‘Kathakali follows me like a shadow’: An Italian dancer on his 44-year love affair with the form

When the dancer who played the title role in a kathakali adaption of American author Ernest Hemmingway’s last fictional work The Old Man and The Sea learnt in March that he had won the best actor prize at the Mahindra Excellent in Theatre Awards, the news came as “a nice surprise”.

“I knew I had been nominated, but I didn’t imagine I could win the award,” he said.

His surprise may not have been unwarranted. Even members of the audience were astonished to learn that the kathakali exponent playing the Old Man was a 72-year-old Italian named Mario Barzaghi.

Barzaghi, who runs the Teatro dell’Albero in Liguria, has been a kathakali practitioner for more than four decades.

“Kathakali follows me like a shadow, it’s always with me, perhaps even within me,” he told Sunil Warrier in an email interview.

Excerpts:

What attracted you to kathakali?

I discovered kathakali after joining the Teatro Tascabile in Bergamo [in northern Italy]. They had begun practicing some classical Oriental Theater styles in 1978, including kathakali. Learning kathakali was the new training and research that the director of the TTB, Renzo Vescovi, had suggested to the actors and actresses.

Vescovi asked me to practice kathakali and flamenco [from Spain] as he wanted to explore the extent to which an actor could practice...

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