Latest News
Annual report 2023-2024
Job opportunities
The Annual Report 2023-2024, including a summary of the financial statements, has just been published! You can read it here.
20 July 2024: Netherlands Ambassador to India visits the Kattaikkuttu Sangam
We were extremely honored to receive Mrs. Marisa Gerards, Dutch Ambassador, and her husband Mr. Peter Knoope at the Kattaikkuttu Sangam. They witnessed a performance of Draupadi Kuravanchi followed by a photo-op with the performers who included a number female and male alumni students of the Kattaikkuttu Gurukulam. Her visits helps to put Kattaikkuttu on the map. We look forward to future interactions and new networking opportunities. Thank you so much Mrs. Ambassador!
Parshathy J. Nath writes in The Hindu about the Kattaikkuttu Gurukulam and her experiences of training with P Rajagopal, one of Kattaikkuttu’s senior-most masters, in preparation of her new solo production.
Job openings
At this moment in time we have no any specific job opportunities, but we are open to people who have a desire to work with us to help us foster Kattaikkuttu and the arts in general so as to realize the vision of the Sangam.
If you are an artist, academic, farmer, someone with great media, fundraising or craft skills or someone with a long-cherished creative plan, please contact us to discuss your ideas and expectations with us.
Inspired?
Please get in touch with us at info@kattaikuttu.org
Festival volunteers
The Sangam is organizing Rural Performing Arts Festival spread of 10 subsequent Saturdays in November and December 2024. All performances will be free, but we are eager to use this event to raise funds from local businesses, CSR and through donor passes.
We are in need of passionate volunteers to help us out with the preparations for the fund raising campaign. Are you good at proposal writing? Do you take evocative photographs or video-clips? Would you love to set up a consistent social media campaign to support the fund raiser or revamp our YouTube channel? Do you have hands-on skills and sales expertise to set up and run a stall and selling our merchandise and organic farm produce during the event?
If yes, please contact us! We cannot offer you no remuneration, but we can provide you with onsite accommodation, access to all our training activities and performances and an Volunteering Experience Certificate. We also welcome off-site assistance!
Interested in a Kattaikkuttu Workshop?
Let us know your preferences by filling out the registration form or contact us at info@kattaikkuttu.org. We need a minimum of 10 participants to make a workshop viable.
You can watch a preview of one of our workshops here.
“The most enriching event of 2022 for me were the weekend workshops conducted by the Kattaikkuttu Sangam in the month of November. Rajagopal sir would demonstrate every element we were scheduled to learn that weekend and he would dedicatedly follow each student’s progress and ensure that each one of us were able to fully apply ourselves and understand the movements, dialogues and songs.
Praveen Vijayakumar, Singapore/Ph. D. candidate University of Pennsylvania, USA, 30 Dec 2022.”
Our latest production SANTIPPU is now available for your space!
SANTIPPU (Encounters) is an experimental, minimalist production that mixes and matches Kattaikkuttu and Storytelling in Tamil, English and Tanglish. The production has been conceptualized as a series of encounters the nature of which varies from funny to serious to unreal depending on the participants involved. It uses themes from the traditional Kattaikkuttu repertory, including humoristic intermezzos, and stories from the vast storytelling reservoir, in addition to newly written songs and dialogues.
SANTIPPU is brought to you by senior Kattaikkuttu actor, teacher, director and writer Perungattur P. Rajagopal and Chennai-based veteran storyteller Jeeva Raghunath who together form the company VEKU PARAAKKU. They work without musicians relying on their own voices and bodies to take on different characters, genders and other species.
In part one of SANTIPPU we listen to a lively engagement between the beautiful Azhakan and his devoted wife, the lovely Anbu. This is followed by the famous encounter between Duryodhana and Krishna from the Kattaikkuttu play Krishna’s Embassy. Herein Krishna travels to Hastinapura on behalf of the Pandavas to ask for the return of half of the country. The third meeting features a conversation between Delta and Omicron, while the performance concludes with Kuppusami and Narayanan going off into space.
Concept: P. Rajagopal and Jeeva Raghunath
Dramaturgy and costumes: Hanne M. de Bruin
CALL FOR SUPPORT
to the Kattaikkuttu Women’s Dream Project
The pandemic has severely restricted our access to donor funding. We turn to you again -- as passionate supporters of our work — to elicit your financial and moral support. We are asking you to help us create a space and artistic opportunities for our professional women performers and their young families, who are affected as much by a patriarchal society as by the pandemic.
