The Ecology of Body Memory in Heisnam Kanhailal’s Theatre

Performance arts provide an ontological framework that enables memory to be performed in ways that make private memory public. ‘Public’ here refers to the spatial component where groups meet and share memory. Theatre, a component of performance arts, is a cultural practice carried out in public arenas. Heisnam Kanhailal’s theatre, popularly known as the “Theatre of the Earth,” rooted in a culture empowered by the earth questions the edifice of Indian dramaturgy and revolutionises performance through the enactment of suffering on stage. The actor in his theatre becomes an embodiment of ‘organic memory,’ the medium through which ancestral teachings of a community and sensory knowledge of being find an outlet. The focus on the actor’s body rather than the conventional emphasis on the psyche suggests that acting is sustained and relayed as an active force. This paper aims to understand how the physical body in Kanhailal’s theatre transforms into a collation of communal memory which creates a space for communication between the deliverer (actor) and the receiver (spectator). By studying the body dynamics shown in his plays, Pebet, Memoirs of Africa, Dakghar and Draupadi, the assessment traces the affective as well as discursive modes of sustaining identity codified in the ecology of the community. Therefore, by making theatre evocative of their history of powerlessness and the bodies of actors representative of these sensitivities, theatre rooted in the community’s ecology creates sites of remembrance, the mental loci of which could be imaginatively accessed and explored.