From Ranan

Questions from within

2012-01-21T20:24:00.001+05:30

Debashree Bhattacharya

I attended four sessions of the workshop with the intention to observe and learn, and use my experience in my career as a dancer, teacher and choreographer. Little did I realise that it would go much deeper and shake me from the roots of my being.

I learnt quite a few things after observing and performing the ‘Bamboo exercise’, ‘the Chorus’ and ‘Drowning piece’, that Douglas had made us do during the workshop. All these exercises provided me with reference points for the future.

Pic: Emma Cameron

Bamboo Exercise

energy flow, energy transformation, patterns, designs, exploring levels, awareness, connection, concentration

Chorus

togetherness, connection, alertness, presence of mind, focus, awareness

Drowning Piece

stillness, surrender, peaceful, flow, balance

The above exercises were really a learning experience for me.

Kaikhali – on the banks of the river Matla, 21 December, 9.30pm

the Matla river at Kaikhali (Pic: Shataf Figar)

A star-studded sky. Pitch Dark. Sounds of lapping water. SILENCE. It was an eerie, uncanny silence. Felt both peaceful and uneasy at the same time. Can’t explain why. In this context, I would like to mention about the Chorus piece that was created on 29 December. I was unable to hold back my tears that day. Moments from the lives of the people of Sundarbans, each wrapped up in a situation – their sorrows, their joys, their SIMPLICITY, their immense wealth and dire poverty, their innocence and experiences, their regrets and their celebration – all found expression through chorus. And never in my life have I ever thought that ’12 beats’ could become so monotonous as well as eerie and uneasy. Suddenly I was hit by many questions from within.

What’s my role as an artist? My responsibility? Am I committed only to my dance form, a tradition hundreds of years old? What’s the larger picture of which my dance is only a small part?

What’s the truth? About my art? About myself? Where do I search to find myself?

(If I am sounding like a philosopher, I am sorry, but it came straight from my heart.)

Pic: Shataf Figar

In the monotony of 12 beats, Anubha had screamed ‘Bachao’. Save me. Us? From whom? From myself? Who is the protector and who the survivor? Where do I place myself?

HOW SHOULD I SAVE MYSELF FROM WHAT I HAVE BECOME?

‘Bachao’ still echoes in my ears and my heart.

That is what learning is

2012-01-18T15:13:00.001+05:30

Debosmita Roychowdhury

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life but in a NEW WAY” …….

Yes, definitely this workshop had been a great learning experience for me. The 2 week long workshop with Transport team made me think about the vastness about theatre, dance….. Actually about the ART...rather I should say the inter connection between different fields of ARTs.

We‘ve done some exercises which were about concentration, awareness, group work etc. All of those were too good but I personally like “chorus”, “impulse” and “force”.

We were given different subjects to research on and the researches revealed many unknown facts.

Really a lot of thanks to Douglas and his team for giving us such a great opportunity to work with TRANSPORT.

Refinement...

2011-12-26T23:48:00.001+05:30

- by Shataf Figar

Photo: Emma Cameron

The workshop with Douglas so far has helped me refine my performance as an actor. Each day I wish for the clock to travel to 4pm as fast as possible so that we can start our workshop. I am like a little kid waiting with my bags packed to enter a space that focuses on the word refinement. Refinement of the skills that we possess.

The last week focused a lot on coordination, movements, space, energy, relationship with the other performers on stage, being aware of each other, what you say, what you do and how you move. And of course the 2 day trip to Nimpith and Kaikhali in the Sundarbans. It was all about Exploration. Exploring the space internally and externally.

Some of the exercises that have really been helpful and have stayed with me are the Bamboo exercise, 3rd force exercises, Impulse exercise, Chorus exercise and the rhythm and movement exercises.

Photo: Emma Cameron

The Bamboo exercise helped me in creating patterns and movements with my body that I had never imagined I could. Responding to each other’s energy in the right measure so that the stick could balance and at the same time being aware of what everybody is doing. Giving and receiving the exact amount of energy. Leading and being led. We started this exercise in groups of 4 and then broke it down to pairs. Once in pairs after a few minutes the bamboo stick was removed and we had to imagine the stick still there and maintain the fluidity of movements. Then the distance between the pair was divided into half. The focus was on receiving and giving of energy, fluidity of movements and creating interesting structures. Vikram's addition of the text of "All you who sleep tonight" made the movement much more interesting and gave us a lot to play with.

Photo: Emma Cameron

The impulse exercise displayed some really fluid movements. The idea was of how movements would happen when the body is suspended in water or the sea. A lifeless body. Anubha was brilliant at this exercise and her moves were telling a story by itself. A wonderful sight that shall remain with me. Connecting with each and every part of the body and letting it flow by the forces of the current.

Photo: Emma Cameron

The chorus exercise created some fun and entertainment for the audience. In a group we had to follow what the leader did. And every time we turned sides the leader would change. Some really interesting sightings were made by our audience. It also showed how easy is it to break away from the performance of a group. When this happens it is clearly visible that there is a disconnect between performers on stage. We were asked to perform on simple topics like life in the Sundarbans, life in Kolkata and life in Bollywood. This has been recorded by Vikram and I am waiting to see what fools we made of ourselves.

Can't wait for this week to begin. Waiting for it to be 4pm so that my packed bag and I can enter the space that I loved the most.

[Read more about the India phase of The Edge project]

Horizon

2011-12-25T10:58:00.002+05:30

- Dana Roy

Re-reading the post Shut up and Listen, it strikes me that I have not at all been able to capture how one’s senses seem to reach out into the world. Just as your eyes find the horizon when you are out in the open, just as the moonlight lights up all of that great distance into the beyond, just as you look into the horizon and somehow you are present there at the far end of where your eyes take you, so too you discover a horizon of sound.

Photo: Shataf Figar

Let me try and explain better. If you stop, shut your eyes and listen in a place like the Sundarbans, your ears first take in the sounds closest to you, waves, fiddler crabs, mudskippers then your sense of hearing seems to expand till you hear things maybe five feet away, a bird perhaps, or a frog, then it expands further to take in more that surrounds you, adding to the symphony. You ears steadily seem to take you further and further away from the place you are standing. There is no measurable way to know how far you have heard, and sounds do get fainter and fainter till you can just about make out that that is as far as you can hear. How far your horizon of sound is, will never truly be known, not in the terms with which you can measure a horizon of sight. It is also a horizon that you will never experience in a piece of music no matter how complex, because it does not exist, the instruments are finite and there is nothing beyond.

How far can your ears take you? I am reminded of a discussion during our workshops about what it feels like to be underwater, and the quality of sound under water. I remember floating in the sea just off Pattaya, listening under water. The sounds are alien, unidentifiable because of the lack of language to express them, yet they are distinct even through the quality that water gives them. Sound travels further in water. How far does it take you? How far away in the ocean is what you hear? One thinks of the great whales that communicate to each other over enormous distances. The connectivity and connectedness of it. I wonder about the bamboo game. And the connectedness of it. How each actor is connected to every other actor in the space, through nothing but bamboo sticks held between them by the tip of one finger on each hand.

When you remember the kinds of listening you experience in the natural places of the world you know that the world is connected. It is the same quality of listening that is required of you in the bamboo game. It is as if the Earth has been playing that game for millions of years and has become so good at it, so adept that the patterns are organic and complex. Actually it is the other way around, we attempt in the bamboo game to replicate the organic quality of the living Earth.

Photo: Shataf Figar

And I wonder what happens if an outside impulse is introduced. So if the world is so connected what happens if humanity provides a push from the outside. How does the world adjust? What happens when there are more external pushes. How long does it take to break the connectedness? How long before a bamboo falls?

Photo: Shataf Figar

Or is it that the Earth adjusts. Millions of years of connection, each organism connected to another, each wave connected with another, cannot just be broken, but the ripples of an outside impulse are seen coursing through the connections. How do we plug in again to this constant communication, how do we shut up and listen? How do we connect, spiritually, personally, collectively, consciously? And it will need a disciplined consciousness, because currently we are shouting so loudly that there is not a chance of listening.

In the bamboo game when you are listening and connected, it is not hard to know what you have to do. It is not a revolutionary change that you bring about in others, or yourself, it’s but a slight shift of gears, not even that. It is subtler than that. It is a listening, through your ears, neck, back, a listening through your body. How do we do find that quality of listening in our relationship with the Earth? What new horizon will be opened up to us then?

[read more on The Edge project]

Sundarbans - where truly nothing is waiting yet it awaits

2011-12-24T11:31:00.008+05:30

- by Anubha Fatehpuria

Sundarbans

- what exists there and what exists no more, only a sense captured,

through my lenses

- a being there, settling..unsettling, seized and held within, through my senses

(a bit of Sundarbans - where truly nothing is waiting yet it awaits.

- and a poem by Pablo Neruda)

You will remember that leaping stream

where sweet aromas rose and trembled,

and sometimes a bird, wearing water

and slowness, its winter feathers.

You will remember those gifts from the earth:

indelible scents, gold clay,

weeds in the thicket and crazy roots,

magical thorns like swords.

