PERFORMANCE
Where's the light?
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The `Mahabharata Project' was conceived of as an aesthetic piece, but it lacked one elusive element — chutzpah. TISHANI DOSHI writes.
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S. ANVAR
IT had become habitual to congregate on the staircase of Chennai's Chinmaya Heritage Centre to dissect the performances of the Park's The Other Festival. And it was with increasing trepidation that audiences even returned for consecutive shows after the first firecracker night of Zohra Segal fizzled into a string of disappointing, amateurish performances. There were a few intermittent sparks of luminosity, but for the most part, there was a mounting fear that we, the audience, had not yet encountered the final coup de grace, which would prevent us from returning the following day. Unfortunately for Nissar Allana, the coup de grâce came in the form of Lee Sibley, whose appalling caterwauling session on stage left a disastrous wake in which to follow. Especially unfortunate, because of the way the "Mahabharata Project" came packaged: dark, brooding, and scraping around for light.
The set and light design, which was conceived of even before the script was written, was being touted as the main focus of the piece. "Design as Performance", is what the purposefully abstruse handout called it — where the "thematic content of the production is built up through a fragmentation of `expressive' elements". It further went on to explain that the story we were about to see unfold was fragmented in Time and Space (note the capitals letters, just so we all know we're dealing with Universals here) in 12 zones of light, where the idea was to deconstruct actors' body and text to highlight different aspects of the story.
Deconstruction is always a bit of a dangerous idea. For the most part you're left with handfuls of fragments you're not quite sure what to do with. This was the case for this experiment as well. It's not the pretentious air of intellectualism and pre-programme boasting which offended. I actually salute any effort to reach above banal interpretations, however esoteric and inaccessible they may be. It was the bewildered feeling I was left with afterwards. Anyone who's seen "Being John Malkovitch" will know what I'm talking about, when I say that it was something similar to crawling through a tunnel to get into someone's head, seeing that person's life through their eyes intensely for about an hour, and then being chucked unceremoniously into a dark ditch off a highway to contend with the experience.
This is what happens when you have three Karnas contemplating the one stupendous moment of his death. The multiple characters and juxtapositions worked effectively in that they showed the various facets of son, warrior, and friend. What's less understood is how flashing a beam of light on one part of the body (rather than another) has anything to do with accentuating these different layers in personality. This is the bewildering after-taste that I'm talking about. There seemed to be a lack of connection, or perhaps the right word is clarity, with regard to the spectacle we were watching. It's perfectly all right to feel like you haven't "got" everything you were meant to "get", but it's a different thing entirely if you're not convinced of the director's own sense of "gettability".
The problem with the "Mahabharata Project" was that it was conceived of as an aesthetic piece and, in many ways, it was. It was visually impressive, the physicality of the actors added dimensions to the Space on stage, the verbal smatterings of Sanskrit, Bengali and Hindi, distortions of sound, ominous repetitions of certain phrases like Yudishtara's, "There is no hope for success", all heightened the necessary mood of doom, mystery, and angst. We were made to feel like we were travelling with Karna through the shadowy womb of pre-history, which is perhaps what the moment before death feels like. But as an aesthetic package it lacked one elusive element — chutzpah, or chamatkar, or whatever you want to call it. It lacked moments of transformation, where as a viewer, one ceases to be merely in a state of wonder or amazement, and is actually able to judge when the perception of art has become a serious experience (with or without super-sophisticated set and light design).
In other words, it didn't have soul.
It's a difficult thing to be modern in the field of performing arts in India, because in our context there's no sense of polarity or binary opposition. The past, present and future exist in a continuum, and each cannot be extricated from the other. The phenomenon of modernism doesn't require a blatant rejection of the past, but the hope is that those elements of performance which have lost their effectiveness will slowly be sloughed off, making way for a process which will spawn new modes of thought and action. This is our only bid for dynamism. Zuleikha Chaudhari has attempted this with the "Mahabharata Project", and unabashedly so.
She clearly stated that as a director, she was not interested in the specifics of the Mahabharata; hers was an exploration into the emotional journeys of just one of the characters. For this, she must be applauded. Because we have our inheritance, undoubtedly, but what will we do with it? Being truthful is necessary only in context to what one is trying to communicate. Therefore, it's not necessary for her to be an authority on the text (she was questioned later as though she were a Mastermind candidate). Nor is it necessary for her to be truthful to the text. The text is merely the starting point, and as an artist, the crucial thing is the process that will get us to that vital transformative essence.
If the Other Festival is about celebrating "the other", that which has not remained static, which strives to be dynamic and pull us along the continuity curve, the organizers will do well to ensure that the standard of "otherness" is the kind that will illuminate, not the kind which will make us run with our tails between our legs back to tradition, which at least we know we can do well.
Creating platforms for new talent is imperative, but testing it is equally so. By putting Lee Sibley on stage, the organisers did not only the audience, but also the theatre group of Nissar Allana, a disservice. The audience is not an electricity switchboard to be turned off and on. We would like to see the light please.
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