love, bonds, freedom, regret, dissatisfaction, bitterness...

Amlan and Debashree - technical rehearsal

Amlan and Debashree had already been talking about the source texts they wanted to respond to for some time before I came into the picture. They had settled on two 3-line poems by Bangla poet Sisir Kumar Das. The first addressed the tensions between duty and love, freedom and bonds. The second – with the idea of unfulfilment. These two poems seemed to resonate together somehow. The connections and contradictions between ideas of love, bonds, freedom, regret, dissatisfaction, bitterness…

We began to ask questions of each other:

-         Is love necessarily freedom? Can it not also be a form of bondage – the bonds of love which begin to suffocate?

-         Who considers what freedom? For a dancer, the act of dance could be an expression of freedom. For a poet, it could be the writing of a poem

-         Could dissatisfaction come out of the fact that one has had to suppress love for reasons of duty?

-         How do all these colour a relationship between two people? Are there individual aspirations which are smothered by the habit of staying together? Does one unknowingly or knowingly quell a yearning for something more in the other?

-         What is the sensibility of dissatisfaction? When does it set in and why? Are there clear cut reasons necessarily? Or does it emerge from a sense that there is something more to experience and reach for, something that present circumstances do not support?

-         Does habit kill love? Can togetherness encourage loneliness? Can finding love actually be a loss?

-         Can love, freedom, release crumble and die? Can movement and music crumble and die? How do the things we value in life – whether we have them or not – fade away?

The improvisations began by looking at just the first line of the first poem as a point of departure. More than two months down the line, it has been unnecessary to go further just as the text itself finds no place in the piece that has been created. It just provides the impulse for the exploration.

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Amlan and Debashree - technical rehearsal

Somehow the white wall in Ranan seemed to pull both the performers towards it. What was it? An obstacle they were trying to vault? A relationship that had grown out of proportion? A challenge? A promise of something better? A magnet pulling them back from desire and aspiration? An expression of a vast, inner emptiness? A neutral stillness? A death?

We played with distance and proximity, stillness and motion, aggression and empathy, tension and release, beauty and ugliness – and the areas where these opposites blur into one another … what is one looking for and what holds one back at each point? Can the tables turn?

Musically a classic Simon and Garfunkel number we had been working on separately seemed tailormade to respond to and layer this quiet, yet crucial, tussle between two people who could just as much be perfect strangers as caught in a long-term relationship.