You'll remember the bouquet you picked,

shadows and silent water,

bouquet like a foam-covered stone.

That time was like never, and like always.

So we go there, where nothing is waiting;

we find everything waiting there.

Some thoughts...

2011-12-24T00:02:00.006+05:30

Doug - Day 1

2011-12-23T23:47:00.003+05:30

- by Shataf Figar

Today was the first day of the much awaited 2 week long workshop with Douglas. The day started with some text reading. We picked up a text from The Hungry Tide. Took the first line from it and worked on it with a new technique. "in our legends it is said that a goddess's descent from the heavens would have split the earth had the lord not tamed her torrents by tying it to his ash smeared locks". We looked at each word in isolation and then built an action for each word. Once this was done we spent time individually working on identifying the action to the word one by one. Then we got into a circle and read the text out with their respective actions one at a time. We then gave the lines more fluidity by going all the way. The objective was to let each come alive and live in the present moment. Not assuming what the next words coming up were. We were told not to attach our feeling but to look at it the way the author of the text wrote it. The muscular movement in the brain, face and gestures were to be recorded and then collectively put together for the final reading. The connectedness with each word was also very important. THEN WE ASKED THE QUESTION WHY? WHY DO I WANT TO SAY THIs?

The next exercise was a focus and connectedness game. Using the name, ball and touch. The smoothness of the game was focused upon. Being connected to everyone on stage and a smooth progression was highlighted. We formed a circle and created a pattern of flow with names. Once this pattern was created we passed the ball around to form another link. We played with these two in togetherness. Once this pattern was successfully taking shape we were asked to form another pattern or link by touching people on their shoulder and taking their place while the other person went and touched another person. Finally we put all these three different pattern together and tried to achieve smoothness while performing this exercise. What we speak, what we do and how we react.

Then we played GO, which was all about keeping the rhythm in place. One person in the center with the ball starts passing it to other people creating a rhythm. Once this process is on any other member could say Go to the person in the center and he would have to move away letting the person who said go to take centre stage while continuing the rhythm. The idea was to maintain the rhythm on stage and not disrupt it. Any wrong move or any change in rhythm will disrupt the others presence on stage.

Next was the chair exercise: 8 chairs and 7 people. The person who was walking had to be stopped from sitting on that one empty chair. All connected to the right movements and staying connected with the actors on stage.

Finally the day ended with some movement exercise with focus on breathing and connection of the breath to the movement. Lessen it and build it up. It was to first to be able to connect to the music and then allow the breath to connect to the music. And make the movement small and large. This was a challenge for me as I had taken the wrong start by sitting on the floor. It was the most exhaustive exercise and it left us sweating and warmed us up on the cold winter evening.

Echoes!

2011-12-23T11:59:00.004+05:30

by Ruchira Das

floating down the Chituri forest

We were going down the river on the boat, when suddenly from the forest nearby we heard something which sounded like the cacaphony of birds - when they come back to their nests in the evening - but this was broad daylight ! - could it be monkeys chattering then? but there wasn't even one to be seen!

Later we realised it's only the echo of the boat's motor from the forest- that marvel of nature had taken that mechanical drone and turned it into a natural sound of its own!

[read more on the India phase of The Edge project]

First days...

2011-12-19T23:29:00.002+05:30

-Lav Kanoi

On Friday 16^th December, we’d had our first formal session with Douglas, Vicky, Emma et al. of Transport Theatre UK.

The Friday session did not start the ‘workshop’ proper; some of us who unhappily did not go to the Sundarbans were brought up to speed. We were also introduced to Transport Theatre’s and Douglas’ work. Each of the three productions that Douglas spoke of were topical and quite specific – ranging from shifting identities and dislocation in 20^th c. Europe, to the US war on Iraq and affected minority issues; although these narratives approached a more encompassing human experience from what I could gather from the all too small previews (and verbal descriptions) of the productions. This feeling may have been, of course, an effect of the way the stories were told and presented to us; and we were reminded that theatre is essentially storytelling, perhaps essential storytelling.

Vikram took over to describe the latest leg of this project’s journey and began with the recent visit to the Sundarbans. Dr. Sugata Hazra of the JU School of Oceanographic Studies who answered some specific and difficult questions on the nature of climate change, as well as Sarmistha Dutta Gupta of Ebong Alap who has worked greatly with the people of the Sundarbans, together contributed much to the discussion and the exchange of knowledge. We spoke at length of the living conditions in the Sundarbans; about the degree of uncertainty that these villagers have to live with; the place of education in their immediate lives; and, among other things, how some have dared, with great success, to challenge the river and keep the earth under their feet.

---

Today, 18^th December, Sunday, we worked for about eight hours beginning with the fruits of an exercise that was done in a repertory session a month ago. This exercise had involved an individual’s response to an impulse-word: home (ghar), making & breaking (bhanga-gora) flow(srot) river (nadi), edge (kinara), etc. There were some very thought-provoking even metaphysical speculations on the human condition.

Next we read a passage, a sentence really, from Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. It was a tedious exercise, but very enjoyable. The exercise involved speaking every word, and finding a gesture to use with each word. Then we were made to speak the whole sentence, with the gestures, slowly and deliberately. In the final stage, we discarded the gesture and spoke the text flowingly. The difference in performance was tangible.

This exercise intended to make sure that we operate in the present. Generally, when we speak, we do not have a full exact idea of what we are going to say, or how we will say it. This is not the case with memorised text, of course. And it is unnecessary to emphasise how important the illusion of immediacy is to theatrical practice. Douglas also insisted that whenever we speak, we speak to bring about a change – in the auditor, in our selves, in the environment, whatever, some change. I wouldn’t agree with him in a general way, but within the space of performance it is an acceptable thesis. In so far as one may agree with this, the language of theatre is poetry: intense, rich, and powerful. Needless to say, of course, but one doesn’t speak only with words.

The next step was a listening session. We did not hear music, but audio-recordings of people held in detention centres in the UK. Those who seek refuge or asylum in the UK are held in these detention centres while their applications for asylum are reviewed. This isn’t the place to comment on the (in)justice of such an arrangement, but these refugees do come from frightening circumstances, and have tales that make us shiver. We went pale after we heard what these refugees were seeking refuge from. The point to this was to make us appreciate how the narration of experienced trauma is more often than not dispassionate and impersonal – at least on the surface. Actors, however, tend to over-dramatise emotion, something that we were warned against.

Taking a cue from this, Vikram asked those who had gone to the Sundarbans to recall a story, an incident, or a moment that had touched heart, something that one may have taken away from the visit to the delta.

The next bit involved physical activity. We played three games that promoted one’s awareness of others, of the space; one had to be alert. The first game was called Go!. Here a person in the centre of a human circle throws a ball at any one person on the circumference , and continues this until another player cries ‘Go!’ and replaces this person at the centre. The entire team of players has to make sure that the rhythm of the throwing is unbroken and unchanged. The game gets progressively snappier as the person in the centre is almost immediately replaced over and over again, but all in rhythm!

The second game was very complex, sort of like music. Everyone stands in a circle; the first stage involved throwing the ball generously to somebody else on the ring. The ball must go to every single person on the ring without ever going to the same person twice in the same cycle. Once a pattern of throws-ats was set, the second stage was introduced. The ball was temporarily out of the picture as people were asked to call out the name of any one person on the ring, who would call out another person’s name and so on until every person’s name was called out (but only once in a cycle). This name-calling followed a different path. The third part to the game involved a person walking across the circle and tapping another person who would then walk across and tap a third person, and so on until every person in the ring is tapped (but only once in a cycle). The game became really interesting when all these three parts were to be done simultaneously, keeping to rhythm as far as possible. Slowly the tempo of the game was increased. This game had similar purposes to the last one.

The last game was sort of like reverse-musical chairs. I will not give another description of how the game was played – if someone is interested, we can get together a group to play it; there’s no better way to know it. Suffice to say that this too involved alertness, awareness, quickness, and intelligence!

Finally, the last exercise today was led by Vikram: it was a movement exercise, with music for impulse and support; it involved group consciousness and collaboration as a chosen action was repeated ad infinitum but with variation depending on impulses from a co-actor’s actions. I know this is a little unclear – but it is late, and I am tired.

We have ten more days of promising work ahead of us. You will have more reports to read!

