Kalamandalam Sangeeth Chakyar - Vennirattam

Classical Sanskrit theater has survived as a living performance tradition, continuous with the medieval past, only in one form, the Kūṭiyāṭṭam ("Combined Performance") tradition of Kerala in the south-west of the Indian sub-continent. This complex, still vibrant, yet endangered artistic tradition - recognized by Unesco as a "masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity" - is in urgent need of scholarly study and state-of-the-art documentation. Traditional performances of Kūṭiyāṭṭam plays range from roughly thirty to well over a hundred hours (each is usually a single act from one of the classical Sanskrit dramas), with each subsequent day or night of performance adding indispensable elements to the emergent artistic whole. Only two major academic centers in the world are engaged in serious, long-term study of Kūṭiyāṭṭam - the University of Tuebingen, where Prof. Dr. Heike Oberlin (née Moser), the leading expert on this tradition, teaches and pursues research, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where Prof. David Shulman is now concentrating on the cultural history of Kerala and its classical artistic forms together with several advanced students. The profound complexity of this tradition as well as its intimate links to very ancient Indian sources and to specifically south Indian ritual and artistic genres require the active cooperation of a team of highly trained scholars. Tuebingen and Jerusalem have thus combined their efforts in a large-scale project, historically informed and philologically precise, with a wide cultural-historical scope, with the aim of transforming our understanding of classical Indian drama and poetics. The project includes detailed analysis of the primary performance texts in the existing repertoire (hundreds of hours of recorded performance, published and unpublished stage-manuals, including palm-leaf-manuscripts), publication of a series of monographs on various aspects of the Kūṭiyāṭṭam corpus, workshops and an international conference in Trissur, Kerala, and ongoing research expeditions to complete documentation of the repertoire before it disappears.