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PHOTOS: S. THANTHONI

Wonderful visual imagery From “The Absent Lover”

With clever direction, a poetic screenplay, stark and unusual lighting, surround sound and an evocative movement vocabulary, this eclectic mix came together as one glorious whole, albeit with many punctuations. Initially developed at the Centre National de la Danse, Paris, the production boasts an international crew of Bruno Kavanagh (script/adaptation), Delphine Ciavaldini (costume and stage design), LesDickbert (lighting design) and ben Foskett (composer). The production, starring Thresh’s Artistic Director, Preeti Vasudevan, two French dancers, Gilles Chuyen and Celine Pradeu and 17-year-old Bengali Baul singer, Raju Das Baul, was a multi-lingual work.

A French radio station is heard at first with a largely unintelligible conversation followed by a softly intoned song. The pleasant mood is broken with the announcement of bad news — a cyclone. Suddenly, the air is charged with electricity and there is panic. An enraged voice emerges simultaneously, ‘Son of the devil, where have you taken the woman I love?’ Thus begins the journey. As it progressed, one realised that the allusion to Kalidasa’s ‘Vikramorvishyam’ was incidental. The journey, both outward and inward, remained purely symbolic, with occasional reference points provided by the Sutradhara’s lines or the Baul singer’s music. Wonderful visual imagery — in the sets, in the lighting that concentrated on the profile and form, in the silence and in the starkness of the production — was the focal point of this journey.

Gilles as the King and the narrator anchored the production with dexterity as he navigated through the English and French scripts effortlessly. The role of the Sutradhara was a challenging hotchpotch of text introducing ancient Indian legends and some nonsensical jester-like anecdote about Urvashi’s hair being like ‘a cluster of bees from which one escaped and came back at her.’ Having lived in India for some years, his exposure to the gestural language of dance was evident in some descriptive segments like towards the end when he surrenders to God.

The two female dancers, Preeti and Celine, with their wonderfully trained and sculpted bodies, gave an airy feel to the heavy atmosphere. They also doubled as silent stage hands, adding and taking away wooden blocks and rolling and unrolling large reams of cloth that made up the elaborate props. Dressed in stark olive green tunics and double-sided pants with long slits, they personified beauty in simplicity. They were at their most arresting though in a fantastic pink and orange flower costume.

Young Raju with a strong, musical voice and a repertoire of traditional and modern Baul songs added the ‘Indian mystic’ zing to the otherwise international flavour. The pace of the journey, however, sagged towards the end when one felt impatient with bizarre visuals like the swans with pointed breasts. Perhaps metaphors and symbolism can go only thus far and no further. The world premiere of “The Absent Lover” was presented by Prakriti Foundation as a finale to their weeklong ‘Tree of Life’ Festival.

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