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The rhythms from within

ARKA MUKHOPADHYAY

Dance, theatre, politics. They blend together in a world of rhythm, beats and hidden silences. Theatre performer Maya Rao is constantly exploring such links

MIRRORING LIFERavana never ceases to fascinate Maya Rao. She thinks his ten heads represent the multiple roles that a woman has to play today Photo: Sampath Kumar G.P.

The performance stage: an apparition in pink moves around, building and unbuilding worlds through her words and her movements, in time to a crazed base guitar. Cut to a different stage — an empty stage this time, the setting for a workshop. The same apparition now transformed to an ageing woman in black and red, talks about the possibilities of the emptiness on stage. She looks tired, but in a moment she is on the stage and assumes a Kathakali stance, and all the potentialities coalesce — she is now Ravana, expressing his lust in fourteen beats — her face a mirror of his primeval passion. The moment passes, and without any perceptible shift, the face is again the woman's — calm, impassive, a little tired. Shift to a drawing room, and Maya K. Rao, now in a sari and draped in a shawl, speaks about her days and ways. Looking at the small, frail woman that she now appears to be, it is difficult convincing oneself that is the same person one saw in a hurricane of motion on stage.

Her pieces, juxtapositions of Kathakali based movement, speech (much of which is improvised), and live and pre-recorded video feed, certainly do stretch conventional notions of theatre to their limits and then maybe a little beyond. Ask her if she categorises it as a play, and she replies, without missing so much as a beat: "No, it's a performance. He (Ashim) is performing, I'm performing, we're performing together, the video is performing, Surojit is performing. It is performance." Press her further and ask what, then, is the distinction between the two. She thinks a while, and then says what we think of theatre is "grounded in actions, and action in situations." Whereas, what one finds in her work is "a flow of movement."

Career map

Her career has been, if anything, varied. It all began with an immersion in Kathakali under guru Sadanam Balakrishnan at the International Centre for Kathakali. And although if you ask her she tells you there is no conscious intention to use the form in her performance, yet one can feel the ethos of Kathakali breathing through the frenetic hurly-burly of even the tapestry of rock and high technology the A Deep Fried Jam is — one can see it in the thousand fleeting masks that she wears in the space of an instant, one can see it in the story that her feet weave, even as she herself remains seated, through a labyrinth of rhythm — Kathakali is its very texture. But the path was anything but straight. Student days and activism and street theatre followed, including a phase when English theatre had been eschewed entirely, even though she had to "weep and learn Hindi lines" for it was not a language she was entirely comfortable with. Somewhere along the way, she found herself studying for a masters degree in the U.K., and followed up with a stint as a teacher of political science. And then it all came full circle — back to theatre: from performing short stories by Manto and Brecht, to doing Ravana, to Desdemona in a Kathakali exploration of Othello — she has known all. Given the fact that her performances are, to a large extent, improvisational, in as much as there is no text that they're built up around ("I'm not a writer," says Maya candidly), what is the impetus, the fount that her pieces spring from? How did it all begin? In essence, she says, it was all really about, "getting into a room, playing pre-recorded music that somewhere moved me, into action, into creating." Is there then, a conscious attempt to disseminate an opinion, or a political stance, in the performances, or is it "pure art?" The question answers itself, when, as the conversation turns somehow to Gujarat, she declares without a trace of hesitation, "it was a pogrom." And so, abstract as the performances are, they are anything but pure aesthetics. References abound — to Gujarat (there is a moving sequence in A Deep Fried Jam where Maya, seated in front of a slab of glass which is lit by a lamp from underneath, spreads a map of Gujarat and fills it up — with a hand-held puppet like image of a girl, with grains of rice, with drops of blood, and the whole is projected on to a screen), to New Delhi, to New York. She would now like to bring "slices of life" into her shows. Artistic yes, but also, "frontally politic," as she calls it. What she would like to move onto is a "researched performance," to work with "a kernel of life," in a village or perhaps a neighbourhood, because "there'd be spiralling stories coming out of it."

No slotting

The discussion turns to feminism, and she makes it clear that categories don't interest her. "You're a strong woman," means nothing to me. What I love about the Mahabharata is that it spells out circumstances beautifully. And I think that's what life today is all about — we all have to make decisions based on our very changing circumstances." She turns to Ravana — the one mythological character that has never ceased to fascinate her: "What is his circumstance? That he has as many boons as curses. He must live with the weight of his ten heads — maybe those ten heads are about his boons and curses. And maybe that's what we are today — I have to be mother and woman, and wife. And it's too simple to say I'm suffering. No, I'm not. Every second I'm negotiating, bouncing and playing around with myself."

And perhaps that sums up this remarkable performer and remarkable woman — as someone who's continuously exploring the rhythms within her.

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