The Anatomy of Emotion

Auroville Today: How and when was Adishakti conceived?

Vinay: Adishakti was conceived as a theatre laboratory by Veenapani Chawla in 1981. Veenapani had just returned after her studies with Patsy Rodenberg and the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. As she began to work in India, she realized that she, like several other urban theatre practitioners, had imbibed what was fundamentally a European tradition of theatre. Based on Stanislavski and Psychological Realism, these traditions do not consider the body, its articulation and its presence, in performance. It dawned on Veenapani that our cultural capital as far as urban theatre was concerned was zero, and she delved into traditional Indian forms to understand how these systems work with the body.

In 1981, Veenapani decided to go to Kerala to learn Kalarippayattu, and to Mayurbhanj and Puruliya to learn Chhaau. This marked the beginning of her exploration of the body as central to the actor’s craft. She instinctively knew that the body has the power to free us from the tyranny of the linear, oral narrative. In terms of visual imagery, texture, form and treatment of time, the range of what the physical body enables us to do is enormous. The Indian traditions understand this and use the physical body to generate multiple narratives, of which the oral is only one signifier.

So Adishakti´s research has revolved around the body in performance?

Over the years, this research on the body has led to notions of a neutral physical craft. In 1995, Veenapani developed a production called Bhima which was a very significant exploration as this was the first time we developed a single actor performance creating a whole body of physical language. Along with pure physical movement, we started exploring how an actor´s emotional landscape affects or generates the physical vocabulary.

What do you mean by a ‘neutral physical craft’?

Generally, we tend to consider the body, the emotions and the voice as three separate entities. However, we found that all these activities are united by, and a culmination of, a singular anatomical response, the respiratory system. The body is a mechanical entity in which multiple factors are interconnected through one singular rhythmic or time keeping mechanism which is the heart structure, operating at around a 72 beats per minute pulse rate. This pulse rate governs all the other body functions. Any deviation in this 72-beats is what we call disturbance, happiness, excitement, sadness or anger, which in turn creates deviations in the voice or physical body. Viewed this way, and this is what we propose, all physical movement in the body is the outer response to accommodate the difficulty that is felt within the body. It is not something that we are doing or have control over; it’s a mechanical response or adjustment.

So, in fact you’re a mechanical system, like a Swiss watch, and every function in your body is organised around a predictable rhythmic structure. Over the years we developed a neutral, mathematical formula that allows us to understand the rhythm of an emotion, text or movement. When we perform, therefore, what we are really doing is destabilising somebody else’s rhythmic structure, and hence their emotional graph, by creating another or multiple rhythm structure. This formed the basis of Veenapani’s explorations in theatre.

When did Adishakti find its present home in Pondicherry?

This space was created in 1993. Pondicherry was a natural choice for Veenapani because she wanted to be here for Mother and Sri Aurobindo. So it was here that she chose to bring artists from different parts of the country together and to build an institution. Her idea was to create a space for artists where they can be nurtured and provided with basic sustenance, in order that they can develop their own artistic voices, and move the body of work forward.

Veenapani passed away quite suddenly in 2014. This must have been a huge shock for you and for Adishakti.

Yes, it left us with several challenges. Our biggest concern after her passing was that the research work would stall, in which case Adishakti would be reduced to being mere bricks and mortar. But to our surprise and relief that has not been the case. Our research work is alive and continues to be a very important aspect of our work.

As far as performance went, the four years after her death were very confusing. We were unsure about how we should continue. Veenapani had created a body of work and we asked ourselves whether we should repeat that work or reinvent it. Our first attempt was to try to follow her work in terms of structure, form, content and philosophy. But half way through we realized that this was not the way forward. We should allow the second and third generations of actors, writers and creative people to create something that, while being rooted in Adishakti’s work, reflected their own creative process, engagement and questions.

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I was trying to evolve a play on Sita. It was a play that Veenapani was working on when she passed away. In fact, our first rehearsal was meant to be on the day she died. So, for emotional reasons I felt the need to develop it into a production. As I began writing it, however, it became clear to me that Veenapani’s voice could only be hers. Only she could make the kind of work that she did, take the leap that she did with her body of work. Others have to create work that reflects their politics, their history, their geographical understanding. Eventually Nimmy, my colleague, wrote a script for Bali which she developed into a production and this allowed me freedom to start writing my own script.

How has Adishakti managed to sustain itself financially in recent years?

Having watched Veenapani go through the humiliation of dealing with funders, it was clear to us that we needed to make Adishakti viable without depending on funding or grant agencies. This is a nightmare that no artist should have to endure! So, over the years, we have developed a structure where the majority of our funds come through our teaching activities and through the residencies that we host in our space. Several companies have enjoyed creating here.

We have also worked hard to develop a network of fellow artists and supporters. Veenapani was a recluse. While she was excited about the ideas and process, she wasn’t interested in marketing Adishakti’s work. We realised, when she passed away, that we did not have a network to which we could reach out for support. In this respect we have had to start from scratch. In recent years we have built alliances by hosting the annual Veenapani Festival, teaching in multiple contexts and by performing to audiences beyond our regional network.

