Rasa and Empathy – Connecting with an absent audience

First delivered at the Fitzmaurice Institute Research Salon on 30 January 2022.

Hidden in Plain Sight is a result of nine years of tinkering with craft and collaboration. Today I will open out one idea that I’m interested in and hope to continue investigating further.

Rasa practice as a process for relearning empathy, finding well-being and resilience.

Rasa is embedded in the Natyashastra which is a treatise on Indian Aesthetics. For brevity, Rasa concerns transference of sensations that arise in the body when the actor experiences an emotion – it is the transference of sensations from the body of the performer into the body of the listener or audience. This is slightly different from the idea of Catharsis, an equivalent idea in the western classical paradigm. Rasa has several applications. I will talk about it with reference to performance practice.

In India the performance practices of Kudiyattam and Kathakali engage Rasa through integrated training of body, breath and expression of emotion. Ritual and spiritual refinement are very much a part of training in these forms of performance practices. I am offering my learnings from engaging these forms and training practices via several teachers – Rita Kothari, Veenapani Chawla, Usha Nangiyyar and Venuji who all taught and continue to teach Rasa or Rasa Sadhana from their unique positions and beliefs.

Rasa is a large and a rather well-known area for study that many scholars have written about it in India and outside for many years. For me the interest is in how the practice of Rasa and the FV work were in dialogue throughout the period I was engaged in making this new digital version of Hidden in Plain Sight.

The practices are of course not the same but there are wonderful parallels. It is in these parallels that I am interested in investigating further.

In Rasa practice, a series of breathing sequences are taught to actors in training. These are typically very young learners who are still learning muscle movement and control. For the purpose of training young actors, a selection of 8 or 9 emotions are the basic building blocks for study and mastery. Incidentally, these building blocks of 9 emotions has been popularised in academic writing and discussions and people take the building blocks to be representative of the whole. However, it is practice of open exploration of the breathing sequences that leads the practitioner to subtler and subtler discoveries of human nature and enables a deeper exploration of the vast landscape of emotions.

Very similar to the tremor sequence in FV work where we place the body in certain dynamic positions to invite freedom in the body, breath and voice; in the breath work within Rasa practice the various breath sequences invite sensations that trigger emotions in the body. Both practices operate on the principles of integrating body, breath, imagination and voice for effective, creative, intuitive and meaningful expression and communication. At no point is breath or voice separate from emotional content which manifests itself in the body by way of sensations. The body, breath, imagination and voice are in a never-ending dance as we make sense of world. They are inseparably interconnected with our emotional world. Rasa practice is therefore a perspective on empathy, well-being and resilience and as a language to access, build awareness and to listen in to the information the body constantly reveals.

This invitation of sensations via breathing in specific ways reveals the parts of the body where our emotional triggers reside. These are not static. They change constantly. Cultivating an awareness of these sensations that trigger emotion through Rasa practice in a safe way and by building a resourceful relationship with sensation and emotional response is where I am locating resilience and well-being. It is in the returning to the practice that one builds familiarity. It is from this place that I imagine will come a sense of peaceful witnessing, a possible shifting of triggers towards a playful exploration of emotional expression and creativity.

To close I want to leave you with the idea that, when a performer experiences emotion in her body, and is witness to what is happening to her in the body there is a direct transference of sensations from her to the audience and they experience it with her. Sometimes the audience is not even in the same physical space as the performer and this transference happens anyway. This is the general understanding of empathy. I suppose the closest one can come to describing the process of Rasa is mirror neurons in action.

The specifics of this is an exciting area for further study for me.

Now a little about the performance…

Hidden in Plain Sight v2.0 is the culmination of a nine-year journey. This is a story of four women in the city who are unmoored from society – who have “dropped off the grid” so to speak. The piece unfolds to reveal and make sense of their states of mind and body as we find them at different points of connection or disconnection.

In the search for meaning making in this digital format, the aesthetics emerged from an exploration of being isolated, mental health, voyeurism and feelings of claustrophobia via a variety of lenses. The choice of dual/multiple frames of the same moment became an invitation to ‘drifting’ or a ‘wandering’ to allow the eye to be drawn to what feels right to the viewer in the moment rather than for it be guided by the camera lens.

The text has a prism-like structure – where voice and sound move away from ornamental concerns about delivery, to a central role in the production of dramatic meaning. The sound of the words, the turn of phrase, proper nouns, and even the mantra-like potential nascent in the utterance of a syllable, are released moment to moment to create a free-wheeling exploration of the four women characters at pivotal moments in their lives. Characters exhibit fractal self-similarity – as each woman who has dropped off the grid into liminality, rejects a conventional social position for an encounter with primal energy.

Embedded in the piece is the enigma of the Chhinnamasta – the decapitated Mother goddess from Hindu-Buddhist traditions, who informs this conception of primal energy and in an act of self-sacrifice, discovers regeneration and life. Some interpretations embody her as the essence of violent transformation. Other interpretations elaborate instantaneous activation of spiritual energy centres within the body. Words, through written symbols transmute in uttered sound – in effect, mantra! In the text, this restless search for “truthful sound” has prompted variations on the Zen Koans of Takuan Sōhō, an exploration of the dissolution of the body’s energy centres – chakras – as given in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and even the incantatory language-codes of cyberspace.

This edition responds to the need to connect with an absent audience for a shared theatrical experience – while engaging with the question, ‘how can presence be embodied, transmitted, and perceived across cyberspace.