EXPLORING UNRELATED TEXTS - 7 May 2011

technical rehearsal - Anubha, Jayati

• Four text excerpts from three wholly unrelated and vastly different sources: Dreaming, a play by Peter Barnes; How to Cut a Pomegranate, a poem by Imtiaz Dharker; and Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, a novel by Tariq Ali.
• Four performers: two actresses (Anubha Fatehpuria and Dana Roy), one dancer (Sohini Debnath) and one actress and trainee dancer (Jayati Chakraborty).
• Music impulses from a Turkish album, Jeff Buckley’s ‘Lilac Wine’ and an unusual theka of the 15 matra Pancham Sawari taal often performed in Kathak
• A 7 year old email from Imtiaz Dharker touching on the associations of the pomegranate especially for someone from an Islamic background

These were – or rather became – the impulses for one of the pieces in Dreamed, the piece which has developed to become the fulcrum of the whole performance, a piece which talks about memories real and imagined, about times and opportunities gone by, about loss, about bittersweet regret, and about future hope that springs from the debris of lives half lived. 

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The first text we started working on purely as an actor’s exercise with Sameera Iyengar in December 2010 was the Dreaming excerpt. The Imtiaz Dharker poem – a text that has been on the backburner for some time (for a future duet production between Anubha and me) – wormed its way in sometime in February, pulling the Tariq Ali excerpts along in its wake. The choice of performers seemed natural – why, I have no idea. And the Turkish music impulse too.

technical rehearsal - Sohini

A gut feeling brought these texts together, but finding some sort of performative logic to pull them together as a cohesive piece eluded us for a long time. A series of improvisations threw up some possibilities but many more dead-ends. The texts were instinctively deconstructed as impromptu conversations, responding to a line from any one with a line from another; different narrative scenarios emerged – a niece longing to get away from the responsibility of looking after an aging aunt, a daughter’s life thrown off balance by her father’s decision to become a monk, an aunt’s lifelong physical disability … all potentially strong cores, but all seemed in some way to leave the texts behind and go off on their own tracks after a point. What did the text excerpts themselves offer, why had I brought them together, what was the hidden connecting thread that I was responding to when I chose them?

technical rehearsal - Anubha

The memory … or the promise … or the yearning … for a pomegranate grove in a garden now decayed … or in a garden one had perhaps never seen … And the pomegranate grove itself as a symbol of – to quote the email from Imtiaz Dharker – “paradise … fragility, resilient humanity … childlike longing to hold on to the ephemeral”. This seemed to be the thread that pulled all these texts together and pointed the way to the choice of music (both the rehearsal track of Turkish music, the sensibility of ‘Lilac Wine’ and the violin as instrument of choice to accompany the piece as it stands now – plaintive, a cry from the heart). The particular Pancham Sawari theka that is recited also has sudden peaks and troughs in its graph sometimes springing up in hope and joy, and sometimes descending into despair and melancholy. 

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With the ‘mythical’ and ‘symbolic’ pomegranate grove as our point of focus the relationships and tensions between and within the texts flowered gradually and beautifully in many different directions, and actually touched on all the narratives we had come up with before giving us possibilities of nuances which the straight narratives themselves would probably not have allowed. The piece now has hints of many different stories, lives and relationships tied to this unreachable / remembered / imagined pomegranate grove and segues smoothly into other sections of Dreamed which deal with the tensions between desires and obstacles in very different ways.

THE TEXTS

from Dreaming (a play by Peter Barnes)

I dreamed I was in a great hall with men and women playing dice on the floor, and a grey cat following me everywhere. I looked down a long corridor and saw a figure in a black monk’s caul at the far end. I was frightened but I walked down the corridor and grasped his wrists.  But he faded away and I cried, ‘Mother, Mother!’ The corridor became longer and the monk appeared again at the end of it, and I was frightened again, and grasped his wrists again and so on and on again and again… I don’t know what’s happening to me. Yet I used to climb apple trees and chase badgers. Now I’m carried along, cork in a stream when I just want to stand and grow.

from Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (a novel by Tariq Ali)

Excerpt 1

I used to dream about this courtyard every month. Remember the shadows of the pomegranate tree during the full moon? Remember what we used to say? If the moon is with us, what need do we have for the stars?

The pomegranate grove. When you lie flat on the ground does it still feel as if one is underneath a tent of pomegranates with a round window at the top? And when you open your eyes and look through it, do the stars still dance in the sky?

I do not know, Great Aunt. I did not have the opportunity to lie down.

Excerpt 2

I have been waiting for you a long time. You are going to come soon. Why not now? I cannot bear the agony of waiting much longer.

“Aunt Zahra! Aunt Zahra! Can I get you something?”

“I am dying.”

“You’re not dying, Aunt Zahra. Your feet are as warm as burning embers. Whoever heard of anyone dying with warm feet?”

“What a child you are, Zubayda. Have you never heard of the poor innocents who are being burnt at the stake?”

“Not yet, Aunt Zahra. Do not leave us so soon.”

from How to Cut a Pomegranate (a poem by Imtiaz Dharker)

'Never', said my father,

'Never cut a pomegranate

through the heart. It will weep blood.

Treat it delicately, with respect.

Just slit the upper skin across four quarters.

This is a magic fruit,

so when you split it open, be prepared

for the jewels of the world to tumble out,

more precious than garnets,

more lustrous than rubies,

lit as if from inside.

Each jewel contains a living seed.

Separate one crystal.

Hold it up to catch the light.

Inside is a whole universe.

No common jewel can give you this.'

Afterwards, I tried to make necklaces

of pomegranate seeds.

The juice spurted out, bright crimson,

and stained my fingers, then my mouth.

I didn't mind. The juice tasted of gardens

I had never seen, voluptuous

with myrtle, lemon, jasmine,

and alive with parrots' wings

The pomegranate made me feel

that somewhere, I had another home.

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