts from talk-show host to psychic chef, to over-zealous, USA-returned jogger, to Machiavellian politician, to an elderly version of her own self in a torrent of transgressive comedy. Like Rao’s other experimental performances, this polymorphous show incorporates a variety of forms including kathakali breath and gesture, cabaret, comedy, drag, live music, and video. The stage set consists of a single chair, and Rao’s props include food items such as slices of cucumber, a watermelon, spices, and a large decoy of a fish—each of which will be animated in unexpected ways through the performance. Structured episodically, the live performance is steeped in the “absurdities of everyday existence in a contemporary urban Indian location,” and offers commentary on multiple themes from gender roles, sexuality, entertainment and fitness to democracy, surveillance, and terror (Rao 2013b).

Glimpses of Rao’s virtuosic kathakali training are apparent through this experimental performance as she draws on the expressive vocabulary of the seventeenth century dance-drama form, including mudras (gesture), vayu-prana (breath energy), abhinaya (precise manipulation of facial muscles to evoke character and emotion), and kannusadhakam (eye movement practice), in a range of intensities, to layer her storytelling. Incorporating such “corporeal drag” (Bragin 2014), Rao migrates between framed kathakali-inspired mudras and a studied quotidian physicality. “Corporeal drag” is a term I borrow from dance studies scholar Naomi Bragin who defines it as “a process of queer play in which performers try on and refashion movement as sensory-kinesthetic material for experiencing and presenting the body anew” (62). According to Bragin a practice of corporeal drag centers the materiality and “material effects” of movement. Rao retools kathakali gesture to produce new sensory-kinesthetic knowledge of quotidian regimes. Kathakali training offers her an embodied residue and a lingering ability to discompose the norms of the everyday.

In another instance of the performance, Rao presents heartfelt advice for when one might be stuck in an interminable traffic jam on the Delhi-Gurgaon highway. “Take in a deeeeeeeeeep breath with the car’s intake of fuel; and exhale with the exhaust of fuel” (Rao 2013a). Rao embodies this action by holding her eyes wide open for an extended period of time—a tool from the kannusadhakam of kathakali—while simultaneously expanding her diaphragm to take in a breath. Her deep chest vocalization and elongation of the vowel sound in “deep” is interrupted when she abruptly allows her diaphragm to collapse – body contradicts speech as her attempts at yogic breathing are thwarted by Delhi’s intense air pollution. Self-care still prevails, for all this while she is seated in a chair, legs crossed at the ankles, with slices of cucumber cooling her inner thighs.

In this article, I analyze how Rao’s “not not kathakali” (Mitra 2014, 84) performances draw attention to the performative, political, and ethical potential of gesture, a basic building block of her contemporary kathakali-inspired works. I trace Rao’s specific embodied practice as a minor inhabitation of kathakali gesture and focus on the possibilities for affective realignment and queering that her performances present. The minor mode isn’t smaller than some larger or normative “major” mode; rather, following performance theorist Erin Manning (2016), I see the minor as a movement that “travel[s] across the everyday, making untimely existing political structures, activating new modes of perception, inventing languages that speak in the interstices of major tongues” (2). Drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the minor (1983), Manning writes, if the major is a “structural tendency that organizes itself according to predetermined definitions of value,” then the minor is an “unmooring” and enabling force, scrambling normative hierarchies of value and organization (1).

Rao’s experimental practice is minor in these terms. By distorting, combining, disarticulating, deterritorializing, and repurposing kathakali’s costuming, gestural, and expressive codes, she infuses both the everyday and kathakali with an alterity. Straddling kathakali’s mythical economy, conventions, and physicality alongside contemporary news snippets, ideologically inflected historical narratives, or socially normative dress and behavior codes, and consumption patterns, Rao reorients the ways in which her audience might encounter the everyday. Her contemporary practice reworks kathakali gesture to mine its “world revealing”² potentialities, dispersing its expansive affective register into new aesthetic, social, and political terrain. In doing so, her experimental practice is an instance of dissonance that produces a realm of inter-possibility, encompassing the extraordinary with/in the quotidian.³ I offer Rao’s minor aesthetic as a mode toward a minor epistemology (Deleuze, Guattari, and Brinkley 1983; Cull 2009; O’Sullivan 2009; Yapp 2019).⁴ I posit that her work is a proposition to see politics through the lens of the minor. Introducing the potential of a reworked kathakali gesture into a socio-political space of shifting forces and materials, as per Manning, not only releases the affects and energies proper to kathakali, but also bears upon the field of the major, activating new relations and reverberating through them. To sum up in Manning’s words, “always alive with a certain quality of transduction, the process clinched by a minor gesture is one that makes the threshold between process and object/effect felt” (2016, 75). Within the field of dance studies, Rao’s practice also asks scholars of Indian classical dance and kathakali to consider what such forms may do in their deterritorialized, minor modes, alongside their more conventional and studied forms.

The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show and neoliberal pleasures

Social historian Nandini Gooptu (2009) writes of how the neoliberal reforms of the early 1990s that moved India from a dirigiste, centrally planned economy to a free-market one have been accompanied with the spread of a market ethos as well as the emergence of an “enterprise culture” and of an “enterprising self” (45). In The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, Rao brings just such an enterprising and consumerist subjectivity to the stage in a flamboyant, older, femme body, and exaggerates its grotesque dimensions. At the same time, her performances affirm the many paths to sensuous pleasure available to her body. Further, in her responses to the cultural logics of heteronormativity and neoliberal capital, Rao’s spectacle is camp in aesthetic and, as scholar of South Asian performance Priyam Ghosh (2013) has argued, interrogates modes of gendered subjectification and objectification, “simultaneously claiming and denying” a range of stereotypes related to the consumption patterns and lifestyle choices of middle-class women in Delhi (9).

