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Journalism of Courage
“Just like a table,” says Philip Zarilli, as he rests his hand on one, “acting has a base. Beneath the surface, is the deep training that has gone into it,” he adds, sitting outside the coffee shop at the India Habitat Centre. A former professor of Performing Practice at the University of Exeter, England, Zarilli is an exponent of kalaripayattu, the traditional Indian martial art form. He has been running his own kalari in Llanarth, Ceredigion, Wales since 2004. “I came to Kerala in 1976 and began learning the art of kalaripayattu. Is stayed here for seven years and also picked up Kathakali,” says Zarilli, who recently conducted a three-day workshop with acting students at the Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida.
As a theatre director, performer and producer, Zarilli’s core area has been developing the techniques used by an actor to optimise their performance on stage. Known as pre-performative training, Zarilli has been fascinated by Oriental art forms such as the Wu style of tai chi, and Indian forms of yoga and kalaripayattu. “I only played American football and soccer during my time in the early ’70s and this is what my body was exposed to. I felt that the ways to train actors in the West were lacking and once I learnt kalaripayattu, tai chi and yoga, I started using them as a pre-performative training for actors and performers,” says the 68-year-old, who trains them in the three forms in his Wales studio. “The reason I use these three forms is because you can do breathing and stretching exercises, yoga helps in warm up, the slow movements of tai chi relaxe the body and then kalaripayattu helps focus,” he says, about his six-hour-long sessions.
In 2000, he collaborated with Bharatanatyam performer Gitanjali Kolanad for a contemporary dance piece titled Walking Naked, which toured outside India till 2003. He is better known for his 2008 collaboration with choreographer Kate O’Reilly for a piece titled The Almond and the Seahorse, which captures the story of survivors of brain surgery and the impact on their loved ones.
Zarilli is currently developing a play with nine performers, which will be staged in Norway, later this year. “I am training the actors using these three methods,” he says. It is an adaptation of Chinese playwright Ota Shoga’s The Water Station.
