Saji Oorali
I am Saji Oorali, a performing artist based in Kerala. I have spent more than twenty years on stage, writing and singing my own songs and building performances that move between music, theatre and storytelling. Somewhere along those years the stage began asking me questions it could not answer by itself, and research became the only honest way to keep performing.
The practice.
Artfulness has run around fifty sessions: with sales teams, with senior leaders, with artists, and with people whose work has nothing ostensibly to do with art. The last group is the one that taught me the most, because they arrive with no reason to trust the form and leave having used it anyway.
The work draws on the traditions I grew up inside and have performed alongside: Theyyam, Kathakali, Panchavadyam, Kalaripayattu, chenda melam, and the independent and folk music of Kerala. These are not decoration and they are not exhibits. They are working bodies of technique about attention, timing, breath and how a group holds a form together, which is precisely what a room needs to learn.
Three places this work also lives.
Artfulness, the podcast
Conversations with academics, cognitive scientists, artists and entrepreneurs about what art is for, and how it works as a learning technology.
Pattil Kurumulakundu, the pepper in our songs
A performance and research project on the history of Kerala's independent music, running from a Sangam poem through the work songs to blues, rock and roll, rap and electronic music. Kerala's music as the residue of trade.
The book
A Malayalam book with DC Books. Title and launch date to be added here on publication.
Artists.
Artfulness is delivered by working artists, paid properly, and trained into facilitation rather than dropped into it. A performer's craft points inward. Facilitation points the same instrument outward, and learning to reverse it is a real apprenticeship.
If you are an artist and this is work you want to do, get in touch. The form has a box for exactly that.
The fastest way to understand this is to be in a room where it happens.
Eight people, one room, no preparation.