In the Tamil song “Tuyil kola…” (“துயில் கொள்ள”), the text addresses the sea: “You never sleep, for what reasons? Is it the heat of the sun? Is it the sound of the waves? Is it because of the fishermen’s nets and their oars? Are you too busy with the beings you protect: seaweed and shells, sea snakes and fish? Do you suffer, enventually, from the madness of human beings?” Bharata-nāṭyam artist Sivaselvi Sarkar was lulled by this ancient song by her sisters in her childhood in Puducherry on the coast of the Indian Ocean. By finding an archive of this musical composition, she decided to perform it on stage. How is the sea represented? How are the emotions of childhood, the cultural heritage, the aesthetic and political dimensions of the deployed and sometimes suffering body of the sea woven together? According to Tabish Nawaz, Indian professor of environmental sciences, “a key objective of ecopoetry is to help the readers feel and imagine the non-human interlocutors of their environment, rather than possess them”. The study of excerpts from “Tuyil kola” will focus on the creative processes to show how the poem, its musical score and their updating in the postcolonialist context of contemporary Bharata-nāṭyam express an aesthetic flavor carried by a true “ecopoietic”.

To be continued in french here : https://tropics.univ-reunion.fr/2919

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