CULTURE
Satire for our times
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UMA MAHADEVAN DASGUPTA talks to Jonathan Stone about Ralf Ralf's "The Summit", that blends song, dance and invented language.
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IT'S a play. It's a dance. It's "The Summit". A satirical power-drama about two gibberish-speaking politicians at a summit conference. What's funny is that it could be any two politicians representing any two groups, talking about any old bunch of issues at any summit. The moves are the same, the rhythms and the cadences of their speeches and silences, the flag-waving, the table thumping, the verbal pyrotechnics and, finally, the handshaking.
Haven't we seen it all before? And yet how amusing it is to realise that it's what we're all doing, all the time, every day. Negotiating, dialoguing, playing games.
Mumbai's Tata Theatre at the National Centre for the Performing Arts was the first stop in India for the brothers Stone, Barnaby and Jonathan, or "ralf ralf", who were performing this two-decade old satire before their first Indian audience.
"The original idea and method was simple," according to Jonathan Stone. "We would make a piece that was based on our own real dialogues, disagreements, and ways of arguing as brothers and enact it in smart suits, using a playpen of two lecterns, two chairs and a negotiating table, so that our own conflicts paralleled what was happening on a global scale."
And over these 20 years, while negotiations and dialogues have changed the real world around them, "The Summit" has remained popular. "We suddenly found we had a piece that was very relevant, accessible and could be understood whatever language our audience spoke."
Because here were these two men playing that old, familiar game of one-upmanship. When all hand-waving and gobbledygook fails, they turn into animals, grunting and snarling at each other — until that, too, fails, and they return to words, or their gibberish version of them. Why do they call themselves "ralf ralf"? After their father Ralph whose ambition it was to be an actor.
It's all in the family for these two brothers, it seems, who parted ways at first, one to start a family in England while the other went to the United States, but then came back together as this impeccably choreographed partnership.
And "The Summit" seems to give a new meaning to the term sibling rivalry, with one brother leaping gracefully over the table and performing cartwheels on it, while the other can barely get his feet up for a headstand; one begins a nonsensical yodel while the other chimes in reluctantly; and if one begins to beat his fist on the table, the other finds music in it.
Soon they are sitting at the bottom of the table, singing to each other. Ah, the elaborate machinations of contemporary diplomacy!
It is interesting that the piece has remained so popular over the years.
"The central image of two men with opposing views, negotiating, is immediately resonant and readable all over the world," according to Jonathan Stone. "When we invented the languages for the show, we took care that they should be believable as languages, but not sound too similar to existing languages. The piece is not about making fun of particular nationalities or politicians. It is the humour of recognition of attitude and behaviour, not the humour of ridicule."
The performance lasts 70 minutes and uses no recognisable words at all. It consists entirely of non-verbal communication, and yet we know exactly what is going on, and even what they are probably saying at different points of the performance.
Continues Stone: "The style of performance does not rely on knowledge of any particular language. The piece uses invented language, gesture, rhythm and song to tell its story. We have built the piece by stepping outside our own way of arguing and seeing how we can reconstruct it as physical dialogue, without using words.
"For the viewer, it is like watching foreigners having an argument, and, although you do not know what they are arguing about, the audience can read the story from the music of the voices, the body language, their relationship, using their innate knowledge of human behaviour and non-verbal language."
It's a story that we know so well, in the 21st Century.
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