The Teaching of Kathakali in Australia: Mirroring the Master

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Content
Chapter 1 Mirroring not Mimicking the Master
Chapter 2 The guru shishya or master disciple relationship
Chapter 3 From Mythology to reality: Western perceptions of the exotic Kathakali body
Chapter 4 Teaching Multiple Bodies in Australia
Chapter 5 Working One-on-One with Helen Smith and Peter Fraser
Chapter 6 Caste, Kathakali and its "gestures of embodied aggression"
Chapter 7 Performing Kathakali in Australia
Chapter 8 Kathakali for the global performer and researcher
Index

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This book tells the story of teaching Kathakali, a seventeenth century Indian dance-drama, to contemporary performers in Australia.

A rigorous analysis and detailed documentation of the teaching of multiple learners in Melbourne, both in the group workshop mode and one-on-one, combined with the author’s ethnographic research in India, leads to a unique insight into what the author argues persuasively is at the heart of the art’s aesthetic- a practical realisation of the theory of rasa as first articulated in the ancient Sanskrit treatise on drama The Natyashastra. The research references the latest discoveries in neuroscience on ‘mirror neurons’ and argues for a reconceptualization of Kathakali’s imitative methodology, advancing it from the reductive category of ‘mimicry’ to a more contemporary and complex mirroring which is where its value lies in Australian actor performer training.

The Teaching of Kathakali in Australia will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre and dance, intercultural actor training, practice-led research, and interdisciplinary studies of neuroscience and performance.

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