CULTURE AT ITS BEST: PURISAI THEATRE FEST

The Purisai Theatre Festival stands out with its rustic semblance to a festival, and

the exceptions of dangling spotlights off bamboo sticks, seating area carpeted

with bed sheets, people wrapping themselves against night cool acquiring

random spaces and the surprising humility of all the theatre personalities present

for the two-day event.

A three hours drive from Chennai, Purisai is a hamlet located in Cheyyar taluk of

Tiruvannamalai district. While the festival has been in existence since 2003, this

year witnessed its 16th commemoration to the founder, Kalaimamani Kannappa

Thambiran, the only man whose garlanded portrait adorned the centre of the

background of the stage.

With queues of folk, music and theatre performances, the festival started out as a

family affair to perform the traditional therukoothu form of dance-act that depicts

scenes from the Mahabharata and was performed traditionally at the temples.

The community centric affair snowballed into a festival that saw different groups

and individuals perform over the years, after the demise of the founder.

As Mr Ilam, a director himself, puts it, “the spotlights and the stage have made it

look like a festival in recent years.” Having been associated with theatre and the

family for over twenty years now, the festival has become more personal to him.

He is one of the many personalities present, with relations going back to sixty

years.

Despite the language barrier, the performances were successful in striking a

chord with the audience. Ranging from renowned adaptations like The Little

Prince or Kutty Ilavarasan to the ones catering to socio-political issues such as

states and Vellai , on transgenders, performed by Revathi, the transgender

activist whose name features alongside that of Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison

on the scroll of the Columbia University, the festival certainly was political in

nature.

Apart from the above, there were children’s plays as well that saw kids from

various age groups perform the characters of animals, depicting scenes from the

wild.

The folk dances witnessed performers from various sections of the society. While

having a word with Mr M. Palani, the only patriarch of the Thambiran family and

the founder’s son-in-law, he explained how the performers work other jobs to

sustain their families and come back to their roots through dance and theatre.

Manjal, the play on manual scavenging, saw the Kattiyakkari Theatre Group

perform with members from the Kattiyakkari community. Upon being asked, the

individuals who played the respective characters emphasized on their resonance

with the play due to the ostracization that they faced personally, in some form or

the other. Along with the attack on Brahmanism and casteism, the play displayed

the plight of the community through kids who, in the very first scene, are deprived

of education at the same hands which are supposed to disseminate knowledge-

their teacher.

Apart from the message, it was interesting to see even the number of props that

include- buckets, tubs, tyres as septic tanks, cycles, sticks attached to dried

banana leaves used a broomsticks etc to name a few. Symbols played heavily in

communicating instances where language fell short of words. For example, the
usage of the banner, ‘Men At Work’, according to me, symbolizes the distant

dream of accepting the manual scavengers as a part of the dignified mainstream.

Apart from the distinguished characters, there were a group of those with

coloured faces. The actors explained that it was done partially for depicting the

traditional art form and partially to designate the faceless and scarred status that

the scavengers are relegated to, by the society. The act of scrubbing themselves

along with uttering- “we don’t like rain”- stands for the fact that while on the one

hand, the farmers rejoice with downpour, the bodies and the lives of manual

scavengers get scarred with human excreta. The play is based on the

Thalappakatti incident in Chennai, wherein, four scavengers had entered the

septic tank at Thalappakatti that led to the death of three workers due to the

poisonous gas, while one survived to tell the tale only to relive the horror every

single day. The protagonist is shown as a paralyzed man being attended to by his

wife and daughter. With hardly any assistance from the Government, this stands

to be the reality of developed India.

Similarly, the play Kaveri, while showing a scene on farmer suicide, used the tool

for ploughing symbolizing farmers and the one from which the character of a

farmer hung himself. The river Cauvery is symbolized by a woman who is played

tug of war with between two men, symbolizing the states of Karnataka and Tamil

Nadu.

This year’s therukoothu performance depicted the life of Kannagi- a renowned

character in Tamil mythology. Quite surprisingly, this year saw the protagonist

being played by a woman herself- Gouri- who comes from the Thambiran family.

This is a first time because the traditional therukoothu performances, being

“with modernity and the shift in focus from the temple to it as an art form,

women’s participation is gaining traction.” However, what remains to be seen is

the quantity of women’s participation considering, apart from the protagonist,

other female characters were played by men. The koothu on the second night

was different in that it involved two simultaneous actors for one character. While

most of the singing was done by the actors themselves with a few others playing

the instruments, what really stood out were the performances of the elderly

dancing to the beats with the same fervour as the young. With hardly any

background music, the performances stand as the epitome of people coming

from different walks of life with most of them being the only earning members of

their family.

A community driven festival cannot leave out community dining. So the people

who were seen performing on stage the previous night could also be seen the

next day clad in a veshti and serving food.

Everything about the festival was true in the sense of authenticity. Speaking of

expansion, although language does not come as a deterrent factor, the priority is

the community- the village of Purisai and its faithful audience who hardly moved

from their spaces in front of the stage, camping with their bed sheets for two

nights. The festival is all about drawing back from the roots.