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Author: Susan Seizer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386194
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 473
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Book Description
A study of the lives of popular theater artists, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage is the first in-depth analysis of Special Drama, a genre of performance unique to the southernmost Indian state of Tamilnadu. Held in towns and villages throughout the region, Special Drama performances last from 10 p.m. until dawn. There are no theatrical troupes in Special Drama; individual artists are contracted “specially” for each event. The first two hours of each performance are filled with the kind of bawdy, improvisational comedy that is the primary focus of this study; the remaining hours present more markedly staid dramatic treatments of myth and history. Special Drama artists themselves are of all ages, castes, and ethnic and religious affiliations; the one common denominator in their lives is their lower-class status. Artists regularly speak of how poverty compelled their entrance into the field. Special Drama is looked down upon by the middle- and upper-classes as too popular, too vulgar, and too “mixed.” The artists are stigmatized: people insult them in public and landlords refuse to rent to them. Stigma falls most heavily, however, on actresses, who are marked as “public women” by their participation in Special Drama. As Susan Seizer’s sensitive study shows, one of the primary ways the performers deal with such stigma is through humor and linguistic play. Their comedic performances in particular directly address questions of class, culture, and gender deviations—the very issues that so stigmatize them. Seizer draws on extensive interviews with performers, sponsors, audience members, and drama agents as well as on careful readings of live Special Drama performances in considering the complexities of performers’ lives both on stage and off.
Author: Susan Seizer
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386194
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 473
Get Book Here
Book Description
A study of the lives of popular theater artists, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage is the first in-depth analysis of Special Drama, a genre of performance unique to the southernmost Indian state of Tamilnadu. Held in towns and villages throughout the region, Special Drama performances last from 10 p.m. until dawn. There are no theatrical troupes in Special Drama; individual artists are contracted “specially” for each event. The first two hours of each performance are filled with the kind of bawdy, improvisational comedy that is the primary focus of this study; the remaining hours present more markedly staid dramatic treatments of myth and history. Special Drama artists themselves are of all ages, castes, and ethnic and religious affiliations; the one common denominator in their lives is their lower-class status. Artists regularly speak of how poverty compelled their entrance into the field. Special Drama is looked down upon by the middle- and upper-classes as too popular, too vulgar, and too “mixed.” The artists are stigmatized: people insult them in public and landlords refuse to rent to them. Stigma falls most heavily, however, on actresses, who are marked as “public women” by their participation in Special Drama. As Susan Seizer’s sensitive study shows, one of the primary ways the performers deal with such stigma is through humor and linguistic play. Their comedic performances in particular directly address questions of class, culture, and gender deviations—the very issues that so stigmatize them. Seizer draws on extensive interviews with performers, sponsors, audience members, and drama agents as well as on careful readings of live Special Drama performances in considering the complexities of performers’ lives both on stage and off.
Author: Martha Ann Selby
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 0791472450
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
How perceptions of land and space influence social and aesthetic conditions in the Tamil region of India.
Author: Selvaraj Velayutham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134154453
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
Hitherto, the academic study of Indian cinema has focused primarily on Bollywood, despite the fact that the Tamil film industry, based in southern India, has overtaken Bollywood in terms of annual output. This book examines critically the cultural and cinematic representations in Tamil cinema. It outlines its history and distinctive characteristics, and proceeds to consider a number of important themes such as gender, religion, class, caste, fandom, cinematic genre, the politics of identity and diaspora. Throughout, the book cogently links the analysis to wider social, political and cultural phenomena in Tamil and Indian society. Overall, it is an exciting and original contribution to an under-studied field, also facilitating a fresh consideration of the existing body of scholarship on Indian cinema.
Author: Assa Doron
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317988388
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
Health, Culture and Religion in South Asia brings together top international scholars from a range of social science disciplines to critically explore the interplay of local cultural and religious practices in the delivery and experiences of health in South Asia. This groundbreaking text provides much needed insight into the relationships between health, culture, community, livelihood, and the nation-state, and in particular, the recent struggles of disadvantaged groups to gain access to health care in South Asia. The book brings together anthropologists, sociologists, economists, health researchers and development specialists to provide the reader with an interdisciplinary approach to the study of South Asian health and a comprehensive understanding of cutting edge research in this area. Addressing key issues affecting a range of geographical areas including India, Nepal and Pakistan, this text will be essential reading for students and researchers interested in Asian Studies and for those interested in gaining a better understanding of health in developing countries. This book was published as a special issue of South Asian History and Culture.