[read more on the India phase of The Edge project]

BURIRDABRI: Sunday, 11 December 2011

2011-12-19T12:46:00.004+05:30

- Vikram Iyengar

I am sitting in the prow of a small launch in the Sundarbans. It is 2.30pm and we have just about ten minutes ago turned into a wide river – which I think is the Jhilla – from the Burirdabri Khal. The waters are falling. The tide is receding revealing more and more of the land they submerge, more and more of the contours of the narrow creeks they flood, more and more of the network of mangrove roots that hold up the trees in a tangled and interconnected mesh of precarious support. The waters are calmer now, with gentle ripples – the strongest being the waves our launch kicks back as it glides sedately forward. The surface reflects floating impressions of what lines the banks – a myriad shades of green and brown that will defy the colour palette of the most inventive painter. And as one moves away from the bank in this vast expanse of water that is only one of the many rivers that we have experienced since yesterday, it reflects the blue-grey milkiness of the sky – a depth below reflecting a depth above. To my left the sun has begun its journey into the earth, and the waters there shine silver as they catch the light, play with it, throw it up momently in little celebratory crests of gold and subside once again, seemingly at peace. Yes, the tide is receding, but as the sun warms my left shoulder I remember this morning when it was engaged in conflict with the thick fog that swirled up from the rising waters, only managing to imbue the mists with a greyness of intangibility. The air was damp, the stiff breeze had a chilly bite to it, and the sun only appeared as a suffocated pale disc, looking more like the moon than its powerful self. But in moments when the fog let down its guard and a bundle of rays managed to get through, the waters shone like burnished gold, delighted in the promise of a warmth to come. It was all magical then, it is all magical now.

As I sit here enveloped in this world all around me – the river stretching out before my eyes, a dense green bank to my right, a long, low shadow of a bank far to my left broken unevenly by the silhouettes of treetops, and the blue cloudless sky above turning into a blinding white where the sun is – I feel alone, but not lonely. I feel a oneness. I feel I belong, I feel an acceptance by this place which moves and humbles me. And more than anything I feel my smallness, but do not feel slighted by that. I feel the generosity of this landscape but can only imagine its power. I feel grateful, I feel Grace, I feel peace, I feel Majesty. I feel everyone I love and have loved and lost around me, I feel them with and within me in this place, space and moment. Amazingly, I do not feel their absence. It’s as if this – where I am and what is being given to me with quiet, sombre dignity – is a burden too beautiful and precious for me to bear on my own. They are in this landscape, in this suspended moment that extends into eternity – helping me experience it, helping me articulate it, helping me remember it, and remember them.

I am in the midst of a gift truly offered, truly given – a pureness that knows no motive other than making the planet I call my home a more beautiful, a more awe-inspiring place. People look and pray for miracles all the time. Here is one, and we don’t see it.

[read more on the India phase of The Edge project]

Shut up and Listen

2011-12-19T12:38:00.002+05:30

Shut up and Listen

Everywhere you go in the Sundarbans you meet loud tourists shouting at the top of their voices to each other “Eikhaney kichu nei, there is nothing here’. Looking out of the enclosed walkway meant for tourists at the mangroves and the mud they are convinced there is nothing out there worth any attention. Thankfully they leave quickly. The trick that this place teaches you over and over again is to stop filling the space with you and then, ah, and then the Sundarbans offers a feast for the senses.

Take a walk at night with a torch and all you can see are the two steps in front of you lit by torch light. But switch the torch off and suddenly, amazingly you can see clearly right till the horizon lit by the brilliance of the full moon.

Talk, night or day, and all you can hear is yourself and the person next to you. But stop talking and the sound of the waves leap up at you louder than anything before. Listen, and it is not just the waves; you are immediately struck by the depth, density and intensity of sound that you were not even aware of a second ago, such pitches, tones, clicks and rhythms. The deep underlying steady hum of the insects, above that the lower tones of the waves, each wavelet finishing with a gentle high tabla tap, persistent and rhythmic. Over that the plopping of the mudskippers and the staccato clicking of the crabs at your feet. Then both a high pitched and low pitched wind that rustles through the leaves. Above that the myriad calls of birds each with their own musical time, unpredictable like improvised jazz but still the perfect counterpoint to the steadiness below it. And somehow, caught in the center of it all, the peace, that only a rest could bring in the middle of a musical score. Caught in the center of all those tones is silence.

There can be no doubt in such an intricate orchestra of sound that the Sundarbans are full of life. Listening to all that life it is incredible to believe anyone could think “eikhaney kichu nei”. All anyone needs to do is shut up and listen.

[read more on the India phase of The Edge project]

Some Verses

2011-12-17T20:37:00.003+05:30

Some verses...

- Amlan Chaudhuri

Be(n)dhechhe Eman-o ghar

ShuNyer upar po(n)jtaa ka're ....

Dhanya dhanya ba'li tare!

[ What a house He has built in thin air!

But how firmly founded!

Bravo, bravo to him!]

Lalon Shah phokir.

O re, noukaar upar Ganga Bojhaai ..............................................

[ It's a scary game to watch:

A boat loaded with a river, sails on dry land.

The river's name is the Water of Life.

You can find it in the microcosm.

In a wink of an eye it overflows its banks,

In a wink it dries up, too!]

the title song from Ritwik Ghatak's " The River Called Titas"

[read more on the India phase of The Edge project]

Sundarbans Moon Journal

2011-12-17T20:20:00.003+05:30

Sundarbans Moon Journal - December 2011

- Dana Roy

(timings are approximates since I was looking at more fascinating things than my watch)

10th December

5ish in the evening: Travelling from Bali Island in a launch we see the red moon before the approaching lunar eclipse. There in that half light on the river I wonder for a second if that red full moon is the disk of the sun. Slow logic tells me it isn’t, the sun had already set leaving long red fingers of twilight across the sky and the low hanging red moon

Song in head: Jersey Thursday

“night brought on it’s purple cloak of velvet to the sky, and the gulls were wheeling spinning…”

5:30 pm : Later at Aponjon Hotel it looks slightly less red but very much like a disk of cheese with a warm coloured orange light cast on it. It is slightly higher in the sky. It seems to have developed a five o’clock shadow in one corner of its chin, but it’s so slow that we doubt if the eclipse has actually begun. Funny thing, I can’t actually see many stars, just the evening star right above us.

6pm: It definitely is the eclipse. There is a chunk of the moon missing from the sky. We watch the eclipse, watch the earth’s slow progress across the sky. I think of this silent unstoppable coordinated dance between three giant moving bodies. A dance only fathomable to us by the shadow the earth casts on the moon, by the shadow we cast on the moon. A brief but measurable sense of our cosmic journey. I feel awe.

7 pm: Now it resembles a clove of garlic.

Song in head: “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie…” clearly awe has left us and we are being a little silly.

What is this obsession with the moon and food? - Cheese, garlic, pizza

8:10 pm: It looks like a thumbnail clipping – at least that is not food.

8:20 pm: If I looked at the sky now for the first time that night without knowing anything about celestial occurrences, I would have instantly thought something had ripped a bright little slit through an inky black blanket that covered the sky. No stars are visible. There is just a rip, a sliver of Heaven glowing through an otherwise impenetrable black. You can easily see how omens and predictions could come about. In the city watching an eclipse, such a thought seems silly, but out in the Sundarbans there is no escaping the leap in your heart when you look up and see something undoubtedly wrong with the sky.

8:30pm: The total eclipse. The part of the moon that had been disappearing into shadow suddenly can be made out, lit only by the corona as the earth completely eclipses the sun from the moon’s point of view. Curiously, the moon does not disappear from the sky like you are led to expect. It gets swallowed by the shadow and when that shadow is fully cast, the moon looks like a very pale imitation of itself. It still is faintly red and oddly, stops looking like a two dimensional disk and looks more spherical, more three dimensional, with a faint shading around the edges that show a depth distinct to a sphere.

9:20 pm After dinner, we looked up to see the moon had emerged quite a bit, cleaner and whiter than I ever remember seeing it before, like it just underwent some ritualistic purification. Certainly it was startling after having grown used to it’s redness all evening. I’m reminded of the Chinese dragon that is said to swallow the moon, or was that a serpent. No, perhaps the serpent is Indian and the dragon is Chinese

11^th December

7:45 am: The moon appears again this morning, high-ish in the sky. We are on the river, on a launch wending our way through thick morning fog. I am watching through a window below deck. In the milky whiteness, my mind plays tricks on me again, I think the white disk is the sun struggling to shine through a thick white curtain. Then the boat turns and the real sun reveals itself, perfectly spherical with a soft incandescent glow that you see through the haze that surrounds it. There is no chance of mistaking it for the moon.

Song in head: CSNY’s Cathedral. Not for the lyric as a whole but for the tune/ movement of music and I suppose random bits of lyric that my unconscious throws at me that seem to fit. The song just mirrors in a different context the emotional responses of the present moment.

After dinner: Rhea and I talk about stories of the Lady in the Moon. The moon looks exactly like it should on the Chinese Full Moon festival. I tell her the Chinese story of the princess of the Heavens trapped on the moon by her father for falling in love with a shepherd on earth, and how the cranes take pity on them one night in the year (the day of the Moon Harvest Festival) and form a walkway across the sky between the earth and the moon with their wings so the lovers can meet for one night.

The Bengalis and Chinese both have a Lady that lives on the Moon, the Romans and Greeks have Diana and Selene of the Moon. It is only the west that seems to talk about the Man in the Moon, some guy whose hair was made of spaghetti according to a kid’s nursery rhyme that flits across my mind. The song is unapologetically thrown out of my head.