Adishakti campus - a creator’s paradise

Tell us how you disseminate Adishakti’s work and research.

We offer the methodology that is the outcome of our research work over the last 30 years – on emotions, breath, notions of rhythm that govern us – to students in two ways. Firstly, we organize classes and workshops. These have a cost factor and are not affordable for everyone. Each year, therefore, to ensure that everyone has access to this research, we take our workshops to small rural theatre groups as well. The most important factor for us with actors around the country is to challenge their existing, romanticised notions of theatre and to invite them to look at their body as the biggest tool for creation.

In studying emotion and understanding that the respiratory system, governed by our emotions, controls all the functions of the body, we found ourselves branching out into areas beyond performance. We spent years studying this subject as actors, and comparing our findings with the ancient knowledge systems developed by Ayurveda on the one hand and with the findings of modern science on the other. The resultant methodology, dealing with the anatomy of emotion, has proved to be useful for people from other disciplines such as medicine, psychology and counselling. Recently three important papers have been published on the use of Adishakti in modern counselling to help severely traumatized patients open up and reveal their stories.

You also worked with a group of women who had lost their homes and families in the Tsunami.

In 2005, we worked with a group of women from Nagapattinam whose lives were destroyed by the Tsunami. We spent 10 days with them. The idea was to teach them some basic livelihood skills, and support them in dealing with the trauma. We found that while some people were able to enjoy some relief after narrating their stories and going through the techniques we have developed, others who were extremely traumatized were not able to access their emotion. In fact, it was at this point that our research on emotion entered the medical area. Their medical reports revealed that the majority of these women suffered from anaemia. Now, we associate anaemia only with chemical imbalances or blood. But anaemia is created fundamentally by fear. Anyone who has experienced sustained fear will not recover their hemoglobin or platelet function. This fear, retained in the body’s memory, has a lifelong crippling effect.

This realisation opened up a whole new territory for us. We started looking at fear and accessibility to emotion. While we say that there are multiple emotions, the daily emotional graph of an average person, whether in an urban or rural setting, is limited to two or three hard emotions such as detestation (jugupsa) or fear. Experientiality of softer emotions such as love or sadness is more or less absent! This fact frightened and alarmed us. Our current research deals with how opposite activities can restore the emotional range of a person.

How would you describe Adishakti’s contribution over the years?

Making the body central to the craft of the actor, I believe, has been one of Veenapani’s biggest contributions. She played a huge role in bringing Kalari to the forefront and establishing it as a form of performance. In recent years, it has become common for actors to work with movement, to write their own scripts, and to ask questions of their own context. This too, I believe, has been a ripple effect of Adishakti’s engagement with our own myths and stories. In the 1990’s, when we began resourcing mythology for our productions, unloading and reinterpreting it, our modernity revolved around a primarily European existential script that emerged from the experience of two world wars. Our reality is different. So, working with our own myths and stories was a conscious and significant decision. It allowed the artists to connect with our past. Veenapani used to say the moment we stop rereading our myths and stories and stop interpreting them, their plurality will vanish, they will be appropriated and become our history.

What does the Adishakti team look like now?

Our core team is more or less four people and there is a peripheral team of another four people who joined us a few years ago. There are also students who we have been training.

The bane of every institution is that there’s a head, and with that person’s passing everything crumbles. This had been a topic of discussion at Adishakti since 2010 and we consciously organized ourselves to avoid that. The first decision we took was that we must merge the creative and administrative aspects of the institution. The second important decision was that we must become autodidactic. In 2011,Veenapani put forth the idea that all actors should write their script and direct. This provided an alternative to the conventional model of an institution with a single creative head. It means that there are three or four creative people, all of whom are simultaneously engaged in their own process, each of whom has the liberty to take two or three years to create their production. This ensures that Adishakti presents new work regularly without undue pressure on any one person to constantly produce and be relevant. It also allows each artist to expand their own engagement with their craft in terms of both form and process without having to package it into a production, but rather as a life engagement or spiritual journey.

What has been Adishakti’s relationship with Auroville?

Veenapani was here for Mother and Sri Aurobindo. As an arts institution, however, she believed that Adishakti must guard its independence fiercely. “We must be able to make rules in the morning and break them in the evening,” she would say. She was also very clear that her own philosophy should not be a deterrent in the functioning of the institution, nor an influence in the ideological moorings of each creative person.

Geographically, of course,we fall under the Auroville constituency and most of our audience comes from Auroville. More than that, though, we are very proud to be near Auroville. Creating a space like Auroville was a very special moment in time. I don’t think this kind of process can ever be repeated in the human psyche. We have passed that idealistic space. When I speak to some of the early settlers, I am struck by their idealism. They didn’t consider geographical boundaries when they came here. They came from around the world, stayed in small huts, surrounded by barren land which they spent their lives transforming. Just look at what we have here now! To those people who did that work, I feel, we owe our very breath!