We aim to raise INR 750000 (EUR 8600 or US$ 10200) to finance salaries for the women, child care and a first production -- now in fast forward mode -- addressing the issues women performers face in a traditional theater form that has been a men-only prerogative.
Please donate directly to the Kattaikkuttu Sangam mentioning "Women's Project". Local donors can avail of our 80G Income Tax exemption. If you are donating from outside India, please use our FCRA account. You can find all relevant bank account details in the table below. You can also donate through our sister organization Kalai Manram in The Netherlands.
TAVAM
The first baby of the Kattaikkuttu Women’s Dream Project has seen the light. Based on the experiences of the 5 women participants in the project as to what it means to be a woman performer in a rural art form that itself is stigmatized, P. Rajagopal wrote the script for a novel contemporary production called TAVAM (“Penance”).
Live version
TAVAM interweaves 3 different threads: that of a sanyasi who has severed his relationships with the social world; scenes from different Kattaikkuttu plays acted in Kattaikkuttu style by the all-women cast; and scenes acted in a more realistic style reflecting situations at home and at the in-laws house of one of the actresses where the women are confronted with the diction: stop performing as you are the talk of the village and will spoil your marriage chances and your family honour. The actresses negotiate their way out of different situations in order to be able to continue their passion, that is performing Kattaikkuttu before and after marriage, as the theatre has become part of their identity.
Interested in hosting TAVAM live at your space or in your festival? Please contact us at info@kattaikkuttu.org.
Film
In collaboration with film maker Sandhya Kumar we made our first-ever foray into the world of film. The cinematic adaptation of TAVAM can be viewed here.
We thank Ranga Shankara Theatre and its donors for making the production of TAVAM and its film version possible.
Please donate
We continue to need your support — financially and in the form of performance opportunities — for the Kattaikkuttu Women’s Dream Project, for the Kattaikkuttu Diploma Course and for the Sangam’s Repertory Company.
We would like to pay our performers well, because a good remuneration provides performers with social dignity, in addition to financial security. And for our women performers in particular women, it gives them much needed leverage to negotiate their continuation in the theatre.
Please support us and donate now!
We have a job opening for a passionate Farm Manager
We are open again!
We are able to receive fully vaccinated visitors and artists-in-residence, who would like to stay on site.
In the ongoing struggle against the Covid-19 pandemic, your safety comes first. We have taken several measures to make your visit to the Sangam as pleasant and safe as possible. Please read our safety protocol and find answers to your questions.
“Perungattur P. Rajagopal: A Portrait of an Actor”
Sue Rees has made a documentary film about actor, director, teacher, playwright, co-founder and moving force behind the Kattaikkuttu Sangam, P. Rajagopal. So far the documentary film has been shown in film festivals in the is Toronto Tamil Film Festival where it won the best documentary award and the South East Asian Film Festival in Chicago.
Sue has been working for and with the Kattaikkuttu Sangam and P. Rajagopal and Hanne M. de Bruin since 2005. This has resulted in some beautiful video images, clips and this long awaited documentary.
New Executive Board
On 23 November 2021 the Kattaikkuttu Sangam elected a new Executive Board during its annual General Body meeting. There was a stiff competition for the various positions within the board. We are happy to welcome 3 new members to the board. Congratulations to all elected members who will be taking on the responsibility to govern the Sangam for the coming 3 years:
President - G. Dhanapal
Vice-president - K. Jalanathan
Secretary - A. Kailasam
Deputy secretary - T.P. Durai
Treasurer - M. Shanmugam
Members of the Executive Board:
K. Maheshwaran
K. Guru
R. Velu
P. Thilagavathy
S. Tamilarasi
T. Veluchami
Annual Report 2021-2022
Our latest annual report is out! It includes a summary of the financial statements.
You can read the Report here.
We thank our auditor Mr. S. Kalyanaraman of K.S. Aiyar & Co. and Mrs. B. Lakshmi, Director finance & statutory compliance, for preparing and auditing the statement
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Award for P. Rajagopal
The Lions Club of Madras Cathedral honoured P. Rajagopal’s endeavour to transmit Kattaikkuttu to a next generation of young men and women with the Dr. Radhakrishnan Teaching Excellence Award on the 26th of September 2021. Well-deserved this is also an acknowledgement of his almost single-handed attempt to break down gender and caste barriers within and on the rural stage.
February 2023: Another award, this time from the Hyundai Motor India Foundation, in recognition of Rajagopal’s life-long accomplishment as a Kattaikkuttu actor, teacher and passionate promoter of the theatre itself.
