Tale of survival
SARASWATHY NAGARAJAN
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‘La Loba’ unfolded a story of pain, betrayal, tenderness and hope.
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Breaking loose: Yasmin Jasdanwalla’s ‘La Loba’ raises questions about a woman’s role in society.
‘La Loba’ (The Wolf Woman), a solo act by Yasmin Jasdanwalla, is a tale of survival. “Of the games and roles women are forced to play to survive in a patriarchal society,” avers Yasmin.
The play, directed by her husband Jairo Furoto Vergara, was staged at the Vylloppilly Samskriti Bhavan, Thiruvananthapuram. The cross-cultural play, which wove a Mexican legend, myth and contemporary events, unfolded a grim story of pain, betrayal, tenderness and hope.
Phases of womanhood
Minimalism was at its best as Yasmin portrayed the story with a few curious props and a costume that served as a skirt, a cloak and a burkha. As she danced, sang and spoke in five different languages, the stages came alive with different phases and faces of womanhood.
The actor sketched the two faces of woman – while one was instinctive and free like the wolf, the other was domesticated, tamed and trapped in social mores. According to Yasmin, a woman’s innate intelligence and skills are constantly chipped away to make her ‘domesticated’ and ‘obedient.’ “All for the marriage market. She is made to primp and preen and forced to behave in a certain way to make her acceptable for the marriage market. She has to become hypocritical or helpless,” adds Yasmin.
Tag lines from advertisements and bits of pieces of popular ad images depicted the way women get taken in by the images popularised by the media – print and electronic. As she mimed, pirouetted and pretended to doll up to enter into matrimony, she portrayed the plight of thousands of hapless women who endure this in reality. Yasmin has been performing the play for seven years now and she feels that each time she stages the play, she discovers new facets to the play.
It was a theatre camp in Hampi that introduced Yasmin to physical theatre and Dr. Clarissa Pinakola Estes’ ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves.’ “It was Yola Cykuntis who introduced me to the book. I was fascinated by the story. But Jairo has developed it to include contemporary events and women issues to make it a story of our times,” says Yasmin.
However the play ended on a note of hope. The woman sings softly to her child and she hopes for a rosier future for her child.
The pin drop silence that followed the play spoke volumes of the success of the play. As the silence gave way to applause, Yasmin and Jairo spoke about their attempt to give shape to a new kind of theatre and their experience with the play ‘La Loba.’
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