1
The crowd has just come out after watching a performance… a very intense performance… the sounds of their chattering can be heard from a distance. As they move through a narrow passage to the place where tea and samosas are waiting, some pertinent issues which have been at the centre of a tedious process come to the forefront. Some of them have been witnesses to the long workshop process that has culminated in this evening of performances. The instant reviews are pouring from all sides. As they wait for the announcement that would usher the next performance, sipping from their cups… a clown like figure sleeps at the pavement… with a guitar in the hand, only to be disturbed by another person, carrying a ‘dotara’… a two-stringed folk instrument. His irritatingly funny but sharp remarks about the people around him give way to interesting interactions between the participants, who we learn soon, have all come together for an ‘audition’: the thin irritating fellow with his constant nagging… and the ‘high-maintenance’ woman who knows Mr. Jain (the head of audition committee?), the confused looking girl who claims to be a dancer, who are they? Where have they come from? Their interactions underline the hierarchies and status quo that they represent, but simultaneously, they acquire these multiple layers of identities which seem hard to penetrate. Who are they? Where have they come from? .
***
Who are they? Where have they come from? As we discussed how we want to go about with our performance, several ideas came up. Every part of the workshop had contributed in some way or the other in bringing us to the point where we could actually start thinking of a performance. However, this was also the most difficult part of the workshop process- to transfer and interpret, all kinds of exercises that we went through into a methodology to access a performance was a challenge of high order. What text would we take? What would we do with it? How would we engage with each other? And the overpowering seduction of text over performance were some initial questions that we wanted to deal with. I was very impressed by a little exercise that Pratyush, Kiran and Anirban had performed the previous day. It was a small script about an audition, where they played with the idea of hierarchies. I thought that the concept was very productive, it had great possibilities, and hence was very vocal about my desire to work on it the following day, and this is the moment we were all starting from.
We wanted to keep the opening very random and realistic. The characters coming from the audience, interacting with them, and turning the whole space into a very dynamic performance space… an event. We wanted the audience to challenge us, to create situations… to be a part of the text, not just follow it, but create it. This reminded Shrinkhla of something that she was particularly interested in, of how sometimes, through our intense engagement with some texts, we experience this intense desire to change it, to alter it according to what we think should happen, how there are moments, when we empathize so much with a character that we start reacting to every move that the character makes, and get angry whenever we cant identify with it. She had this strange love/hate relationship with Antigone, and wanted to explore it. I felt, for this we all should try and engage with a text which is already close to our heart, which we’ve already been working on, instead of picking up a fresh text, as the time was too little to achieve that level of engagement with it. Hence I picked up the text I’ve been obsessed with for more than four years now, Shakespeare’s ’Hamlet’. previously too, for one of Dr. Bishnupriya Dutt’s courses, Comic Traditions, I had adapted Hamlet with some other texts into a street performance. Hamlet’s madness is what attracts me the most, a clown like, self reflexive madness… I wanted to explore this side. I also wanted to look at gender, as for me Ophelia is just an extension of Hamlet, a side, which he has to kill, in order to take a ‘masculine’ vengeance. His fear from her, his anger… his frustration… his monologue is to himself… ‘O Fair Ophelia, Nymph, in thy orisons, may all my sins be remembered’. Rashika wanted to work on a book that her friend has written, interestingly called, ‘Brunching with Ophelia’, where she wanted to talk about virtual identity, but I think there was a strong sense of nostalgia that was also associated, ‘that’ was the real link, as an actress, as a woman, this nostalgia is what brought her close to the text, not the virtual identity idea. Even during the rehearsals, she would often talk about how there were moments in the books based on real events that happened between her and the author… that was her take-off point.
But the most intriguing element was Priyam’s choice of texts, she chose two poems, ’the stopping by woods on a snowy evening’ by Robert Frost, and ’pushp ki abhilasha’ by Makhanlal Chaturvedi, however, in due course of time, the idea of ‘self-sacrifice’ in the ‘pushp’ poem started grabbing her attention and she got more focused on it.