Author: Kristen Rudisill
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438489773
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291
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Book Description
Honeymoon Couples and Jurassic Babies is the first in-depth study of Sabha Theater, a type of Tamil-language popular theater that started in Chennai (Madras) in the period following India's independence, thriving especially between 1965 and 1985. Breaking new ground in the study of stage and performance, this interdisciplinary book presents a complex view of a significant genre, using historical research and ethnographic information obtained through interviews with performers, writers, and audience members, as well as observations of rehearsals, performances, and television and film shootings. This careful coverage not only contextualizes Sabha Theatre historically, politically, and aesthetically within the wider history of the Tamil stage and a performance scene that includes classical dance and mass media but also reveals how its plays express a Tamil Brahmin identity that is at once traditional and modern. Analyzing what particular plays mean to the specific, urban, elite Brahmin community that produces and consumes them, Kristen Rudisill examines humor that reveals a complex Brahmin identity and surveys markers of moral superiority.
Author: Stephanie Stocker
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839438853
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
Caste hierarchy has frequently been singled out as the overriding principle of Indian society. This book examines its significance among the highly-educated middle class in the Tamil town of Madurai. As part of their distinctive status as `educated persons', young graduates form egalitarian constellations by ostensibly subverting the boundaries inscribed by caste hierarchy. Stephanie Stocker explores how these friendships are maintained in wider social contexts, finding that the actors engage in supportive networks throughout career and marriage events. Instead of assuming these relationships to be of an entirely different, `alternative category', however, Stocker's study proposes a dynamic character of friendship which in fact remains in conjunction with Indian values of hierarchy.
Author: Einat Bar-On Cohen
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438496931
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
Kūṭiyāṭṭam, an ancient form of Sanskrit theater from Kerala, was traditionally performed only in temples by members of two temple assistant castes. Today, however, it has spread to other castes and to venues outside temples. It is a fantastically complex, sophisticated, layered performance, toiling at amassing and perfecting ways of materializing a world where gods, demons, and mythical heroes live, bringing the audience into these other realities. Taking an anthropological approach, Awakening a Living World on a Kūṭiyāṭṭam Stage explores how Kūṭiyāṭṭam uses cultural dynamics, gleaned from temple ritual and theater, to remove the distinctions between mundane reality and the mediaeval plays being performed on stage. The unique features of Kūṭiyāṭṭam—makeup masks, enthralling drumming, delivering words in mudrā gestures, a shimmering lamp, male and female actors—all intertwine to animate stories from the great Indian eposes. Analyzing the cultural dynamics at work in Kūṭiyāṭṭam foregrounds a symbolic anthropology in which representation and symbols are shunned, while endless repetitions fill the stage with reverberating somatic intensities of profound depth. Thus, a new kind of living reality emerges that includes the protagonists of the play—gods, demons, humans, animals, and objects—together with the artist, the audience, and beyond.
Author: Amanda Weidman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520976398
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
To produce the song sequences that are central to Indian popular cinema, singers’ voices are first recorded in the studio and then played back on the set to be lip-synced and danced to by actors and actresses as the visuals are filmed. Since the 1950s, playback singers have become revered celebrities in their own right. Brought to Life by the Voice explores the distinctive aesthetics and affective power generated by this division of labor between onscreen body and offscreen voice in South Indian Tamil cinema. In Amanda Weidman’s historical and ethnographic account, playback is not just a cinematic technique, but a powerful and ubiquitous element of aural public culture that has shaped the complex dynamics of postcolonial gendered subjectivity, politicized ethnolinguistic identity, and neoliberal transformation in South India.
Author: Hari Krishnan
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819578886
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
Received a special citation from The de la Torre Bueno© First Book Award Committee of the Dance Studies Association (2020). The book has been hailed as "an invaluable addition to the scholarship on Bharatanatyam." Celluloid Classicism provides a rich and detailed history of two important modern South Indian cultural forms: Tamil Cinema and Bharatanatyam dance. It addresses representations of dance in the cinema from an interdisciplinary, critical-historical perspective. The intertwined and symbiotic histories of these forms have never received serious scholarly attention. For the most part, historians of South Indian cinema have noted the presence of song and dance sequences in films, but have not historicized them with reference to the simultaneous revival of dance culture among the middle-class in this region. In a parallel manner, historians of dance have excluded deliberations on the influence of cinema in the making of the "classical" forms of modern India. Although the book primarily focuses on the period between the late 1920s and 1950s, it also addresses the persistence of these mid-twentieth century cultural developments into the present. The book rethinks the history of Bharatanatyam in the twentieth century from an interdisciplinary, transmedia standpoint and features 130 archival images.
Author: Caroline Osella
Publisher: Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843312328
Category : Masculinity
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
An anthropological examination of masculinity within South Asian societies.