12^th December

After dinner: We walk along the embankment at night, having switched off our torch. The moon is full, bright and brilliant and lights up the whole landscape. Doug suddenly sings 3 notes of “Moonshadow” pointing out our shadows cast by the moon. Have I ever seen my own moonshadow before? The rest of the song plays in my head as we walk back to Help Tourism. I’ve always loved the song but confronted with my own moonshadow it doesn’t seem to make any sense, even just the music of it doesn’t work in the moment. Must find out what was meant when it was written.

[read more on the India phase of The Edge project]

The Sundarbans trip: Bali, Pakhiraloy and Burirdabri (10 to 12 December 2011)

2011-12-17T00:14:00.004+05:30

The Sundarbans trip: Bali, Pakhiraloy and Burirdabri (10 to 12 December 2011)

- Vikram Iyengar

We set off at 6.30am for Gadkhali via Basanti – three cars meeting at Science City before two Sumos veered off left. Thick fog you could cut with a knife enveloped us, barely letting us see the road before us and only occasionally revealing the surroundings – ponds dotted with pink and white lotuses, houses which moved from concrete into mud constructions, and sudden busy wholesale markets of vegetables and fish. Breakfasted on the local petai paratha at Basanti and finally arrived into Gadkhali at about 10.30am – about an hour late thanks to the fog.

We were to spend the day on Bali island visiting schools and villagers with Shri Sukumar Paira, headmaster of Bijoynagar Adarsha Bidya Mandir, who has made Bali his home for the last 33 years. His work has gone far beyond education, involving students, their parents and the larger community in areas and issues of conservation awareness and action, sustainable and alternative livelihoods which are eco-friendly, disaster relief work and much more. The school itself is an example of a holistic education including arts, sports (local games too), work education and nature education as part of the curriculum. From being an island with no schools at all in 1970, Bali now has about 24 schools spanning primary and secondary levels and a respect for education among both parents and children – both boys and girls. Shri Paira did not start the school: he was asked to come in for some time (three months between his BA and MA) by the gentleman who envisioned the school. Those 3 months have now become 33 years.

Our time at Bali was divided between the primary school in an Adivasi area and the main secondary school – Bijoynagar Adarsha Bidyamandir. At the first stop we met some villagers from the community including a 98-year old farmer, some children who were studying there while their parents worked elsewhere, and the teacher in charge. Conversations ranged from the current condition of agriculture in Bali especially post the Aila cyclone of May 2009 to education and aspirations and much more. The second experience included a long conversation with Shri Sukumar Paira himself touching on a host of experiences and observations, meetings with some students talking about the school Nature Club and their aspirations for the future, conversations with some farmers, and a visit to the newly inaugurated Girls’ Hostel. We then left for out two-night stay at Aponjon, Pakhiralay.

It is impossible to detail out the varied and rich nature of the experiences in a blog piece – and indeed, it would do no justice. Bare facts are one thing, a human experience and engagement is quite another. This evening – 24 hours later – the ten of us sat around and talked about any one thing that we took away from the two days we have spent here – today being a day-long launch trip into the astonishing Sundarbans forests to and from the Burirdabri watchtower which is on the border river of Raimangal, looking across the wide swathe of water at the Khulna district of Bangladesh .

A heavily paraphrased illustration of what and how ten very different individuals remembered and were affected over both these days is perhaps a better evocation of this incredible experience.

Dana

(Ranan repertory member, actress and production person, freelance work with children in various schools through music and drama)

“In a conversation I was having with Jo on the launch today, we both thought we would love to visit and stay in one of the villages we were passing – only she was thinking for a week and I was thinking for 24 hours. What am I scared of? Perhaps scared is not the word. I’m not bothered about amenities or the lack of them. But what would I be doing for a week? The complete lack of knowledge about that. I’ve spent time in rural areas with school, but there is a whole gaggle of girls there! What is the experience of just me and the village – that’s both scary and exciting.”

Emma

(Producer with Transport Theatre, Stage Manager)

“What really struck me was the huge community that I encountered as I got off the boat at Bali. I don’t know what I was expecting but it wasn’t that. They were all with us when the boat came in, all with us in the beautiful schoolroom, and all with us when we left again. They were together with us the whole time. I felt very supported even though I couldn’t communicate with them directly. I was struck by the generosity of the sharing.”

Jayati

(Ranan repertory and core group member and Administrator, actress and dancer, works in Insurance Sales)

“My day-job involves selling insurance for a company. Gosaba is one of the branch offices under me, and when I went to Bali with my agent, I was also interested in how I could develop business here.

In the classroom at the Secondary School when we spoke to the children about their aspirations, many of them said that they wanted to stay on in the Sundarbans in what they did in the future. An observation made by Sukumar Paira at that point has been haunting me. He said that they are not yet aware of the realities and practicalities of living in the Sundarbans. Once they are faced with that, they may well leave for good.

And my professional self was asking, how can I even think of developing business somewhere as poverty ridden as this in a country where the idea of life insurance hardly exists in rural areas.”

Rhea

(Dancer, Ranan repertory member, learning to be an actress)

“I went with Romoni – one of the girls I met at the Primary School – to her house nearby. She was affected with polio when she was 8 and is now about 19 years old. She does intricate zari embroidery on saris and gets just about Rs. 200 for each sari even though it can sell at Rs. 5000 or Rs. 6000 in Calcutta shops and up to Rs. 20000 in a branded boutique. That too, she gets paid much after she has done the work. Her mother works harvesting paddy on others’ lands and get paid Rs. 100 per month per family she works for. Her father does not work.

And yet she spoke to me frankly, sang me two songs and pressed me to stay for lunch. As I was leaving both she and her father asked if I could do anything to help them. That was when I felt most helpless – it was a pathetic moment for me.”

Amlan

(Ranan repertory and core group member, Production Coordinator and Movement Trainer, Actor)

“Yesterday evening after we arrived at Aponjon, I got a call from Sukumar babu asking if everything was ok. He has already helped us so much in organising the day at Bali, there was no need for him to call me after we had left. That touched me a lot.”

Doug

(Artistic Director of Transport)

“The classroom in the Secondary School at Bali with the students talking about their dreams and aspirations. The optimism in the midst of so much adversity, even from children who haven’t seen their parents for nine months – parents who work away from home. The people’s stories and careers / jobs that came out of that exchange. What would be the level of optimism and aspirations I a deprived school in Kent? And they were so well-behaved!”

Anubha

(Ranan repertory and core group member, actress, architect)

“We always think of roots as life-giving, but here I felt they were life-taking. NO one decided to be born here, it just happened. And then they are caught. Like when the roots of the mangroves go down, it’s as if the soil starts clutching onto it so they can’t break away. Where would I be today if I had been born here?”

Vicky

(Artistic Collaborator on The Edge project, actress, producer)

“I see the mangrove tree roots as the place where earth and water meet. Intermeshing, interlocking, connecting – a community working together. Each tree is a symbol of that strength.”

(Captain and sailor)

The drive here, having never been in India before! And the sense of community and family, and their connectivity to their life support system / natural environment. How the community rooted in a place responds together. We speak from an urban perspective – what does a ‘better life’ actually mean?”

Vikram

(Artistic Director, repertory and core group member of Ranan, dancer, choreographer, theatre director)

“What struck me most on the launch trip into the forests and at the watchtower was the quality of silence, and the quality of listening it demands from you. The quality of stillness. It has a grace and a majesty, a dignity that commands respect. Do we actually take it in at all?”

[read more on the India phase of The Edge project]

Attending the Handia Kathak Mahayagya: November 2011

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Ranan and Samskritiki Shreyaskar members with Pt. Birju Maharaj and Smt. Saswati Sen

Senior students of Brindar - Ranan's Kathak training wing - attended and performed at the first Handia Kathak Mahayagya organised by Pandit Birju Maharaj and Smt. Saswati Sen through Kalashram. The Brindar students were accompanied by Debashree Bhattacharya under whom they have trained.

Samskritiki Shreyaskar, Smt. Rani Karnaa's academy - Smt. Karnaa being Debahsree's guru - was also represented and the whole group presented two generations of students and performers trained in her personal style of Kathak.

Debosmita Roychowdhury, Indudipa Sinha, Surasree Kundu and Surangama Majumdar write in on their experience.

Debosmita and Indudipa at Handia

Debosmita Roychowdhury

Well, I’ve been asked to submit a report about HANDIA KATHAK MAHAYAGYA EXPERIENCE…but I have not got much to describe about the whole journey and it will be a complete waste of time if I write down what happened throughout the journey... everyone knows the details. But there were certain moments, I felt, which in my words could be called as rare experiences, and I desire to share those.

We reached Allahabad on the last day i.e. on 18^th November, and were very much unfortunate to have just one day in hand to attend the workshop. After going through a straight 15 h our train journey, we were very much disgusted and then again another thought of travelling a 35km journey to attend the workshop without a minimum bit of rest started to haunt us then and there. Anyway, while we were thinking all of this, suddenly bliss showered upon us as we met an awesome charismatic person who broke the ice and made everything very soothing. The person is none other than Pandit Birju Maharaj. You can call it a magic or like I said, heavenly bliss that all my tiredness had gone within moments.

Thereafter, we reached the place, HANDIA and saw the workshop had already started. We learned some new bols, ginti, tehai. The style they taught us was very different from ours, but we tried our best to do it in our own way.

