In late 2003 I started work on Ranan’s first dance and theatre experimentation: Crossings, exploring the facets of Lady Macbeth. It was first produced as a workshop production in April 2004 and went through several re-writes and versions before crystallising in December 2007.
These experimentations with classical dance meets text-based theatre continued with the short-lived Nagamandala in 2005 and Chitra in 2007, which had a slightly longer life. The culmination for me, so far as a theatre director, has been Equus – which we produced in April 2009. I personally feel that this production marks a sort of arriving at the beginnings of the form I have been searching for.
But Equus has also brought home to me very strongly how large the divide is between my training and instinctive understanding of dance and choreography and drama. To direct is a whole different ball game, and involves a whole different set of skills which I must develop. In this context, attending the Directors’ Forum at Aberystwyth, The ten-day Forum was a hectic schedule of Plenary, Exlporatory, Laboratory, Discussion, Feedback and Demonstration sessions, starting at 9.30am every day and going till past 10pm every night. Plus, since I was earning my participation rather than paying for it by manning the event blog, my breaks were taken over too! So since that blog is full of really rich material, I’m not going into great detail here. Diverse voices have posted on the blog so here’s the link: http://thedirectorsforum.blogspot.com/
I’m just going to literally enumerate the major sessions I was a part of and touch on the ideas and inspirations that have begun to form in my imagination. This is a beginning – I will keep updating this post with more.
- Exploratory Session with Julian Maynard Smith of Station House
Station House Opera is known for their lavish productions using different sites and materials to construct their performances. However, Julian – who always has his tongue firmly in his cheek – at this Forum, was exploring the idea of living life backwards. The brief session I experienced with him made forays into constructing small segments of the simplest actions, running them forwards and then backwards, adding another segment, running both forwards and then both backwards… and building more and more. Suddenly, since there were about a dozen people in the room, the importance of time and timing became paramount. How time can deceive when we rewind! Impromptu tableaux form as we construct segments, but while any number of segments added on have the potential to create the most interesting set of interactions and scenes between various people – as soon as one tries to run even three or four sequences in reverse (without counting time aloud) time, and therefore space and spatial arrangement go for a toss. Suddenly we were treading on each others toes, bumping into a person who had not been there when we had run it forwards… The centrality of listening to each other in performance, and being able to work on a common understanding of time and space: this is something that was a common thread through most of the sessions I was part of during those ten days.
More specific to this session on http://thedirectorsforum.blogspot.com/2010/04/exploratory-session-with-julian-maynard.html
To be continued:
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