Enacting affectivity: the psychophysical training of śṛṅgāra in Gopal Venu’s Navarasa Sādhanā

Abstract

This chapter introduces Navarasa Sādhanā, a training for performers developed by Gopal Venu (1945-), an Indian kūṭiyāṭṭaṃ theatre master-teacher, scholar and practitioner. Navarasa Sādhanā (NRS from now on) literally means “the practice of the nine rasas”, where “rasa” is a concept central to Indian aesthetics, often translated as “sentiment” or “aesthetic emotion”. Thus, this chapter offers for the first time to an academic audience a detailed presentation of a training for performers (mainly actors and dancers, but not only) that focuses on the enactment of a variety of affective states (such as emotions and moods). We present this training as an instance of what is known today in theatre studies as “psychophysical acting”—an approach associated with theatre practitioner, actor, teacher and director Phillip Zarrilli (1943-2020). On the basis of Giorgia Ciampi’s direct experience of the training and of her interviews with Gopal and his daughter Kapila (also a renowned performer), we illustrate how Navarasa Sādhanā is a practice for learning to enact different affective states by developing a heightened sensitivity to subtle bodily sensations and by harnessing this sensitivity for expressive purposes. After presenting some necessary background for situating the training in its cultural context, we delve into the experiential dynamics of the practice. We first provide a general description of the training, focusing on what it is to undergo and experience it in the first person. We then describe in detail the experience of practising one specific rasa—śṛṅgāra (love, or the erotic). This detailed description aims to illustrate the richness and sophistication of Navarasa Sādhanā as a form of psychophysical training and, more generally, to illustrate the capacity of art to further our understanding of human embodiment—not just as a physical fact but also in terms of the first-personal experience of being alive and inherently animated, with associated feelings of vital energy and their affective dynamics.