Now in the evening, we performed “Vilambit Teentaal”. The performance started from 6 pm till midnight. While watching the performances a lot of questions arose in my mind that evening. The first of the few were,

“What am I doing?”

“Why am I wasting my guru’s time?”

“Do I really love dance?”

“Do I worship it?”

“How much time do I give to dance in a whole day?”

“Can I ever dance like them?”

I thank God that these questions did not affect my performance. I thank my guru, Debashree Bhattacharya on her discretion to have provided me with a platform like HANDIA. The evening concluded with Maharaj-ji’s performance and it was a treat for us to watch him performing live on stage.

The next day when Maharaj-ji inquired about me from my guru, it was a huge achievement for me. He by himself came to me and blessed me by telling few words which still vibrate in my ears… “kabhi dance mat chhorna beta… bohut aage jaoge tum…”. I know that I’ve been noticed by him because I’m slightly different from others, but that day for the first time I really felt lucky and I understood the reason of me being in there – and may be that it was the only reason.

Indudipa Sinha

Day-1 (16/11/2011)

We reached Allahabad in the morning and finally went to Handia at around 2pm with other Kathak dancers from different parts of India. Today we could attend only the last part of the workshop. But it was a great experience to learn Kathak directly from Birju Maharaj-ji, whatever the duration may be.

After lunch we went to the original place situated at an extreme part of the village where the creators of the Lucknow gharana of Kathak used to live.

I felt myself lucky to observe the spectrums of performances of some of the leading Kathak dancers of our country.

Day-2 (17/11/2011)

As per schedule, we reached Handia which is 40 km away from Allahabad at around 10am. After breakfast, we had a session of basic Kathak movements under the guidance of Kishan Maharaj-ji and Shaswati-ji. Then we were fortunate to learn some tukra, ginti ki tehai, tora and various types of tehai from Maharaj-ji. The entire session was very well organised by the volunteers of Kalashram.

In the afternoon, we had a screening session which included the performances of Kelucharan Mahapatra, Yamini Krishnamurti, Radha and Raja Reddy, Damayanti Joshi, Sitara Devi, Mrinalini Sarabhai, Krishnamohan-ji and many more. Also we had a film session showing remarkable dance performances in some films like Umrao Jaan (by Rekha), Jalsaghar (by Roshan Kumari), Mughal-e-azam (by Madhubala), Dil to Pagal Hai (by Madhuri), Jhanak Jhanak Payel Baje (by Gopikishan), Shataranj ke Khilari (by Shaswati Sen) and many more.

Then we experinced some lecture-demonstrations by Roshan Datye, Chetna Jalan, Ravi Jain and many more. They depicted their respective gharana and style created by their gurus.

Evening performances were stunning in their own way.

Day-3 (18/11/2011)

We enjoyed morning workshop, film session and seminar as previous days.

Today we had our own performance which included a piece set to Vilambit Tintaal choreographed and conceived by our guru Smt. Debashree Bhattacharya. She performed Kedar Raas with Sohini Debnath. Samila & Sreyashi performed Trivatt. It was really a lifetime experience to step into such an arena of Kathak. We got a very positive response from audience which made us speechless. We all are heartily grateful to our guru Debashree Bhattacharya who is solely responsible for all this.

Day-4 (19/11/2011)

We ended our tour after meeting Pt. Birju Maharaj-ji today morning and spent some time with him. That is such a memory which will always refuse to fade. The whole tour will surely be a source of inspiration in future.

Brindar students performing at Handia

Surasree Kundu

Surasree at Handia

Surangama Majumdar

Surangama at Handia

Few days ago, Kathak Mahayagga was held in Handia and I am very lucky that I could attend the workshop which was built up under the guidance of Maharaj-ji. Maharaj-ji illustrated gati bhab (varieties of movements) which was fantastic. I learned some beautiful bol, tihai, ginti. As i joined the workshop at very last day I missed some interesting sessions. Video session offered some edited parts of art film, documentaries using Kathak dance. There were special sessions where dancers performed their different styles and I performed Vilambit Teental choreographed by my guru Debashree Bhattacharya. It was a beautiful experience of my life that I will remember forever.

Transport Theatre, UK in Calcutta

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There is something about the edge: the edge of the land and water, of habitation and wilderness, of safety and danger. Here possibilities abound that don’t exist in the security of the interior. Mythically it is the lone explorer that searches out the edge. But in life it is entire populations who learn to live at it, on it, with it.

~ Sunand Prasad, Architect

Ranan and Transport Theatre, UK have been working on a collaborative performance project - The Edge - since February 2011, focussing on human stories emerging from the issues of climate change and migration. Amlan Chaudhuri and Vikram Iyengar visited the UK to work with them in August-September 2011, and Douglas Rintoul (Artistic Director, Transport), Vicky Long (Artistic Collaborator) and Emma Cameron (Producer, Transport) will be in Calcutta in December 2011 to work with Ranan members.

The schedule includes programmes open to the public - please check for entry information below.

Friday, 9 December 2011: British Council, Calcutta. 5.30pm
'Culture and Climate Change'. Meet The Edge project people. Screening of Cape Farewell's Art from the Arctic. The film tracks the three Cape Farewell expeditions that took artists to the Arctic, travelling with climate scientists, 2003-05. Entry by invitation only. Please contact us at rananindia@gmail.com if interested.

Saturday, 10 December to Wednesday, 14 December 2011: Sundarbans I
A group of people from Ranan and Transport will visit various areas in the Sundarbans to meet with people and groups living and working in the area. Visits include Adarsha Vidyamandir, Wildlife Conservation Society of India and Help Eco-Tourism project on Bali island, Aponjon at Pakhiralaya, Buridabri Watchtower, Ghoramara and Sagar islands.

Friday, 16 December through Friday 30 December 2011: Ranan, Calcutta
The workshop phase of The Edge (India phase) with participants from the Ranan Repertory. Led by Vikram Iyengar of Ranan and Douglas Rintoul, with Amlan Chaudhuri, Vicky Long and Emma Cameron.

Saturday, 17 December 2011: Ranan, Calcutta. 10am to 2pm
'The Actor, the Space, the Ensemble, and Classic and Contemporary, British Text': Theatre workshop conducted by Douglas Rintoul. Applications open. Click here for more details. Open to selected participants only.

Tuesday, 20 December 2011: Mahadevi Birla Girls Higher Secondary School, Calcutta. 11am to 1pm
Douglas Rintoul conducts a theatre workshop with a group of seniors students of MBGHSS. Not open to others.

Tuesday, 20 December 2011: Weavers' Studio Centre for the Arts, Calcutta. 6.30pm
'Exploration, Culture and our Environment': Jo Royle and Vicky Long discuss the Plastiki project and Cape Farewell. Presented by Earth Day Network and Weavers' Studio Centre for the Arts. All are welcome.

Wednesday, 21 December to Thursday, 22 December 2011: Sundarbans II
The second Sundarbans filed trip will revolve around the work of the Ramakrishna Mission in the area. Visits will include the Nimpith Ashram and the adjoining Vivekananda Institute of Biotechnology and Krishhi Vigyan Kendra, and Kaikhali island.

Friday, 30 December 2011: Ranan, Calcutta. 7pm
Sharing of the workshop process between Ranan and Transport over two phases: Folkestone and London in August-September 2011, and Sundarbans and Calcutta in December 2011. All are welcome.

Other programmes are being finalised. Please check back for updates. Regular blog updates on the whole programme will be available here.

THE ACTOR, THE SPACE, THE ENSEMBLE AND CLASSIC AND CONTEMPORARY BRITISH TEXT: a workshop by Douglas Rintoul

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This workshop will look at the relationship between the actor, the ensemble, the word and space. Led by Douglas Rintoul, Artistic Director of UK theatre company Transport and long-‐ standing Associate Director of Complicite, the workshop draws from theatre games, creative exercises, bamboo work, improvisation, group movement, reading, writing and discussion, the workshop is During the workshop participants will explore and experience the potential power of the actor when fully present in the space, inhabiting texts in English (Shakespeare and contemporary) whilst engaging as an ensemble.

Date: Saturday, 17 December 2011 

Venue: Ranan (Ground Floor, 8 Sultan Alam Road, Calcutta – 33)

Time: 10am to 2pm 

Participation fees: Rs. 400/-

Recommended for those with some experience in contemporary theatre practice and performance, 18 years and above. Limited participation. Please apply with full CV and contact details to rananindia@gmail.com by 5 December 2011. Those selected will be informed by 10 December 2011.

Douglas Rintoul read Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham. He was awarded a Channel 4 Theatre Director's Bursary and became Resident and Associate Director at Salisbury Playhouse. He was the first recipient of the Esmée Fairbairn Regional Theatre Initiative Award that gives young directors the opportunity to direct a large-‐scale classic text on a main stage. In 2009 he was nominated for an Arts Foundation Fellowship by the National Theatre Studio and Barbican Theatre. In 2010 he won a European Cultural Foundation Award for Transport to develop their new project Invisible.

