The Otherness through Le rêve d’Urmila (Urmila’s Dream), an interdisciplinary and intercultural research creation doctoral project through Natyashastra
The Otherness through Le rêve d’Urmila (Urmila’s Dream), an interdisciplinary and intercultural research creation doctoral project through Natyashastra

Author(s): Sylvie Belleau
Subject(s): Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts, Fine Arts / Performing Arts
Published by: Editura ARTES
Keywords: Natyashastra; kathakali; Le rêve d’Urmila;
Summary/Abstract: This communication will present how research creation based doctoral project can be an opportunity to explore the Otherness and other disciplines, to open to new realms of research as well as to question the artist’s posture in his journey between the culture of origin and the culture of the discipline in which he trains. As an apprentice, I studied kathakali in South India in my early twenties and it influenced all my theatre practice. The dance-theatre of Kerala has been part of my creative tools since the beginning of my creative life as a professional stage artist. My doctoral research was a way to question the footprint of the kathakali training in a creation project, to deepen my knowledge of Indian theatre and to explore the connections between kathakali, Natyasastra, the classical Indian treaty of dramaturgy, and my doctoral creation, Le rêve d’Urmila, which has been presented in September 2018 at Université Laval, in Quebec City. As part of my doctoral research on cultural hybridity, I had to train a group of western artists to dance and play with the codes of Indian dance to reach the level of cultural and disciplinary competence needed to produce the doctoral creation. I will thus present the specificities of the training process and expose the ways in which we explored various elements of the kathakali performance: the four abhinaya, rhythmic and musical elements, etc.

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