In Canada: The Kathakali dance and percussion instruments

Kathakali dance (of South Asian char­ac­ter) was intro­duced to Cana­da in 1976 by chore­o­g­ra­ph­er Richard Trem­blay in col­lab­o­ra­tion since the 1980s with com­pos­er and per­cus­sion­ist Bruno Paquet. The first Cana­di­an pro­duc­tion was con­duct­ed in Sague­nay in 1976, by Téâ­tram, fol­lowed a few years lat­er by pre­sen­ta­tions in Vic­to­ria, Van­cou­ver, Saska­toon, Win­nipeg, Toron­to, Ottawa, Mon­tre­al and Que­bec City with K. Karunakaran (1980) in Toron­to and K. Gopalakr­ish­nan (in nation­al dis­sem­i­na­tion, 1981). Richard Trem­blay also danced with the Indi­an nation­al Kathakali com­pa­ny, the Kala­man­dalam of Ker­ala in India and at the Mon­tre­al per­for­mance of the 1981 North Amer­i­can tour of this pres­ti­gious com­pa­ny. After train­ing in the per­cus­sion music of Ker­ala, Bruno Paquet joined the Kathakali Insti­tute (Mon­tre­al) where reper­toire and cre­ation pro­duc­tions were part of the reg­u­lar dance land­scape in Que­bec and Cana­da. Bruno Paquet and Richard Trem­blay have staged lit­tle-known pieces from the Kathakali reper­toire, such as Gitopade­sham, as well as cre­ations such as Orig­ines (Mon­tre­al, 1988 – 94 – 96), The Ili­ad or The Anger of Achilles (Ker­ala, 1988 – 91 – 93, pre­sent­ed in Sin­ga­pore in 2000), and Ulysses (Ker­ala, 1994). With the foun­da­tion of Danse Kalashas in 1990, the chore­o­g­ra­ph­er and the composer/percussionist found inspi­ra­tion in their prac­tice of Kathakali dance and music and thus cre­at­ed a reper­toire of con­tem­po­rary cre­ations of their own.

Anan­da Shiv­ara­man, a descen­dant of a fam­i­ly of gurus (gurukku­la) from Ker­ala, had pre­vi­ous­ly ini­ti­at­ed the intro­duc­tion of Kathakali in Que­bec and Cana­da. In the ear­ly 1950s, the dancer lived for two years in a small apart­ment on Sher­brooke Street in Mon­tre­al and con­tributed to sev­er­al pre­sen­ta­tions that were high­ly appre­ci­at­ed by the dance com­mu­ni­ty of the time.