If a market-dictated “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2004) attempts to foreclose spontaneous and multiple eruptions of sensory engagement in favor of its own rules on how, when, and where to consume, in The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, Rao’s minor practice revivifies the senses in inappropriate ways to create new openings for the emergence of political, ethical, and aesthetic possibilities within the neoliberal regime, while also revealing that regime’s repetitive scripts. The tongue-in-cheek title of this performance itself, The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, points to an audience’s drive for continual “feel-good” easy entertainment.⁵ However, the contradictory rhythms and relations set up by the performance interrupt any predictability to the flow of pleasurable affects.

Further into The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, in a scene paralleling the one in which she reveals the snug placement of cucumber slices between her thighs, Rao is on a quest to enact the perfect commercial for a holiday getaway to an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Her prop is half a watermelon. She begins by caressing the fruit, commenting on how its juiciness transports her to a silvery beach. Postcolonial theorist Lata Mani (2013) describes how the appeal to consume in market-driven economies is framed as “the invitation to touch, feel, smell, taste ever more things, ever more intensely, ever more frequently,” in a way that “the senses become subordinate to a concept of pleasure” (214–5). She offers the increased purchase of “more,” “extreme,” and “beyond” as “linguistic evidence” of this (214). Mani writes, “pleasure is seen as the product of a chase; one which constantly requires breaking the sense barrier in experiencing something more or different” (214). Rao slows down this chase. Her own seductive commentary about the watermelon propels her to scoop out its interiors and place the fruit on her head, its juices dripping all over her face and body “in a very larger-than-life kathakali way.”⁶ She savors the cool, sweet trickle of the fruit’s extracts down her face and neck while also anointing audience members with it on her way off stage (Figure 2). Rao’s action of pleasurably smearing the watermelon all over herself and donning its empty shell as a hat would neurotypically be seen as a sort of aberrance but is here reframed for the audience as a glimpse into the submerged possibilities of extended sensory encounter.⁷ Ultimately, a mundane commercial for luxury tourism that attempts to control and direct stimuli, robbing our senses of experiential connection, is interrupted to produce new relations in the social. By untethering sensorial desires from those of market-driven aspirations—here seen in the imitation and disruption of a travel commercial, Rao displays a means of gesturally releasing herself from market-derived conceptions of subjectivity.⁸

Figure 2. Maya Krishna Rao, The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, 15th Bharat Rang Mahotsav, New Delhi, 2013. Credit: S. Thyagarajan.

With such revisions and extensions of everyday gesture, Rao creates new modes with which to engage everyday urban Delhi life through flesh, voice, and breath. Her minor gestures disrupt conventional formations of meaning—choking yogic breath with pollution, performing self-care and spa treatment for her inner thighs, or smearing watermelon on her face and head—to pierce the “givenness” of the sociopolitical and question the rules and logics of its assembly. Through her performances, Rao invites audiences to partake and follow her into a gestural regime that lies alongside the everyday—the comedic, exaggerated, seemingly senseless motions and new connections Rao traces in The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show thus allow a glimpse of “that which is not yet,”⁹ an emergent, minor form of becoming, acting on and across contemporary structures of discipline and control.

While The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show allows audiences to think through minor modes of subjectivity in a shifting political economy, in the rest of this article I examine more broadly how Rao’s “becoming minor” as a performance aesthetic, ethic, and politic is filled with potentiality to unsettle major, hegemonic, or dominant modes of understanding and value, disturbing commonplace discourses and practices not only of neoliberal urban development (as in The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show), but also of national memory (in Khol Do) and of gender and sexuality (in A Deep Fried Jam).

From “not not kathakali” to a minor kinesthetic mode

Rao has been producing work as a dance and theater artist, director, writer, educator, and activist in Delhi for over thirty years. Beginning in the 1960s, she trained in classical kathakali at the International Center for Kathakali in New Delhi with Gurus Madhava Panikkar, Kumaran Nair, and Sadanam Balakrishnan (Rao 2018). Kathakali (literally “story-play”) is a four-hundred-year-old, South Asian, stylized dance-drama form combining dance, theater, music, and mythological tradition that continues to flourish, primarily in Kerala, today. It emerged from the ancient Sanskrit theater form of kutiyattam. Kathakali has been patronized by the Sangeet Natak Academy as one of India’s eight classical dance forms. Traditionally only performed by men, over the past several decades not only has the form had women practitioners, but all-women troupes such as the Tripunithura Kathakali Kendram Ladies Troupe (formed in 1975) perform regularly on national and international stages (Daugherty and Pitkow 1991, 138).

In Kathakali Dance Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play (2000), Phillip Zarrilli offers a careful description of the traditions and structures underlying the form. Kathakali performances are immensely physical and are based in scenes from the Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, and stories from the Puranas, in a mixture of Sanskrit and Malayalam (3). Kathakali actors receive several years of rigorous training in an embodied regime drawing from kutiyattam and consisting of physical exercise from the Kerala martial arts tradition (kalaripayattu) and yoga asanas, as well as stretching, jumps, and massage. This is combined with the study of key performance texts, rasabhinaya and kannusadhakam (facial expression and eye movements), choreography, detailed dance and movement patterns, and twenty-four basic mudras (with combinations of mudras increasing that number) (72–83).

As Zarrilli describes it, the basic position in kathakali shows the form’s martial arts roots and its wide-stance, grounded use of weight. In a bent and splayed knee position, the dancer holds her feet parallel to each other, with the outer sides of the feet and the toes “gripping the earth.” In such a position, there is a “solid triangle of energy created between the soles of the feet and the region of the lower navel” to create a “dynamic set of oppositional forces” with the dancer’s breath and energy being directed “simultaneously up toward the navel and down into the earth” to “enliven” technique (93).