2
What is it being a woman? As we go up, we find the same clown figure lying in front of us, in what seems to be a pool of flowers. The various iconic feminine images in the background, by raja ravi varma, the harem images, the marigold garland, what does all of it signify? Is that what a woman is about? Priyam throws the flowers around, crushes them… breaks the garlands… when in the background, a sound completely contrapuntal to this narrative operates. This is the sound of the man with dotara, with a copy of Hamlet in his hands, he tries to rehearse his dialogue, getting stuck at every second word. Finally rehearsing ‘pushp ki abilasha’ in a radio-like style. This juxtaposition was not to express the very naïve logic of gender interpretation, as a mix of the feminine and masculine, but instead, to create a complex texture of spaces of gender… the fragile thresholds of identity is what it aims at. Though they inhabit the same space, they don’t really are together, within the same physical dimensions, the spaces are different, and so is time. We realized that to problematise the linearity of realism and take it to the carnivalesque level, this parallel time idea was very useful. The way in a carnival space, several performances take place simultaneously, and create several meta-narratives, is what we wanted to achieve in some way. The brash mannerism of Priyam, with the confused gender identity that the Hamlet character accentuates, gets mingled with a death-like silence… a silence from where Antigone’s voice emerges, and asks for flowers, to put on her Brother’s grave… and where is it? Inside Ophelia… Rashika who was constantly chattering on phone, transforms into this complex identity… the story of O!
***
We were very interested in working with sounds, even during the workshop, when I and Shrinkhla were taking a session, this texture of sound question, and how we dissociate it from the language kept coming up every now and then… the moment of ‘O’ was significant… as that was also something we had considered earlier. As a preliminary exercise, we all had figured out specific words… and then all of us had suggested movements based on our own interpretations of the words, then we would arrange these movements, to create a kind of a character graph through movements. This exercise was very useful, as there wasn’t any master text that we were following… so these movements gave us a lot of space for interactions. Rashika’s word for example was ‘absent presence’, Priyam’s ‘self-sacrifice’, mine ‘word’… now for my word, Rashika had suggested a movement of hands, like a balancing act… at this moment, when she talks about Ophelia and her melancholy, that action came back to me… and acquired a new meaning… I realized, that the balancing act is Hamlet’s, where he’s trying to balance his masculinity and feminity… like a chemical equation, two parts of Hamlet, one of Ophelia- H2O… the water in which Ophelia eventually has to drown. Interestingly, Priyam was also dealing with gender trouble in her own way, so at this moment, all three of us came together, to unconsciously formulate a performative unit, with a very powerful juxtaposition of Shrinkhla’s exaggerated body movements. Her own training of ‘Bharatnatyam‘, and its rigid treatment of the hips had made her get interested in working with body. During the workshop, when Urmimala ma’am made us think of grotesque body movements, and specially focusing on the hip movements, she picked up this exercise as a starting point towards her work with body. During the workshop, she found a space for this work in through her ‘vulgar’ hip movements during the story of ’O’. Even my interpretation of lines, and ‘W’ that transforms into a ‘bottom’ on the white board emerged here. These interactions were amazing, and also the fact, that none of it was really planned… and everything emerged through the workshop process itself, was very fascinating for me. This also made me realize, that when a group of artists interact, and through a long workshop, not just share spaces, but start sharing themselves… then, these kind of wonderful moments will emerge, effortlessly, and float from one to another… like a seamless trope… uninterrupted. For me, that was the most beautiful aspect of the performance. The way, Pratyush takes over from this moment, for eg. Is significant.
3
Pratyush comes into the scene with two central issues, though constantly disturbed by Ankush, and ignored by Shrinkhla… one is the whole question of a National theatre, and the other, of the inability of any medium to record a performance. His monologue takes us from a space, which looks like a small theatre stage, with cheap curtains and blue background, to a wall filled with posters of star film performances of famous theatrical texts, from Lawrence Olivier to Kurosawa. It is here, that Ankush starts making a weird sound… trying to explain himself through sounds…nobody understands (of course), tries to write but ends up failing, only upsetting the co-participants with ‘obscene’ versions of ‘W’ which sometimes emulate breasts, sometimes bottoms, then takes up the verbal medium… fails again… and ultimately, starts singing a sonnet from Hamlet. His problem, as we realize is, that he’s dyslexic, and sent to RADA, by his parents in order to ‘correct’ him. His identification with Hamlet happens here… a tale of filial obligation… madness… angst!