Douglas is now the Artistic Director of Transport for which he directed the first major revival and English premiere of David Greig's 1994 play Europe (BITE:07/Dundee Rep Theatre), the devised piece Elegy (Edinburgh Festival Fringe) nominated for a Fringe First, and Invisible (New Wolsey Theatre/UK and European tour). As a freelance director he has directed Much Ado About Nothing and Copenhagen (Salisbury Playhouse), Touched for the Very First Time (Trafalgar Studios -‐ What's On Stage Award Nomination for Best Solo Performance), Closer and Design for Living (Les Theatres de la Ville de Luxembourg), King Lear (Creation), Private Lives and Travels with My Aunt (New Wolsey Theatre).

Associate Director on Deborah Warner's Julius Caesar (BITE:05 and international tour), Douglas has also associate directed Endgame (Duchess Theatre), A Disappearing Number (BITE:09 and international tour) and Measure for Measure (Royal National Theatre and international tour) all for Complicite. He assisted Deborah Warner on her production of Fidelio (Glyndebourne Festival Opera). He has directed for Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and has taught or led workshops for the Young Vic Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company, Hyderabad University, The Eugene O'Neill Institute of Theater, London Metropolitan University, Birmingham University, Theatre Institute Warsaw, University of Gdansk, Rose Bruford, West Yorkshire Playhouse, NT Studio and Old Vic Theatre.

Douglas Rintoul is in Calcutta for the second phase of a collaborative performance project between Ranan and Transport. Titled The Edge the project takes narratives of climate change and migration as starting points focusing on stories and experiences emerging from the geographical areas and histories of the English Channel and the Sundarbans delta. This research and development phase of the project is part-funded by the British Council’s ‘Connections through Culture’ programme.

Bijoya Dashami on the Ichhamati

2011-10-19T15:05:00.007+05:30

more photos by Antara Das Gupta

The Ichhamati river forms a part of the extensive border between India and Bangladesh. Our first field trip comprised a trip to Hasnabad-Taki on 6 October 2011 – Bijoya Dashami, the last day of the Durga Puja celebrations and the day the idols of Durga and her family are immersed across rivers in Bengal.

Bijoya Dashami is the one day in the year when border patrolling and control by the BSF (Border Security Force) from India and BDR (Bangladesh Rifles) from Bangladesh is relaxed. The river becomes crammed full of boats of all shapes and sizes – some to immerse idols, but most full of revellers from both countries. A day of celebration when this very questionable border blurs.

We had booked a small country boat that could accommodate up to 15 people from Hasnabad Ghat. This proved to be immensely sensible since, when we got to Taki by boat, all one could see along the banks of both countries was a sea of people. There was no way we could have descended to the ghat, let alone got on a boat without a veritable stampede. Hasnabad is on the Katahal river, a small tributary which opens into the Ichhamati as it takes a wide curve between the two countries. Moving upstream along the Ichhamati, India is on the left, Bangladesh on the right.

At about 3pm Hasnabad ghat too wore a festive look. The narrow street was full of people dressed in their best, vendors of all sorts selling paper trumpets, balloons, snacks and Heaven knows what else. The narrow Katakhal was jam-packed with boats flying the Indian tricolour. Bigger launches jostled with smaller country boats as people clambered on for the trip. Our boat was the smallest kind – a country boat built from slats of wood fitted with a noisy motor and manned by two boatmen – or rather one and half, since the one who sat in the prow and occasionally bailed out the water that seeped in was just a boy. A boy with incredible balance, I must add, since he ran nimbly along the narrow edge of the boat to and from the prow all along the journey without once seeming to notice the brown waters inches from his feet.

the view from Hasnabad Ghat - video

The docile Katakhal opened into the expansive Ichhamati as it curved around the Bangladeshi bank. At this point, this finger of Bangladesh strangely has India on both sides of it as the river curves back on itself. Far up stream we could see that the monochromatic waters of the river were suddenly a riot of colours. There – between Taki in India and Sripur in Bangladesh – the river was crowded with boats from both countries crisscrossing between the banks. The banks too were lined with thousands of people. We saw for the first time boats flying the Bangladesh flag – but apart from that, how on earth could we tell each other apart! Zipping through this veritable chaos was the occasional BSF or BDR motorboat and the large stately blue and red launches that connect Bangladesh’s many riverside locations.

A festive atmosphere is nothing new for India, and definitely not for Bengal. But to encounter this in the middle of a river was a different experience altogether. Vessels from the two countries are not allowed to land on the opposite banks, but apart from this it seems an explosion of emotion for both sides. A few smaller idols had descended into boats and were travelling up and down both the banks surveying and being surveyed by people on both sides. Bangladeshis and Indians shouted and waved at each other from their respective boats throwing flowers and sweets for the other party to catch, traditional dhaak beats merged with the latest film music, and boatmen skilfully avoided each other by a hair’s breath with ease that would make any stuntman envious. Everyone has cell phones – but how does one deal with international roaming in such a situation and on such a border? My phone actually received no signal when we were towards the Indian bank, but had full reception when we were on the Bangladeshi side!

On the Indian side, we spotted people perched atop broken embankments – a reminder that this whimsical river is not always so kind and has the capacity to wreck havoc. As we coasted to the Bangladeshi side, we saw a large pandal set up with music blaring and some local heavyweight trying ineffectually to make announcements about the deep connection between the two countries. And among the mass of people thronging the bank, two families of Durga idols waited patiently for their turn in the immersion rituals. On the Indian bank too larger idols had begun to arrive, and the mother figures gazed at each other from two countries that came together annually on this once day. Perhaps it is only a mother that can bring together sundered siblings, if even for the shortest span of time. It was one of the most emotional and unforgettable experiences to be on that river among those thousands of people: complete strangers, and yet momentarily united in the aura of something larger than our individual selves, something larger that both of our countries, something intrinsically human and not a little divine.

The sun had begun to dip and the scene for the special immersion that Icchamati is known for was set, though the crowds of revellers are cleared from the river before this is allowed to begin in earnest. The idols are taken out to the middle of the river seated on a makeshift bamboo platform supported by two boats. Once in the deep waters, the two boats move away from each puling the raft of bamboos apart. The Goddess descends into the river vertically.

more photos by Antara Das Gupta

As darkness came on, fireworks began manned from an official barge towards the Indian side. Our boatman became anxious: not everything is as joyful and tension-free as it seemed. Apparently, as night falls over the river, the bigger boats purposely push past the small country ones – the kind we were on – in a dangerous game that under cover of darkness can go completely unnoticed by the patrol boats. We managed to avoid several such encouters by the skin of our teeth and dexterity of our boatman. There is complete absence of river traffic discipline of any sort, no one knows what dark shape will loom out from which direction, and by and large none of the boats have any lights. Every year there are accidents. Indeed, the day after the papers carried a report about an Indian boat that was capsized by a Bangladeshi boat. One person was lost in the waters, and his body was found washed up downstream somewhere in Bangladesh only a few days later. Doubly unfortunate is the predominant sense that the bigger Bangladeshi boats target the smaller Indian boats on purpose. People on the Bangladeshi side probably harbour just the opposite feeling.

A border once drawn is not something one can easily wipe away, even though the land and water bear no actual trace of it. When very young, I had once asked my mother why we just didn’t join the partitioned countries back together again. She replied with what I feel is a strong and most unfortunate metaphor. One can join together a piece of broken glass but the cracks will always be visible.

Article by Vikram Iyengar in e-Rang

2011-10-19T11:11:00.001+05:30

Spaces for Engagement: Art on a pavement (possibly)

In this article in the latest issue of e-Rang, Vikram Iyengar reflects on several avenues of public engagement with the arts in the UK. These experiences were all during the one month that Vikram and Amlan spent in the UK for The Edge project.

Visiting Scottish Dance Theatre, Dundee - 15 August 2011

2011-09-08T05:43:00.003+05:30


Driving to Dundee

Janet Smith and Amanda Chin of Scottish Dance Theatre had visited Ranan in October 2010 during their reconnoitre of India along with Nelson Fernandez. Janet – Artistic Director of SDT – had been the guest at one of Ranan’s adda sessions – a report and response by Lav Kanoi (Ranan repertory member) can be read here.

SDT were to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe the week after we left, so we drove up to Dundee where they are based to meet them in rehearsal. SDT is housed in the Dundee Repertory Theatre which is also home to an acting repertory of the same name as the theatre. Dundee is a small town which – like so many other small towns in the UK and across the world – prospered with local trade and as a port, and then declined with the advent of newer technologies. And like many other small towns in the UK, Dundee is trying to rejuvenate and regenerate itself at present. And input and support for the arts has formed a major part of how this is conceived. There are problems there as well – specially now with the economic downturn and huge and often illogical cuts in arts funding – but that’s another story.


Set building area at Dundee Rep

The Dundee Repertory Theatre building is a self-contained space with its own well-equipped performance space, rehearsal studios, costume, set and technical departments and a strong Education department as well. The theatre receives public money of course, but what caught my eye as soon as we entered the foyer was a large plaque thanking both public, individual and private donors for their continued support.

