ABSTRACT
Indu’s narrative brings its own complexity, revealing a multifaceted landscape of different experiences of training: informal/everyday, formal, teaching as retraining. Her biographical reflections invite to embrace formative training as woven into a more cyclical, layered, porous and expansive conceptualization of time lived in and through training. There was a theatre and film culture with auteur directors and poet playwrights, their actors training in the gesturally expressive body and vocal forms derived from Kathakali and the martial art form of Kalaripayattu. The music of South India is one of great rhythmic complexity and sophistication. The musician learns to keep to a rhythmic cycle of, say, 6, 7, 8, 10, 14 or more beats and, through manodharma within a formal composition, sings or plays over extended repetitions of that basic cycle. The initial training task is to keep the cycle through a mixture of hand gestures known as mudras, beaten out on the leg.