Kathakali mudras are conventionalized and expressive hand gestures belonging to a larger system of signification. Mudras perform multiple functions, from the mimetic to the decorative to a literal “speaking” of the text, including an articulation of grammatical endings (Zarrilli 2000, 77). Mudras also evoke the qualities of any object or form (river, mountain, lotus, mirror, etc.) and abstract concepts of beauty, valor, or love. Articulated fingers, hands, and arms trace and create gestural movement and, together with facial and eye expressions, deliver the dramatic component of kathakali. These components are interspersed with sections of kalasam or “pure dance,” virtuoso footwork. Dancers do not vocalize the dramatic text themselves. Instead, onstage vocalists render the verses in a form of Karnatak singing, accompanied by an orchestra usually consisting of the percussive centa, maddalam, and itekka, and brass cymbals (4). Kathakali’s ornate costuming and elaborate makeup also suggest the special natures of each character—good, evil, radiant, passionate, etc. (53–5).

At the heart of kathakali training is a “psychophysical” mode of acting, as Zarrilli terms it, or the “dialectical engagement of the actor’s ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ processes,” animated by waking, controlling, and circulating the actor’s breath (Zarrilli, Daboo, and Loukes 2013, 8). Rao herself describes the connections between kathakali breath, emotion, and physicalization as under,

So, for instance, if I were to evoke falling in love with face, hands, body, I would see and absorb each specific aspect of the love object that appears before me. My guru would instruct me to “breathe through the eyes,” to make this connection alive [between myself and the love object]. The visualization is now in the body, through breath, and there is a transformation in me physically (Rao 2015b).

The Natyashastra, the ancient treatise on Indian aesthetics, composed by Bharat Muni sometime between 200 BCE and 200 CE, details how breath is a transformative element—vibrant and specific inhalations and exhalations onstage affect not only the performer’s body–mind, moving her from one emotional state to another, but also carry the audience from moment-to-moment of emotional feeling, affective resonance, rasa (usually translated as “juice,” “sap,” or “essence”), and unanticipated reflection.¹⁰ That is, sensorial and perceptive apparatuses are further activated through breath, and the kathakali performer’s coded hand and facial gestures continue to transform when “infused with breath” to generate varying intensities of feeling (Rao 2015b).

Scholar of South Asian performance Shayoni Mitra historicizes Rao’s contemporary radical aesthetic as stemming from several sources—her kathakali training; feminist and activist street theater praxis (Rao was a co-founder of the feminist collective Theatre Union in the 1970s and 1980s); transnational flows of aesthetics and politics responding to the globalized commodification of culture at the time; and experimental movements in the visual arts within India (81–2). Mitra categorizes Rao’s practice as urban avant-garde, alongside Delhi-based artists such as Anuradha Kapoor, Anamika Haksar, and Zuleikha Chaudhari. She writes that while this avant-garde isn’t to be considered Indian in an essentialized way, “[…] a peculiar locality is coded into these performances that makes this avant garde experimentation organic and indigenous” (84). Mitra aptly describes Rao’s experimental practice as “not not kathakali”:

[the] residual synapses from her kathakali repertoire are always archived in [Rao’s] body. To use Richard Schechner’s formulation of the double negative in performance as re-stored behavior, Maya Rao […] is not the kathakali dancer, but at the same time she is not not the kathakali dancer. The Indian avant-garde artist, whether literally trained in the corporeality of a classical performance or imaginatively inspired by a latent, diffuse traditionalism, is always aware of the contradictions of her performative utterance and chooses to manipulate this impossibility of articulation as the generative force of her work (84).

Rao began experimenting outside of kathakali’s traditional frames in the early 1990s. As she explains to me,

It was too easy to be satisfied or absolutely content as an artist and therefore even complacent, to a certain degree [within the kathakali “body–mind”]. The form is enormously rich, tremendously difficult, energizing and fulfilling, but I was restless (Rao 2014).

Firmly maintaining her debt to the form (kathakali’s “residual synapses”) in her experimental practice, she continues,

I’m not sure I would have ended up with these kinds of resources to dip into in my contemporary work, were it not for kathakali, where you train your body and your mind. And every part of you is trained separately—your face, your feet, your legs, your torso. My muscles carry the memory of this training, and the awareness of a certain condition of rhythm and the channeling of breath for focus. One is so trained to sense rhythm, that even in stillness, I am attuned to the rhythm of a space, or the rhythm of a news event. From this rhythm, my breath is affected, and from breath, a gesture takes form (2014).

Approaching the everyday itself as a “resonance event,”¹¹ Rao pays bodily attention to its underlying pulses and measures in her creative process. Rao describes also how kathakali’s essential inter- and trans-disciplinarity across the fields of dance, theater and music, with deep immersion in the mythological form, allows for her to view the contemporary experimental performance space as one “without limits” in which every element “becomes a world” and each story might be a tributary to another (2014). In her “not not kathakali,” Rao carries kathakali convention to unconventional spaces and creates new modes of storytelling drawing from the kinesthetic, rhythmic, gestural and breath-force of the form. As she says of her experimental practice, “I am always full of kathakali training, but open to the element of surprise in contemporary improvisation … it is a full emptiness when I’m improvising for new pieces in my studio” (emphasis mine, 2014).

Rao describes turning to her kinesthetic sense to achieve a certain awareness and knowledge of her body through embodied movement shifts between the mythical modalities of kathakali mudra and those of contemporary gesture to produce what I term here, a minor practice. For instance, describing how the basic physical stance of kathakali leads her to new modes for contemplating everyday New Delhi scenes, Rao says,

kathakali begins from a tension and a displacement, so, for instance, my knees are splayed and bent in the basic stance and the feet are set wide apart, toes pointing forward. The outer side of the sole of my foot rests on the ground … from this stance [she demonstrates], I observe everything around me—here and now—differently (2014).

Rao’s suggestion is that bodily displacement also displaces her attention away from the conventional, and towards an altered or minor perceptual mode, different from the everyday. That is, displacement as bodily experience transfers to displaced modes of thinking, seeing, listening, smelling, tasting.¹² She continues:

Kathakali offers me an unusual stance and energy and, so when I pick up this teacup [picks up teacup], and I make a mudra I feel a kind of tension that pulls and pushes in unexpected ways. It takes control of my body and mind. When I improvise physically in this manner, I feel a rhythm and in this reverberation, larger, different forces are revealed and activated [She slowly brings the teacup to her nose, raises her eyebrows, sniffs it, moves it away from her, following it with her eyes, glances at it lovingly etc.] My wide-open eyes are also ones of amazement, open to surprise. I watch as my hands conjure new realities in front of me with mudra (2014).

