Chavittunadakam Workshop with Britto Ashaan at Artiko.tales [Sep 26]

Chavittunadakam is usually something you watch from a row of plastic chairs, at a church feast, at night. On 26 September you can get on the boards yourself. Artiko.tales in Jew Town is hosting a morning workshop with Kalashri Britto Vincent, curated by the Thudippu Dance Foundation.

The session goes through the energy, the expressions, the movement and the theatrical habits of the form — the parts that are hard to read from the audience.

The Details

Date: Saturday 26 September 2026

Time: 10.30 AM. How long it runs has not been announced — ask when you register.

Venue: Artiko.tales, Jew Town Road, Mattancherry — the same stretch as the synagogue and the spice godowns, open 11 AM to 7 PM on an ordinary day.

Register: spots are limited, so message +91 7594 987928 on WhatsApp or call the same number.

What it costs has not been published. Ask on the same number.

What Chavittunadakam Is

The name translates as stamping drama, and the stamping is the point: performers drive their heels into a wooden stage hard enough to keep the rhythm themselves. It is Kerala’s Christian opera, carried by the Latin Catholic families of this coast, and it grew out of the Portuguese centuries on the Malabar shore. The old repertoire came from scripture, saints’ lives and European legend — Charlemagne, known here as Carlesman, and his knights.

We have written about where the form came from and why it sounds the way it does — Chavittu Natakam, the Indian opera with Christian roots.

Who Is Teaching

Kalashri Britto Vincent — Britto Ashaan — writes for the Cochin Chavittu Nadaka Kalari, founded in 2007 to defend the sung, live version of the form against recorded tracks. His scripts include Julius Caesar, St Paul, Judas and Pontius Pilate; the 1988 Julius Caesar was one of the first Chavittunadakam plays to step outside the saints’ lives the form had always staged. Thudippu have been working with him and the Kalari for two or three years, and Chavittunadakam was the first form their Friends of Thudippu series took up.

Aikyam Space has a longer piece on the form and the people keeping it alive, Britto among them — Stamping Through Time.

Why Go

Most people in Kochi have never seen Chavittunadakam up close, and fewer have stood in the steps. Church feasts are where it usually surfaces, once a year, at night, from a distance. A morning in a studio with somebody who writes the plays is a different kind of access, and there are not many of them.

The morning has happened. Aikyam Space wrote it up — the Chavittunadakam workshop at Artiko.tales.