***
Angst! That was what we were looking for, but that couldn’t come unless there was some personal engagement. Pratyush was initially not ready to engage that way, to bring in the ‘personal’ in the performance space. Resulting into a block. There was no text that could be brought in. Then we all realized, that there was something ‘real’ about his performativity… about his constant denial- his ‘impatience‘. In some sense, that became his word. His engagement with the performance is the engagement of impatience. He would constantly nag us with questions like what will follow, what will happen next, for how long will a particular scene go on, how will all this end? This becomes his character.
However, one event that further helped him was the loss of the ‘Ibsen Cds’ the blame of which, like a boomerang came to him… he was evidently irritated by the carelessness of the students. He manifested that on the day of the performance. It was so wonderful to see his character emerge this way… and to realize that ultimately, he was bringing in the personal in his performance.
There were issues I HAD to address… my interest in queer issues and queer historiography has at several occasions made me come face to face with a school of critique, perpetuated by Alycia Smith Howard, where she argues, that the question for Hamlet is actually- ‘to be or not to be (a Woman)’. so is there a possibility of looking at Hamlet, as a figure torn by his own sexuality… and a frail attempt of ‘redemption’ of his masculinity? Is his ‘madness’ ,‘queer’ in nature? When I sing the same soliloquy…. I deliberately omit some words… the tune, starting from a dominantly strong notes, turns into a fragile melody later. How does one define this movement? I wanted to address the expectations of the family… the society through this confused, figure. But I didn’t want to turn it into a sad figure, instead, I wanted to laugh about it… to turn into the joke called life. Like Falstaff, I make this character go through different times and different narratives. He belongs to everyone, he represents the moment, where even death and hell are so trivial, as Bakhtin suggests, that one may start laughing at it. This is the moment of truth… the moment of madness!
4
Madness is what makes Rashika/Ophelia question the big H, Prince Hamlet for all that he has done. She argues with him, for the first time… starts questioning the very basis of his negligence, his anger… his denial to every attempt that she had made. She cannot bear the burden of his ’masculinity’, can Antigone? When Shrinkhla takes the burden of all of us, and recites her dialogues, is it just a Stanislaviskian method that she is using? A ‘physical action’ method? No, in fact, it’s the reverse, she lets her body loose at times, making us take it up for her. When she passes the burden to us, it turns into objects of association for us. For me, for eg. It turns into a ball that I juggle with, an act of balance that turns into an identity for my character. My constant struggle with pronunciation, is also a linguistic balance, that he’s not able to achieve. (that’s why, my word was ‘word’). how can an identity like Hamlet find a truly meaningful word in a language which is heteronormative in nature? There isn’t any word which would give his existence ANY meaning! No wonder when Polonius asks him, what he’s reading, he just says ‘words’.
***
One significant exercise that we did was when Urmimala Ma’am, made us walk from one corner of the hall to the other as a mass, a unit. We were supposed to let go, and also be responsible, perpetually in touch with someone or the other. This gave us a good sense of body, of space, of comfort…. We could explore our own limits of trust and support. While structuring our performance we realized, that there had to be a moment when we do the same… form a mass… turn into one… let our bodies speak for us. This was the moment of Ophelia’s death… and the emergence of Antigone’s burden. It was a very intense moment for all of us, a strange cathartic moment.
Why we chose the exhibition gallery space was because we wanted to explore it, with its dramatic partitions, in a per formative way. Also, a space, which was dominantly used for exhibitions, to perform in that space, would mean a different type of interaction with the audience, where they’ll have to move, sometimes touch and directly confront the performers. Unconsciously they become a part of the ‘performance installations’, this relationship was beautiful to explore, leading to another significant aspect.
How does one move in and out of a performance. We wanted to explore this through our performance. Using Alienation, as a comic device, was something we were all hooked with. It gave us immense freedom, but also made us realize how difficult this method was. To balance between these multiple identities, to understand that it required far greater concentration and far deeper engagement. A lot of times, while rehearsing, we would start laughing, and hence break this double illusion. The point was to stay in the mode, even when nothing would happen, or worse, when things didn’t happen the way we wanted them to be. We had to laugh… but not out of the performance, that was the true test.
The video of the performance is available at:
https://vimeo.com/22283584
