The Kuttu
Festival 2005 offered a rare opportunity to experience a galaxy
of known and unknown theatre genres from South India in a traditional village
setting.
The Festival began on March 1, 2005 at 8 P.M. and ended on March 6, 2005 at about 7 A.M. Every
Festival night featured five to six different theatre, dance or puppetry companies. The venue was the open-air theatre of the Kattaikkuttu Sangam at Punjarasantankal Village, near Kanchipuram, Tamil Nadu (India).
The Festival programme
combined an unconventional mixture of tradition, ritual and contemporeinity.
Purposefully the organizers wanted to transgress the boundaries that divide
high and low culture, town and village, local and global, insider and outsider
- albeit if only for the time of the festival's duration.
Five South Indian states were represented by important theatre traditions, which were performed in the local languages: Kathakali (Kerala), Yakshagana (Karnataka), Vitinatakam (Andhra Pradesh), Prahallada Nataka (Orissa) and Kattaikkuttu (Tamilnadu). The Festival hosted a choice of other performance genres from the Southern region and beyond, including leather puppetry from Andhra Pradesh, Mangala Isai and Bharata Natyam from Tamilnadu, contemporary theatre, dance and puppetry performances by groups from Pondicherry, Kerala, and Bangalore and novel Kattaikkuttu performances by the students of the Kattaikkuttu Youth Theatre School from Kanchipuram, in addition to a number of special entre-acts.
Why?
-
To enable rural audiences to enjoy forms
of theatre they would never see otherwise
-
To celebrate the power of theatre as
a source of inspiration and reflexiveness
-
To stir our senses and stimulate our
thinking about the role of theatre in society
For
whom?
-
Our regular village audiences
-
A select group of theatre lovers
from all over the world
By
whom?
The Festival ws organized
by the Kattaikkuttu
Sangam, a grassroots, non-profit organization that promotes the cultural
and economic rights of professional Kattaikkuttu performers.
This is the second
time that the Kattaikkuttu Sangam organized a large-scale theatre Festival.
A similar event was held in March 2000 (see Festival
2000).
Festival directors: P. Rajagopal
& Hanne M. de Bruin
Festival coordinators: Maitri
Gopalakrishna & Julia Terlunen
Contact
us
Tamil Nadu Kattaikkuttu Kalai Valarchi
Munnetra Sangam
& Kattaikkuttu Youth Theatre
School
16/31, Selva Vinayakar Koil Street
Vedasala Nagar, Sevilimedu Post
Kanchipuram-631502, India
Telephone: +91 (0)4112 237517 or
+91 (0)4112 309469
E-Mail: kattaiku@vsnl.com
Home page of the Kattaikkuttu Sangam:
www.kattaikkuttu.org
Festival
Sponsors
The official sponsors of the Kuttu
Festival 2005:
-
HIVOS, Bangalore
-
Kalai Manram, The Netherlands
-
Royal Netherlands Embassy, New Delhi
-
South Zone Cultural Centre, Thanjavur
-
Professor John Emigh, US
-
State Bank of India, Kanchipuram
-
Seematti Tex & Readymade, Kanchipuram
-
M. Vedachalanayakar, Kanchipuram
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on the website are copyrighted.
