Author: Susan L Schwartz
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 118
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788120832626
Description
While many people outside India find the images, sounds, and practices of Indian performing arts compelling and endeavor to incorporate them into the "global" repertoire, few are aware of the central role of religious belief and practice in Indian aesthetics. Completing the trilogy that includes Darsan: Seeing the Divine in India and Mantra: Hearing the Divine in India and America, this volume focuses on how rasa has been applied in a range of Indian performance traditions.
"Rasa" is taste, essence, and flavor. How is it possible that a word used to describe a delicious masala can also be used to critique a Bharata Natyam performance? Rasa expresses the primary goals of performing arts in India in all the major literary, philosophical, and aesthetic texts, and it provides the cornerstone of the oral traditions of transmission. It is also essential to the study and production of sculpture, architecture, and painting. Yet its primary referent is cuisine.
This book articulates the religious sensibility underlying the traditional performing arts as well as other applications of rasa and examines the relationships between the arts and religion in India today.
REVIEW:
"Rasa' signifies flavor, taste, and shared aesthetic experience. It this short but far-ranging, thoughtful, and provocative book, Susan Schwartz explores how dancers, actors, musicians, sages, and philosophers have thought about and used rasa over the centuries. She wonders what rasa's new possibilities might be for the Indian Diaspora of the twenty-first century."
-Richard Schechner, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
Contents
Preface
Transliteration and Romanization
1. A Taste of things to Come
2. Rasa in Theory: Text and Context
Etymological Ingredients
Sources of Inspiration
A Written Recipe for the Arts
Influence and Implications
3. Rasa in Practice: Drama, Dance, Music
All the Stage is but a World
Dance as Mystery
Bharata Natyam
Shringara Rasa: What Love has to Do with it
Kathak
Kathakali
Good Taste in Music
Dissonance, Assonance, Variation, Transcendence
4.Transformations in Time and Space
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index