Page 272 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

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Folk Arts And Folk Artists:

Myths And reAlities*

P.J. AmAlA dos

The Feelings of an Artist

This chapter is going to be different from all the others because most
people have been presenting someone else, whereas I am talking
about myself. Basically, I am a Therukoothu (Tamil street theatre)
folk artist, and I represent folk communities. After a three-and-a-half-
year study of that form, I have performed about 100 times. My pre-
sentation may not have much of an academic value. It is a presentation
of an artist—of the feelings of an artist—and a source information
for my audience. My association with the folk artists, as a folk artist
myself and as president of the Folk Artists’ Federation of Tamil Nadu,
has helped me understand better my fellow artists and their art forms.
I want to register my feelings here. As a human being and folk artist,
we have been destroyed and neglected by the so-called technological
media.

∗ This paper is a transcription of the author’s oral intervention in the
international seminar Communication Processes and Social Transfor-
mation, Pune, 8–13 January 1996. This seminar was organized by the Centre
for Cooperative Research in Social Sciences (CCRSS) with the support of
the Charles-Léopold Mayer Foundation for the Progress of Humankind
(FPH).