Rao’s minor aesthetic is therefore born in the space of “not not kathakali.” Observing her everyday as if anew, from a displaced and altered stance in relation to objects or events, Rao suggests a “proprioceptive” move, wrestling with the bodily sensations brought about by an unusual bearing towards a quotidian object (in this case, the teacup). Dance scholar Deidre Sklar (2008) defines proprioception as “turning awareness inward to feel one’s body as a continuum of kinetic sensations” (91). Rao demonstrates again: her eyes are open wide, her fingers articulate as her breath deepens, facial muscles twitch, and spine elongates. Her body as flow of movement, what Sklar may term “kinetic vitality” (85), invites openings to new embodied postures, meanings, and relation, different from both kathakali and quotidian frames. From this shifted stance, she rejects predetermined actions and enables new bodily behaviors and qualities.

Gestural ethics of the minor

In his essay “Notes on Gesture,” philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls attention to the ethical space of gesture (Agamben 2000, 56). As scholar of gesture Carrie Noland offers in her recent reading of his work, because gesture is an “embodiment of a force” toward a complete action, and not the action itself, in every instance, it may potentially create an alternate continuity resulting in a different action (2017, 69, 85). Similarly, in her writing on the intersections between gesture and ethics, Lucia Ruprecht usefully describes gesture as the “opening of the body beyond itself,” and as something that is “often or perhaps even necessarily relational” (2017, 4). That is to say, the body in gesture is “attracted by the world, by an already existing object, by the achievement of a future action that [one] can perceive,” and therefore is “suspended […] at a distance” in relation to this same future action (Blanga-Gubbay 2014, 125, 127; qtd. in Ruprecht 2017, 4). This suspension allows for a specifically “gestural tension,” within which lies the ethical dimension of gesture (4). Ruprecht generatively describes gesture as an “acting otherwise,” rather than placing it in strict opposition to acting, as we might do in common parlance (6). There is thus a “vitality” in gestural forces as they move away from stabilized meaning towards a range of inter-possibilities between the originating point of gesture and the completion of an action.¹³

In Rao’s experimental work, a specific gestural ethics of the minor takes shape in the kinetic qualities that her “acting-otherwise” entail (Ruprecht 2017, 6). Rao’s experimental gestures activate affects that are not bound to fixed (or majoritarian) imperatives of how to move in the world and can also be conceived of as a de- and re-territorialization of conventional kathakali tools.¹⁴ Rao’s deterritorialized gestures lead her minor, experimental form. These renewed and re/dis/articulated gestures are hinges or joints capable of altering a perception or line of thought toward a minor mode.

In Rao’s altered embodiments of Delhi’s ordinary is born an aesthetic philosophy drawn from the material of performance—gesture, which, in the words of Deleuzian scholar Nathan Jun “not only forces us to understand things as they are but as they might be: pushing us to think of the conditions of possibility for thinking, doing, and being otherwise” (Jun and Smith 2011, 3). An aesthetic encounter with Rao’s experimental gesture, involves a short-circuiting of the mundane to actualize new worlds, precisely at the border “where the actual is not-yet” (Manning 7).

If my reading of The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show considers affective realignment in Rao’s polymorphous performances of subjectivity with/in a neoliberal political economy, my analysis of her work Khol do (“Open It”) discusses how Rao’s minor gesture seeks the potentialities, submerged forces, otherness, or “virtualities”¹⁵ of national memory, while in A Deep Fried Jam, her “not not kathakali” critically queers performances of gender.

Minor gesture and nation in Khol Do (“Open it”)

Khol Do, literally translated from Urdu as “Open it,” was Rao’s first experimental performance work, an hour-long, one-woman, mimed adaptation of a short story by Partition-era writer Saadat Hasan Manto. Manto is noted for chronicling this terribly violent period of subcontinental history. Rao premiered Khol Do in 1993, revived it in 2006, and performed it again in 2018.¹⁶ Describing her process Rao offers,

in kathakali, the actor does not speak on stage, the mouth is never open because energy is lost through the mouth, it was very difficult for me to begin talking. So, my improvisations for Khol Do did not have any words. (Rao 2014)

She began exploring speech on stage only after Khol Do, passing long hours in the studio uttering incessant and meaningless strings of words and sounds. In these early improvisations, she stripped away classical hand mudras, using a few select gestures combined with everyday movements.

The historical and social context of Khol do is the movement of millions of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs across the Punjab border between June and August of 1947 to make new homes in the independent nations of India and Pakistan. In one of the greatest human upheavals of contemporary history, an estimated 15 million people traveled across new and hastily drawn national borders, at the end of two centuries of colonial British rule (Menon 2013, 7). The Indian Ministry of Information and Broadcasting report on Partition published in 1956, Millions on the Move, notes that the estimated death toll during Partition, from “communal clashes, floods, starvation, exhaustion, and the proliferating cases of famine and cholera caused by unhygienic conditions” ranges from 200,000 to 2 million (qtd. in Menon, 7). The same report also records the large numbers of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh women who were abducted, raped, or killed.¹⁷ Writing on this gendered dimension of Partition-era violence, social anthropologist Veena Das argues that the meaning of Partition was inscribed on the bodies of women: “the violence of the Partition was unique in the metamorphosis it achieved between the idea of appropriating a territory as nation and appropriating the body of the women as territory” (Das 2007, 52).

Seventy years later, the trauma of Partition still echoes in India and Pakistan’s political, social, cultural and artistic spaces. As Jisha Menon, scholar of South Asian performance and nationalism, writes,

Despite the institutional strategies of redress and reparation and the redemptive accounts of the nation’s nonviolent path to freedom, unruly memories of the Partition resist efforts towards a harmonizing closure. The memory of the Partition continues to shape relations between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs in the subcontinent. Conversely, contemporary religious conflicts shape and revise past Partition narratives (5).

