LOS ANGELES FESTIVAL : A MINISERIES FROM THE GODS

On a steamy Saturday night in the tough, seedy Pasar Senen Market district (definitely not a tourist area), a working-class audience arrives on foot and by pedicab at the Bharata Theater to see Part 2 of “The Mahabharata.”

No, this is not the celebrated adaptation by director Peter Brook and writer Jean-Claude Carriere that opens Saturday at the Raleigh Studios in Hollywood as part of the Los Angeles Festival. Instead, it is an older Indonesian “Mahabharata” based on a form of court theater incorporating speech, mime, dance, song, scenic spectacle (on a very limited scale, in this staging) and long passages of clowning.

Both productions, of course, derive from the 100,000-stanza Sanskrit original compiled in the 4th Century--an epic poem that, at least in part, deals with the revenge of a noble family fallen upon hard times. Presented in three consecutive evenings or one nine-hour marathon, the Brook-Carriere version is the latest mounting of “Mahabharata” in an ancient, global tradition. It is also a perfect specimen of art theater in the ‘80s: exotic, high-minded, expensive.

In contrast, the Jakarta “Mahabharata” (performed in four-hour installments on Saturdays) is clearly conceived as popular entertainment--the world’s oldest miniseries. Tickets are cheap and people arrive at the theater throughout the evening as they finish their jobs or meals.

The acting style is elegant yet accessible, the original Indian characters have been reconceived as Javanese and the clowns add a dimension of contemporary social commentary to the work’s timeless philosophical issues.

Long before midnight, the Bharata Theater is packed. And this is far from the only production or style of presentation that Indonesia offers. You can find “The Mahabharata” retold entirely in dance, staged with wooden dolls and shadow-puppets, acted in many languages and dialects. Indeed, wherever the culture of India influenced the growth of civilization, theatricalizations of “The Mahabharata” have proliferated.

Though not exactly central to the Indian Diaspora, Los Angeles has a long familiarity with “The Mahabharata,” most often through solo dance performances of selected episodes.

During a sequence that may last 40 minutes or more, the dancer becomes a vessel in which all of the epic’s characters, action, emotions and philosophy are distilled. This is “The Mahabharata” in miniature--the great conflict played out in a single body.

A specialist in Bharata Natayam (the classic Southern Indian dance idiom), Los Angeles-based dancer/teacher/choreographer Viji Prakash performed excerpts from “The Mahabharata” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1985 and the Japan America Theatre in 1986. Although she acknowledges that other stories are easier to delineate, she speaks of “The Mahabharata” as “coming down from the gods” and reveals that she always feels “very intensely when I dance or view it. My God, that’s our life in our dance!

“It’s very dear to my heart because of the nature of its story,” she says. “Here you have so many powerful individuals and I have to establish the characteristics of all of them--exactly where each one might be on the stage, so (after playing one character), I can just move my foot and turn to the other side and my whole face and role have changed.”

Until now, the most ambitious “Mahabharata” production seen in Los Angeles was perhaps the abridgment presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1970 by the astonishing Kerala Kalamandalam Kathakali, a company from Southwest India.

An all-male idiom that dates from the 16th Century, Kathakali is one of the wonders of world dance--with elaborately stylized costumes, headdresses and makeup that create a nightmarish grandeur and with a movement style of overwhelming weight and power.

Besides devoting an evening to “Nala Caritam,” an intimate, lyrical fantasy derived from a subsidiary story in “The Mahabharata,” the company offered a three-hour digest of the “main” plot: the Pandavas’ downfall and revenge, which actually takes up only about a fourth of the original poem.

Towards the end, following a rigidly formal battle dance, came a moment of incredible fury when the fierce Bhima attacked an enemy with his bare hands, like a maddened beast, and, after seeming to rip open his foe’s belly, emerged with a length of knotted red rope in his teeth.

All at once the mythic, superhuman context of the story scarcely seemed large enough to contain the primal human emotions being unleashed onstage. Kathakali intensity had dwarfed even “The Mahabharata” itself.