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The Thespian Experience: Sanskrit Sources on the Emotional Life of Actors, by Daniele Cuneo

September 27, 2021

12:15 pm

Uris Hall, G08

Actors across latitudes and cultures amaze their audiences by displaying at will the physical ‘symptoms’ of emotions such blushing, shivering, and weeping. Sanskrit sources offer almost two millennia of sophisticated reflections on the emotional life of actors, the hidden engine lying behind their almost eerie capacity to emote by exhibiting emotions that they might not even be feeling. In the most commonly known South Asian theory, it is the spectator who is the locus of rasa, the aesthetic experience of blissful savoring that even foreshadows the mystical experience of oneness with the absolute. However, an identical experience in the playwright and its indispensable transmission through the medium of the performer —be it an active or a passive recipient— are also vital aspects of the artistic process. The starting point of my presentation will be the seminal dramaturgical treatise by Bharata, the Nāṭyaśāstra, but the major protagonist will be Abhinavagupta (10th-11th c., Kaśmīr), a tantric master and philosopher who fashioned an innovative synthesis of earlier aesthetic theories. According to his vision, fictional detachment, emotional involvement and dynamic agency are integrated in the figure of the performer and in his liminal and all-encompassing nature of recipient, transmitter, and creator of the elixir of aesthetic experience. Such a mastery over one’s own emotional, mental and bodily sphere —the thespian experience— makes the actor a perfect metaphor and paradigm for the playful freedom of lordship, be it that of Śiva himself, the actor supreme, or of the nobleman, the supreme aesthetic connoisseur.

Daniele Cuneo is ‘maître de conférences' (lecturer) in Sanskrit and Indian Civilization at the Université Sorbonne nouvelle, Paris. After obtaining his PhD at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" under the direction of Raffaele Torella, he worked and taught in the three prestigious universities of Vienna, Cambridge and Leiden. His main areas of research are Sanskrit aesthetics, Philosophy of Language, Tamil Culture, and South Asian Manuscript Studies. Across multiples texts and traditions, it is the cultural imbrication of language and emotions that represents the core of Daniele Cuneo’s historical and philosophical investigation. His publications include several articles on Indian aesthetics and philosophy such as ‘Detonating or Defusing Desire. From Utpaladeva’s Ecstatic Aesthetics to Abhinavagupta’s Ecumenical Art Theory’, Italian translations of the Mānavadharmaśāstra, the seminal work on Sanskrit jurisprudence, and of the Muttoḷḷāyiram, a celebrated collection of Tamil poems from the mid-first millennium, and numerous contributions to the digital catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscript collections at the Cambridge University Library. His current projects focus on the edition, translation, interpretation and study of several Sanskrit texts from late medieval Kashmir (Mukula’s Abhidhāvṛttamātṛkā of Mukula, the unpublished commentary by Sahadeva on Vāmana’s work, and Mammaṭa’s Śabdavyāpāravicāra).

Additional Information

Program

Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies

South Asia Program