As such, a strict periodization in the nation’s history is inadequate, leaving space for minor accounts of this event, such as the one Rao offers in Khol Do. Khol Do follows a traumatized father, Sirajuddin, as he tries to piece together the happenings leading up to the abduction of his daughter, Sakina, during Partition. He remembers the platform of the train from Amritsar in India to Mughalpura in Pakistan, and then suddenly, rioters on the train, mayhem in the crowd, followed by flames, and chaos. In a nightmarish flash, he recalls Sakina’s dupatta (scarf) falling and him bending down to pick it up and losing sight of Sakina thereafter. As Rao retells the tale, “it is bitterly ironic that the instant in which a distracted Sirajuddin bends down to pick up the scarf to protect his daughter’s dignity, as it were, is the very instant that he loses sight of his daughter” (Rao 2015b). Manto’s original story continues on to Sirajuddin’s search for and eventual reunion with Sakina in a devastating scene in a doctor’s tent in the refugee camp. When the doctor simply asks his assistant to open the window flap to let some air in, with the imperative “khol do” (“open it”), an exhausted and disoriented Sakina begins to open the drawstrings of her pants, as she is so accustomed to the command “open it” given by the men who had abducted and repeatedly sexually abused and raped her.

Rao does not move to this world-shattering ending of the story. Her minor inhabitation of Manto’s searing portrayal fixes on the “vibrating moment” (Rao 2015a) in which Sirajuddin bends down to pick up Sakina’s scarf. Sirajuddin’s gesture pulses with a bundle of emotions and affects—tension, disbelief, regret, anger, sadness, irony, bitterness, fear, surprise, hope. Sirajuddin, with the sun beating down on him, desperately searches for Sakina, all the while reliving the precise circumstance of her disappearance.

The only prop on stage is Sakina’s blue scarf. Dressed in a white kurta, Rao embodies Sirajuddin’s search to the soundtrack of Phillip Glass’s “Glassworks,” her hands, face, and body trace seemingly recognizable mudras for mother, moon, desire, water, face, fear, as she also evokes simple, seemingly meaningless, movements: breathing into her elbow, caressing her face, squatting, moving her eyes from side to side, to activate the geographic and psychic terrain of Sirajuddin’s predicament. This force-field of incomplete actions, becomes the space for Rao’s minor intervention, one that grasps at an unresolved national story (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Maya Krishna Rao, Khol Do, International Theatre Festival of Kerala, Thrissur, 2018. Credit: Bejoys Vijayan.

In one sequence, Rao holds her face as she pounds her fists into the floor—is this Sirajuddin’s waiting game? His anxiety? His disbelief? His anger? His grief? Standing on one leg, she cradles her other knee, and covers her face with Sakina’s scarf. She bends down on all fours and carries the light scarf on her back. She makes a turban of the scarf, uses it as a blanket, mimics playing dice on it, and wipes her face with it. She counts, “eight men,” looks away, counts again, repeatedly dropping and picking up the scarf again and again and again too many times to count. Sniffling and then smelling the air, she opens her mouth full. With open mouth, she seems to ask for water, or shrieks, and then mimes the loss of her voice, a silent scream. Repetitions of gesture evoke the instant of Sakina’s abduction in multiple ways: it is at once the singular moment in which Sirajuddin loses sight of his daughter, but it may also refer to other such personal stories charged with historical meaning. It is a durational personal and collective trauma. Rao jumps, she whirls around, she falls. Through these vital sequences, Rao as Sirajuddin, appears to be trying to “come into contact with the speeds and affects of a different kind of body” (Cull 2009, 7) and, indeed, to cross the threshold of his contained self through breath, stance, gesture, and facial expression, such that Sirajuddin, consumed by intense grief and anxiety, becomes the search himself, finally metamorphosing into Sakina at the performance’s end.¹⁸ In Rao’s tremendous interpretation, Sirajuddin has become the longing for his daughter—his ontological position is no longer stable. Sirajuddin is not just crossing the border between India and Pakistan but also the boundaries of his own body. In her first foray into experimenting with kathakali form, Rao offers an intense encounter and profound communication beyond representation. Rao’s performance proposes an altogether new relation with the event of Partition as she uses her deterritorialized gestures to interrogate a major marker of territory (Partition). In recalling Manto’s short story, she never loses sight of the horrific and gendered violence of Partition; however, in her interpretation, she attends to the zone of potentiality—or the minor—within the enduring spectral presence of Partition. This zone is materialized as a transformative space open to possibilities that were previously invisible, and an occasion for things and bodies to be altered in relation to one another. The whole performance can be considered a minor gesture insofar as it leads the audience to consider the event (Partition) in terms distinct from the “governant fixity” (Manning 7) of the major (or the State) to relations between bodies and to the swirl of ghostly affects that texture and push against the present.

Minor gesture and gender in A Deep Fried Jam

Following the tradition of classic burlesque performances, which included “chaotic and nebulous” routines incorporating dancing, singing, political commentary, banter, cross-dressing, and comedy (Nally 2009, 622), in her early live cabaret, A Deep Fried Jam (2002), created in collaboration with video artist Surajit Sarkar and composer and musician Ashim Ghosh, Rao bursts on to the stage dressed in sequined hot pants with a feather bustle, a net blouse, fishnet stockings, and splashes of glitter, suturing together disparate political sketches. This presentation of burlesque hyper-femininity is complicated by Rao’s embrace of gender ambiguity, with her short white hair and deep chest vocalizations. The sketches in A Deep Fried Jam present no narrative continuity, except that each evokes some association with the color purple. As the title suggests, it is more appropriate to think of this work as an expression that is slow cooked, with various elements folded in to deepen its color and flavor. For instance, early on in the performance, Rao evokes nostalgia for her childhood, when the purple jamun fruit from Delhi’s tree-lined streets would stain her face and clothes. She then moves to describing the deep purple color of carrots in Kabul, Afghanistan, and follows this with a rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” An affective continuity or affiliation connects these adjacent scenes of storytelling.