SDT’s studio was on the top floor. Again, it is so difficult for us to imagine rehearsal spaces like that. A sprung wooden floor, very high ceiling, built in sound system, a rest area – not to mention dedicated dressing rooms and lounge outside of the space and an office space on a different floor. They had marked out the area of the venue they would be performing in in Edinburgh, and it was about a third of the floor space they actually had. They were having to re-imagine the ensemble pieces for this smaller space, while we – even at Ranan, lucky as we are to have our own space – are constantly creating work in a space smaller than we will perform in.

Speaking of space, one of the things that struck me was how detailed and measured their movements and positions were vis-à-vis one another. How far dancers were from one another, whether one could be seen from the corner of the eye of another… all contributed to making a piece. Yes, they have a large space and can afford to measure and work at that level of precision, but what struck me the most was the generosity of the ensemble among themselves, the eagerness to re-orient oneself to help a co-dancer. For Indian classical dancers trained in a solo tradition, there is a strong lesson here as we move more and more (for better or for worse) into the realm of choreography for a group of dancers.


SDT and Dundee Rep: the people

SDT is a surprising international company. Among the 7-8 dancers we met, there were people from Britain, France Belgium, Spain and other places as well. And each of them wonderfully trained before joining SDT. We watched them rehearse sections of an ensemble piece and then a male and female version of an enchanting duet (the same choreography, but vastly different just because the gender changed). Personally, I feel that contemporary dance sometimes tends to become too abstruse and self-involved in its expression. But here was contemporary dance that had not only excellent technique, but communicated with me instantly, joyously, beautifully. It touched and moved us, and this was just an often interrupted rehearsal. It was really unfortunate that we couldn’t watch them in performance.

There is a possibility of SDT touring India with performances sometime in 2012, though the present recession climate has cast a cloud over so many plans and possibilities. But if they do, I would exhort everyone to go watch and interact with this wonderful company.

[all photographs are By Amlan Chaudhuri]

Watching shows at the Edinburgh Fringe

2011-09-07T05:01:00.001+05:30

The problem with the Fringe is that there is TOO MUCH HAPPENING! How does one choose intelligently from a brochure that looks frighteningly like the Yellow Pages? Everything can’t be worth watching – in fact, everything isn’t. There is a lot of trash, but – how does one sort the grain from the chaff? And we had only two days! Thankfully, we were staying with Emma – a member of Transport – who had her ear to the ground and pulled together a short list of half a dozen things we should see in addition to Elegy, which was Transport’s show. We managed to see four out of them. Here’s a very brief response to each.

Dream Pill

(at an Underbelly venue)

Dream Pill had received very positive reviews, but also some uncertain ones. The play – only 30 minutes – came out of research into child trafficking with children from Nigeria, and the child pornography trade. I would give this production 2 – or maybe 2 ½ – stars (using a rating of a maximum of five stars), and this would be primarily for the premise and approach of the script. The whole situation is seen through the eyes of two 9-year old Nigerian girls who have been trafficked. Living in a small dark room (the space of the performance lent itself well to create this), they are still kids playing, giggling, teasing – their innocence of what they do attempting to underline the horror of it all. And what they describe in child-like language as games they are asked to play is actually quite graphic and deeply disturbing. Unfortunately, a major flaw in the production and the script too is that it’s too short. The two actresses – who are not bad at playing the young girls, by the way (not that they are actually that age!) – seem to rush through the production all the while being energetic, playful children, something which is sometimes overplayed. Of course, there are moments when they hear their ‘owner’ outside and back away silently, giving us glimpses into the sense of wrong and discomfort that must lie behind their innocence. But these are too few and far between. One is never hit with the full horror of the situation, not even when one of them – responding to a call – dresses up in a short, shiny frock with high heels and lipstick and leaves to attend to a client. The other offers to go in her place – something only a child would spontaneously do as a friend – but she replies, “No, he wants me”. A terribly adult reply from a child yet to meet puberty – but it’s the words that stayed with me, not the moment. And in theatre, it’s the resonance of the moment that matters. If it’s only the words that make theatre, we could all just read scripts and be done with it.

Playwright Rebecca Pritchard on Dream Pill

I Hope My Heart Goes First

(at a converted church venue the name of which I have forgotten. How I wish I could forget about the production too)

Half a star for this one (since none is not an option), but definitely NO stars for the critics and reviewers who created such a hype around it, making it sound like a dark horse hit. Devised by a popular Glasgow based youth theatre company, the production looked at aspects of the heart – physical, emotional, technical, medical and of course LOVE – with references and sources from (by their own admission) cheesy pop songs and other equally inane things. An inane source does not necessarily translate into an inane presentation – indeed, it can inspire the most profound commentary through parody, sarcasm, irony – all the tools which make the best comedy as opposed to the best jokes. But there was none of that – no insight, no attempt at it even (at least, none that I could see). Why people were raving and paying good money to go and see a bunch of adolescents singing Karaoke with uncoordinated and badly performed movements (I will not dignify that with the term dancing), silly repartee and general awkwardness all around is something I cannot fathom. And don’t wish too. Enough said!

The Wheel

(at the Traverse Theatre)

Watching this immediately after the one above was a study in contrasts. The script (and central character) reminded me strongly of Brecht’s Mother Courage. An impending wedding opens the play against a stark and violence ridden setting with exposed iron bars and crumbing walls – that in itself was a strong statement. But the script soon leaves the realistic tone it begins with and moves into a space where specifics of time, reality, space, character, belief blur in this almost epic-fable journey about the corruption of innocence that an atmosphere of war promotes. Nothing new to say actually, but the writing moves smoothly through boundaries of time and space with non-specific (yet identifiable) episodes and impacts of war across the world, across the last few centuries. One woman travels with a little girl in search of her father through this violent landscape, picking up two other children on the way – only to come full circle and have to start again. The plot pathway is sometimes difficult to swallow – but I feel that this is primarily because the performance style sticks to a highly realistic, naturalistic manner of acting, while the script itself is – if anything – surreal and dream-nightmare like. Some of the dialogue, acting and representation therefore seemed heavy-handed and ‘untrue’. The features of war – explosions, firing etc – were technically brilliant, but once again too ‘real’ perhaps for a script which demanded a far more imaginative and open approach to its staging. This was a National Theatre of Scotland production and it did win a Fringe First award from the Scotsman newspaper. But – as is the case with many ‘national’ theatres – I do feel they sometimes suffer from a style of playing which is a stamp. This often interferes with being true to the text which may be asking for quite a different treatment. It was, I must say, absorbing, but I – for one – was following the magic of the script rather than the magic of the performance.

Review of The Wheel 1

Review of The Wheel 2

The Table

(at the Pleasance Dome)

Four stars or higher for this delightful puppet performance. Created and performed by the Blind Summit company, the performance comprises three unrelated pieces – each one a gem combining astonishing skill and coordination, tongue-in-cheek humour and remarkable imagination. The first piece –after which the production is named – introduces us to a magnificently handled Bunraku puppet figure who promises (threatens) to perform the last twelve hours of Moses’ life on a table in real time. Thankfully, this never comes to pass since our puppet is easily distracted and garrulously communicative about things like the dimensions of the table – side to side, back to front, diagonal … And then a girl (an actual human being) suddenly appears at the table and appears not to notice him at all, no matter what he does. The rest of the piece plays with this absent relationship bringing together puppetry, movement, dialogue and pure creativity in marvellous and inspiring interplay. The second piece is played behind a series of three picture frames. Pairs of white hands and white masks of different shapes make whirlwind and ever-changing journeys behind these frames in a background and foreground which is otherwise totally black. Performed with split second precision to an accompanying music score, how the four puppeteers managed to create the ever-moving illusion of a processions of hands and faces in pitch black is a mystery which can only be illuminated by the fact of hours and hours of painstaking rehearsal. And nowhere was this better illustrated than in their last piece which used one brief case and a sheaf of A4 sheets to tell a whole story through cartoon sketched storyboard. Precision (once again performed exactly timed with the music as a whole and in parts), absolute coordination (not once did an unplanned gap appear between the separate sheets of paper as they were drawn form the brief case), skill, imagination, fun, play … everything that can make watching a performance piece both an elevating and humbling experience were out in force. And to add a bit of subtext to those of us who complain about the lack of resources and funding in theatre: how much does it take to procure a table, three picture frames, and a brief case of paper – all lit with flat light. Not much at all. But how much does it take to create a production such as this? A minefield of creativity and imagination, and a massive amount of downright hard work.

Blind Summit – the company

Apart from this, we saw Elegy twice. But I’ll dedicate separate space to that connecting it to the collaborative work between Transport and Ranan.

