ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the complex ensemble of entrenched and innovative aesthetic systems and performance techniques of the Ramkatha genres. The focus extends to negotiations amid the contemporary perceptions of a sacred recital, its production and reception, particularly the bodily presence of performers and spectators who gather on the stage of the Ramkatha, as witnessed in different locales, namely Ahmedabad, Porbandar, Bakersfield and Rome. The rich semiotic play links storytelling, rhetoric, ritual, collective myths, history and symbols, allowing the performer to construct an imagination of the past and an understanding of the present through storytelling, music, singing and dancing. Demonstrated in terms of its constitution, framing and repertoire of embodied practices, performances become a theatre where stories and staging strategies are used to alleviate spectators from daily lives and exposed to new experiences that lead to transformations. By sustaining questions about the role of performance, sacred mundane everyday experiences such as greeting or eating food, enacted via shared acts of doing are observed and reported as highly performative. Inscribed with devotional efficacy, sense of community and cultural resonance within the larger context of globalized art and life forms, the re-enchantment of the world is accomplished through the aesthetics of performance.