Musician Ghosh’s slow tuning and testing of microtones on the electric guitar create the soundscape for Rao to enter. She wears dark glasses and a sneer on her lip, laughing, scatting; she opens her mouth, giving sound to a deep, husky voice, “I’m sorry we don’t deal in that anymore, but we could have it arranged for you.” She sits down with her back to the audience, moves her bottom along the floor of the stage, spreads her knees apart and claims “satisfaction guaranteed.” She then rises up slowly, assuming the role of “The Tycoon,” with these lines:

So, let’s shaaaaaaaaaaaake on that one. Sign on the dotted line then.

We’re doing fine fine fine fine

We’re doing fine fine fine

It's a price-line and sometimes you have to tweak…

It’s doing all right

You and me we’re doin’ fine (Rao 2002).

Presumably commenting on an inflationary price-line, she mimes a foot-long, taut “rope,” or the “price-line,” between her hands, while assuming the basic kathakali position. This mimed rope can also be read as a phallic object. Her stance is wide, her back arched, her knees splayed and turned out, and she stands on the outer sides of her feet. The basic kathakali stance creates a “dynamic of oppositional forces” as energy is at once pushed down from the abdomen through the feet into the ground and channeled upwards to support and energize the upper body, face, arms, and hands (Zarrilli 2000, 93). Every muscle in her body is activated as she simulates “tuning” or raising the price-line further (Figure 4). For the audience, the experience is similar to that of watching an athlete lift an extremely heavy weight. The audience’s attention is heightened as minute changes within Rao’s apparently still body manifest as the gathering of live energy within her hands. Addressing the audience directly, Rao manipulates this captivating kinesthetic effect as she asks in the same deep tone, her breath quickening, pitch lifting with each phrase:

Well, do you want to know where it comes from, all of my streeeength?

You want to know where it comes from, the shine of my teeeeth?

You’d like to experience that HOT AIR that lies between my hands?

As she pares down language to its sonic and rhythmic forces, the corporeality of vocal range and low pitch give sound to a multiplicity of gendered positions.¹⁹ The physicality of her words, accentuated by her abhinaya (facial expressions), suggest a way of escaping out of her (socially constructed) body and the gendered structures of the world.²⁰ With these lines, rhythmically and tauntingly, she brings the materiality of gesture into focus, and therein, the bodily labor of such queer performative world-making: the “hot air” between her hands is biomedical heat (thermal) energy or kathakali vayu prana coursing through her body, as the effect of holding the posture causes her to break into a sweat. The tension in her body and between audience and performer raises to an almost unbearable level when, as suddenly as she has evoked this multivalent, vital sculptural moment, Rao destroys it with a casual flick of her hand. The tautness of stance and gesture is undone and the audience is left to imagine what future position this striking gesture may have led the powerful figure on stage. Rao’s vocal and physical gesture suggests that she is interrupting the compulsion to simply repeat at the individual and social levels. Instead, her particular embodiment is alive with immense potential and creativity.

Figure 4. Maya Krishna Rao, A Deep Fried Jam, New Delhi, 2002. Screen grab from film recording courtesy of the artist.

Juana Rodriguez’s (2007) work on queer gesture offers another window into Rao’s work in the scene above. Rodriguez writes,

A gesture can only suggest, and that suggestion functions as its form of seduction. Titillating, the gesture is a risk and an invitation to guess its aspirations. The gesture is ephemeral, it has already passed, but its impression lingers in the air, and seeps into the skin. It enters the psyche of the other like a threat, or a promise (284).

The seduction of Rao’s show lies in this “partial” nature of both vocal and physical gesture, that it “never pretends to fully articulate [its] intent” (Rodriguez 284).

Rao’s expressively dramatic and radically ambivalent performance of gender or her “camp speech acts” (Muñoz 131), whether grotesquely, hyper-feminine as in The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, described in an earlier section of this article, or androgynous in A Deep Fried Jam is related to her specialized study and performance of specifically masculine kathakali roles. This lends her contemporary, experimental, feminist form a particular awareness, as she says, “now, in making work, the male and female lie along a continuum for me; especially in terms of a creative energy” (Rao 2015a). Her explorations can specifically be linked to the kari role of Kathakali. Kathakali has three female character types: the “noble heroine” or minukku; the lalita, who is alike in appearance to the minukku but is a seductress in disguise; and lastly, the kari or demoness role (Pitkow 2011, 223). Kathakali scholar Marlene Pitkow notes that while lalitas “make a pretense toward goodness,” karis do not (223). Pitkow writes,

the kari is a grotesque and vile creature exceeding all acceptable limits. She appears to the viewer as a degradation and mockery of her idealized counterpart/alter ego, the minukku. The kari represents a complete abandonment of any moral or sexual ethic and must be punished for her transgressions (225).

Even among the all-women classical kathakali troupes practicing in Kerala, it is often considered inappropriate for a woman to play a kari who wears “big exposed false breasts and communicates in exaggerated, satirical gestures” (Daugherty and Pitkow 1991, 144). Here, I read Rao’s recuperation of the kari figure through a lens of the minor. Her experimental version of kari is a trickster, transgressing and queering South Asian tropes of femininity through a specific and minor mobilization of gesture. Charged with “disidentificatory difference,"²¹ Rao’s kari, as minor, operates outside of the normative formulations of contemporary South Asian femininity, allowing for limiting images to expand. To flesh out and bring gesture to her version of a kari trickster in her burlesque cabarets such as A Deep Fried Jam, Rao draws her corporeal stance and gesture from a femme archetype of Bollywood, “Helen” (Helen Richardson Khan), who played a seductress, vamp, and cabaret dancer in Bollywood films of the 1960s and 1970s:

I was fascinated by Helen, I was always enamored by her slinkiness [sic], her fishnets, the length of her leg. So, when I put on a mini-skirt and fishnets, it isn’t so much about the skin that I am baring but about holding my body differently, and then the mind starts working differently. This is gesture (Rao 2014).

Helen was a refugee from Burma, with French and Burmese parents, who began working in the Bombay film industry in the 1950s as a chorus dancer. Helen’s biographer Jerry Pinto (2006) describes how she was cast as the “other” of the moral Hindu heroine, her racial ambiguity allowing her to inhabit bars, cabarets, and other urban spaces of revelry, desire, and transgression (location 684). Pinto notes that Helen’s excessive sensuality was one produced not just by her exotic outsider position or her seductive costuming, “golden cages, flamingos, an excess of blue eyeshadow, and oversized orange earrings,” but equally by the pleasure she took in her own dancing (2006, location 158, 116).

The “slinkiness” (sic) of Helen’s costuming and appeal that Rao cites is not merely fetishistic. Rao re-imagines the figure of Helen using various strategies of mimicry, exaggeration, reframing, and affective and symbolic layering. If the femme fatale of Bollywood, like vamp figures in other filmic contexts, “beckons, fascinates, and destroys,” (Camille Paglia 1990, 15, qtd. in Nally 626), Rao’s unique take on Helen’s seductive and exoticized femininity presents an antinormative site, ripe with possibility. Indeed, as Ghosh has written, Rao’s surprising androgynous portrayal of a Helen-like figure has “opened up a space in which alternate and less “feminine” or differently sexualized images of women are possible” (2013, 11). Similarly, her tycoon character and a performance of Jimmy Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” in A Deep Fried Jam present parodies of normative masculinity. Ghosh offers that emergent LGBTQI groups in Delhi identify with her androgynous performances and over the past several years, Rao has come to be an influential figure for queer activists who often operate in the same urban, middleclass, cultural spaces as Rao does (8).

Conclusion: protest gestures

Created within the multiple possibilities of a “not not kathakali” practice, across works such as The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, Khol Do, and A Deep Fried Jam, Rao’s minor gestures recognize and recuperate embodied knowledge to show how gesture can still be that force which “makes the lines tremble that compose the everyday, […] to articulate how else experience can come to expression in the here and now” (Manning 2016, 7). In these works, Rao’s minor compositions dwell in improvisation and processual indeterminacy to create spaces of tension, surprise, and disturbance in the realm of “that which is not yet” (Badiou 2002, 27).

The elasticity of her minor gesture lends itself also to overtly political performances. Rao’s recent work has included a series of protest gestures, most notably in response to the brutal gang rape of a 23-year old woman named Jyoti Pandey (and the physical assault of her companion), on 16 December 2012, on a moving bus in Delhi. The attack on Pandey proved fatal and for days after, feminist activists, students, and Delhi citizens, assembled in thousands around the Parliament building demanding justice and legal reform. Rao developed a short protest performance titled Walk after observing these protestors (Rao 2013c). The “propulsive generosity” (Trinh 2016) of the rhythms of their walking led her creative process (Rao 2014). Since her first performance of Walk on 31 December 2012, the piece has traveled widely across Delhi, the nation and internationally.²² In 2017, Rao also created similar protest works in response to a rising wave of hate crimes against the country’s minority Muslim community—her performance centered on the image of a cow (as the spate of anti-Muslim violence had centered on the question of beef-eating); and on the Right to Information Act—a performance approaching the image of a river or flood of knowledge (Rao 2017a, 2017b). In each instance, Rao begins by gesturally embodying simple images—walking, a cow, a river—then, corporeally layering these images to mark shifts from any mundane or prescribed understanding of events. Instead, she rhythmically activates, seeks, and experiments with opening the image to multi-level becomings and unthought political possibilities. Rao’s vital protest gestures seek the minor in the event to shake the structures of the major—heteropatriarchy, right-wing Hindu fundamentalism, a secretive State.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the editor and editorial collective at Women & Performance and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on this article.

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Notes on contributor

Karin Shankar is an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in TDR, Art India, Feminist Teacher, and elsewhere.

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Notes

1. Erin Manning describes the “minor” as residing “in the interstices of major tongues” (Manning 2016, 2). ↩

2. Rao speaks of how traditional kathakali gesture must lie in “this” world—that of our everyday material existence, as well as the world of Gods and demons in their cosmic scale. Therefore, each kathakali gesture simultaneously reveals alternate economies of being, becoming and relating, encompassing these multiple worlds (Rao 2015a). ↩

3. Trinh T. Minh-ha writes of the poetics of “inter-possibility,” as one that defies (major) tendencies to frame the world into opposing wholes (Trinh 2016, 80). ↩

4. While Manning (2016), via Deleuze, Guattari, and Brinkley (1983), is a primary interlocutor in my understanding of “minor” as politico-aesthetic critique, O’Sullivan (2009) and Cull (2009) are also influential in my thinking. More recently, I am grateful for Yapp’s (2019) insightful work on minor as method. Finally, I thank an anonymous reviewer for Women and Performance journal for comments on my framing of the minor. ↩

5. In its first iteration, performed in 1998, the work was titled The 4-Wheel-Drive-Come-To-Me-Mr. Sharma-Bodyfat-Murdered-Show (Rao 2018). ↩

6. Rao points to how affects of joy, fear, love, excitement etc. are embodied in the “fullest” possible way by a kathakali actor through techniques of breath, gesture, facial expression and dance. Encounters with everyday forms and contexts present the kathakali performer with opportunities to exceed (by mythic proportions), normalized modes of embodied response to these same quotidian forms and contexts (Rao 2015a). ↩

7. My analysis of Rao’s work here draws from Stephen Zepke’s illuminating theorization of performance art as “Deleuzian encounter,” as seen in the work of artist Adrian Piper. Zepke insightfully describes how Piper’s performance art practice allows her to “inhabit an alterity close to madness, but only in order to create an affect that revitalizes ‘everyday’ sensation through the eruption of an unmediated, and invariably humorous, real.” The effect of such work is to “catalyze new social territories.” I see a parallel with the effects of Rao’s minor gesture on normative partitions of the sensible (Zepke 2009, 123). ↩

8. For more on what I term here “gestural release” and its relation to the Deleuzian concept of “unclasping” as it relates to performance, please see Zepke 2009. ↩

9. Alain Badiou speaks of “that which is not yet” as an emergent form of being, one that isn’t valued under present structures of control (Badiou 2002, 27). ↩

10. Rasa is a foundational principle in South Asian aesthetic theory and practice. Translated as “juice,” or “essence,” it describes an emotional and affective relation between performer and audience. According to Sreenath Nair, rasa “elucidates the structural components and functional mechanisms of a transformational experience in theater, emphasizing the role of the body and imagination in aesthetic discourse” (2015, 137). Richard Schechner writes, “rasa is sensuous, proximate, experiential. Rasa is aromatic. Rasa fills space, joining the outside to the inside” (2015, 116). Erin Mee describes it as a form of “emotional contagion” in which the spectator “catches and experiences the emotion being portrayed by the performer” (2015, 157). Shanti Pillai offers that rasa is to be found in those moments when “specific emotions flow through, suffuse, and permeate the performance, taking on a depersonalized, objective, concrete existence” (2017, 17). ↩

11. I borrow the term “resonance event” from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Lovecidal (2016), in which she describes how one might work sensually, tuning into the rhythms of everyday events and actions, so as to produce art and politics apart from the clamor of mainstream news media. ↩

12. See also Noland’s (2009) excellent treatment of how gesture becomes a source of kinesthetic feedback, and thus agency. As Noland phrases it, “it is ultimately kinesthetic experience, the somatic attention accorded to the lived sensation of movement that allows the subject to become an agent in the making of herself” (Noland 171). ↩

13. See Deidre Sklar on the “vitality affects” of gesture, which, drawing on the work of child psychologist Daniel Stern, she defines as “the complex qualities of kinetic energy inherent in all embodied activity” (Sklar 2008, 95). ↩

14. I offer the terms de/re/territorialization from a Deleuzian philosophical framework. Deleuzian scholar Adrian Parr describes deterritorialization as “a movement producing change” (2010, 69). Deleuze offers the example of the different functions of the human mouth to elucidate the concept: “the mouth, tongue and teeth have their first territory in food. In devoting themselves to the articulation of sounds, they deterritorialize themselves” (Deleuze, Guattari, and Brinkley 1983, 19). In the context of visual art, Deleuze turns to Francis Bacon’s portraiture, where a deterritorialization of the human face is realized through “chance manual marks” made by throwing or rubbing paint on the canvas (2003, 94, 96, 100). In the fixed frame of painting, these marks express “spasms” of interior forces such that Bacon’s works present a new, resonant truth—that the essence of painting is experienced as rhythm. As Deleuze puts it, “rhythms and rhythms alone become characters, become objects. Rhythms are the only characters, the only figures” (2003: xv). Another example that Deleuze offers of deterritorialization from the field of aesthetics is in the literary arts. Deleuze holds that Kafka’s works produce a “stammering and stuttering” within language itself, stretching language to its limit, to call into being a new community of writers and readers (O’Sullivan 2009). ↩

15. Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz articulates the political potency of the Deleuzian term “virtuality.” In The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (2004), Grosz describes how regimes of power in the present can be seen to have “actualized” or made material some elements of the past, while leaving the rest “dormant,” “virtual,” or “potential.” She writes, “this means that the future, possible futures have the inexhaustible resources of the past, of that realm of the past still untouched by the present, to bring about a critical response to the present and ideally to replace it with what is better in the future.” The virtual contents of the past are thus the site for the “unravelling of the givenness of the present” (Grosz 2004, 253). ↩

16. Khol Do was first performed in New Delhi in December, 1993. Thereafter Rao performed the piece in Lille’s Theatre du Nord festival in 2006 and at the International Theater Festival of Kerala in Trisshur in 2018. ↩

17. Millions on the Move, a 1956 report published by the Government of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, estimates that “approximately 83,000 women were abducted, raped, and killed and innumerable children disappeared” during Partition (qtd. in Menon 7). Drawing on the work of Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh (2009), Menon also notes that this organized violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs was compounded by the last British Viceroy Lord Mounbatten’s poorly thought-through and rushed withdrawal from India and, also, significantly, must be viewed in the context of the Second World War. She writes, “Not an atavistic feature of fanatically religious groups, the violence was produced in a mimetic encounter with a European fascistic culture of hostility that was refracted ideologically and materially within the subcontinent” (8). ↩

18. In my analysis here, I borrow from Laura Cull’s (2009) definition of “becoming” in the Deleuzian frame: “becomings constitute attempts to come into contact with the speeds and affects of a different kind of body, to break with a discrete self and to uproot the organs from the functions assigned to them by this ‘molar’ identity” (7). ↩

19. Ghosh (2013), drawing from Elizabeth Wood’s (1994) work, refers to this remarkable vocal quality of Rao’s performance as “sonic cross dressing” (Ghosh 2013, 7). ↩

20. I borrow this notion of a “way out” or of a subject “escaping herself,” from Deleuze’s description of a deterritorializing aesthetics, in which “the body attempts to escape from itself” in order to “rejoin” a larger field of possibilities (Deleuze 2003, 16). ↩

21. In José Esteban Muñoz’s pathbreaking work on queer of color performance, Disidentifications (1999), disidentification as “a process of production and a mode of performance” does not merely “crack the code of dominant ideology” but uses this code as “raw material” for representing minoritarian positionalities (25, 31). In considering Helen/kari as a disidentificatory performance, I see how Rao “recycles” stereotypes of femininity to create potent scenes of self-fashioning otherwise (4). ↩

22. Bhishnupriya Dutt has provided a succinct reading of Rao’s protest work Walk (Dutt 2015). ↩

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