Three Days at the Edinburgh Fringe: August 2011

2011-08-30T04:57:00.001+05:30

PART 1

a view of Edinburgh (photo: Amlan Chaudhuri)

Edinburgh is – so I have been told – normally a quiet, peaceful, picturesque small city. Every August all that changes with the Edinburgh festivals. It’s crowded, it’s noisy, it’s throbbing with energy, it changes from local to international overnight, it is THE place to be in the UK. Indeed, it seems that everyone who has any connection with performance in the UK moves up there for some part of the month – to perform, to watch, to be inspired, to revel, to celebrate, to learn, to exchange…

'Underbelly' - one of the Fringe venues (photo: Amlan Chaudhuri)

It is actually a festival of festivals. The Edinburgh International Festival is the mega one around which all the others gather – the Book Festival, the Film Festival, the Jazz Festival… - but by far the most well known across the board (and perhaps the most potentially exciting) is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The very nature of the fringe and its approach lies in the name itself: it places itself off-centre. It happens largely in unusual venues, in unusual ways, through unusual channels, with often unusual outcomes. It does not depend nor define itself by existing mega festival structures – financial, infrastructural, logistical, curatorial. It is strongly artist led, artist managed and artist funded. It’s a coming together of diverse people, a coming together of possibilities, a space where anything – good and bad – can happen. The only counterpart I can think of in my limited experience is the Durga Puja in Calcutta, though this is of course a socio-religious community created-led-managed activity. But if one sees artists and art enthusiasts – performers, directors, venue directors and programmers, art students and volunteers, and audience – as one large community, then this is the one parallel that comes to mind. There is of course a managing group which oversees all the festivals and the mind-boggling coordination and infrastructure that is necessary to make a success of this month crammed full with everything you can imagine (and many things you can’t), but they are – for all practical purposes – invisible. This complete absence of any apparent machinery only underlines for me how well oiled, efficient and alert the systems of functioning must be.

Two examples. The Fringe brochure looks (and unfortunately feels) like the Yellow Pages. Stuffed full of listings with brief descriptions, photographs and box ads, it is categorised into several sections – Comedy, Cabaret, Dance, Theatre, Music… Not to mention indexes by name of event or name of venue – the latter could be anything from an art gallery to a temporarily converted church, the laboratories of the university to a traditional theatre space. Just putting this directory together must have been a task that called for exceptional management and public relation skills. Move over corporate consultants: you want to know how to pull off the most complicated coordination and management, a theatre festival is where you go. The Edinburgh Fringe just takes it to an unbelievable extreme. Just wish the design was slightly more inspired though.

Secondly, the Fringe is run on the ground by an army of young volunteers from all over the world. Often drama students, they work as ushers, box office personnel, technical help … and possibly watch the shows for free. Where do they come from, who do they report to, how to they get assigned their very clearly defined jobs (they behave as if this is all they’ve ever done), where do they stay in a city which suddenly is full to the brim with visitors, how do monies and subsistence work...? I have no answers to these questions, but there is obviously a well thought through system that allows and encourages all this to happen.

'The Edge': a Transport Theatre, UK - Ranan, India collaborative project

2011-08-10T17:55:00.002+05:30

The Edge is a research and development collaborative performance project initiated by Transport Theatre, UK with Ranan, Calcutta with the central themes of climate change and migration as impulses. Funded by the British Council's 'Connections through Culture' programme, this year long performance collaboration project was launched in February 2011 with a series of Skype interactions including rehearsal and performance sharings between Douglas Rintoul and Vicky Long of Transport and Vikram Iyengar and Amlan Chaudhuri of Ranan.

This blog will carry regular updates from Amlan and Vikram over the next month.
The first phase comprised

a performance created with the students of the Central School of Speech and Drama, London in February 2011 under the direction of Douglas Rintoul
a presentation on the project as part of the British Council showcase at the Alchemy festival at South Bank, London on 19 April 2011. Ranan's Artistic Director, Vikram Iyengar was present via audio line, and two of Ranan's process videos responding to a shared source text were screened. Watch the videos here: Alchemy Sharing 1, Alchemy Sharing 2

The second phase

· 11 August to 13 September, 2011: Amlan Chaudhuri and Vikram Iyengar travel to the UK to work with Transport Theatre

Schedule

12 to 16 August: Edinburgh Fringe Festival attending workshops with Douglas Rintoul and viewing Elegy, Transport's new production

22 to 26 August: Workshops with performers at University Centre, Folkestone

30 August to 2 September: R&D with performers at the National Theatre Studio, London

3 to 4 September: Open Workshop at the University of Kent

This blog will carry regular updates from Amlan and Vikram over the next month.

DIRECTORIAL MUSINGS: More Questions than Answers

2011-05-16T13:30:00.000+05:30


'Return' - technical rehearsal

The working title for this double bill of performance work was Conversations with Kathak, and the initial idea was to create a series of small pieces exploring different dialogues between Kathak and other individual impulses such as text, music, voice work, film and so on. How on earth did that develop into two distinctly different presentations: one, a fleshed out, focused and thought through piece emerging from an intense association with the world of Kathak, and the other, an extremely nascent, shaky and rough-edged experiment bringing together varied performance elements, random and often contradictory sources, and diverse performers?

'Dreamed' - technical rehearsal

A couple of things do connect these two diametrically different pieces: early uncertainties about where we were headed and why, and a certainty about what we wanted to engage with in terms of approach and process. For the production we today call Return, the engagement with every aspect of Kathak as a richly evolved and evolving dance form was a given. For the piece we today call Dreamed, the engagement with a variety of impulses and Kathak’s response to them was what we wanted to play with and explore. But the choosing of a focus, a binding idea, eluded us for a long time.

Return

The process of creating Return saw Debashree and I spend session after session asking ourselves what is was we wanted to dance, why it was we wanted to dance. Literally returning to creating a duet piece after ten years, we wanted to tread carefully and specifically. The questions soon became more analytical about why we dance at all, what dance means to us, what dance offered as a form of expression, and the apparently changing face of how dance is performed and perceived today. Does dance enshrine a philosophy, an approach to life, an acknowledgement of something bigger than ourselves? Has dance become more about technique, form and virtuosic skill and less about an uplifting human experience? In the quest to conquer the externals of dance, do we let the spirit get away? Where does dance begin and where does it lead? What is it’s purpose – entertainment, enlightenment, enchantment … all of that and more?

We were playing with rhythms, abstractions, various music tracks trying to find inspiration. Wandering through several nebulous pathways and dim possibilities, we found ourselves drawn to some very specific vocal music impulses, all of which were tremendously classical in approach, treatment and performance. Each one seemed a pure expression and exploration of one particular and personal idea emerging from the singer. Somehow this abstract particularity led us to re-examine and rediscover each and every small nuance of Kathak that we today take for granted – so much so that many of them are not even performed any more. Living in a world of large pictures and instant entertainment, the subtle, the internalised, a slow flowering of ideas and images can seem rather passé. Indeed, how much of dance today is about an internal experience – both for the performer and the audience? A rediscovery of what dance – specifically Indian classical dance – stands for seemed the road to walk down.

Guided invisibly by these inspirational and deeply moving music pieces, we were led backwards into the vast storehouse of Kathak finding gems we had forgotten all about along the way – little jewels rarely brought out of the dusty, yet living, museum of Kathak, precious stones which shyly and / or graciously revealed themselves to a gentler, humbler enquiry on our part. The attempt for us became to realign ourselves – so to speak – with a dance that magnanimously allows us to enter and experience all that it offers, rather than a dance that we have mastered, leashed and wrought into a series of astonishing skilled circus acts. Artists surrender to art and are therefore able to enter and discover it from within. Mere mastery subjugates art: it cannot then envelop the artist.

We thought of what Saraswati stands for – not as any religious association, but as a concept. What does she embody for art, for artists? How does one approach her, get to know her – by chasing her relentlessly or by opening our minds and hearts and allowing her in with humility, respect and the desire to serve? We serve her, she does not serve us. And once we yield to art, we make – or re-make – the most amazing discoveries. The attempt in Return has been to reflect this journey back to an essence.

Musically each piece we chose inspired us to focus on a very specific aspect of Kathak, really try and zoom into its possibilities in various ways – slowness of pace, subtle grace, the awareness of sound and rhythm, the development of abstract pure dance, the stories one can tell with and within one single line from a lyric… all leading coming together in a celebration of Kathak. Again, musically we have tried to give each instrument its due, discovering what it contributes to the music and the dance in this return to a space and spirit we should never have left.

Dreamed

20 May 2010 saw the launch of the Ranan Repertory. A motley group of dancers and actors came together in Ranan’s rehearsal space committed to working and playing together as performers. Dreamed has emerged out of a year’s work with repertory members through acting and movement exercises, dance and text explorations, voice work, workshops led from within the group and by guest artists, film screenings, sharings and more.

The original idea was to create a series of small pieces bringing together performance elements that we have begun to explore and experiment with in our repertory sessions – sessions which take place without the pressure of an imminent production, thus providing a secure space in which we can imagine, try out, fail, create, learn and push ourselves as an ensemble of performers. The aim was – and still is – to stage a possible way and process of working and creating performance – a way and process that we are at the very early stages of discovering for ourselves.

We began by selecting elements and ideas to work with: a text or two we were already dabbling with, something written by a repertory member, some songs we had started on initially thinking only of voice exercises, rhythm cycles, and other random ideas put together collectively. There was no attempt at threading a logic or continuity that would bring everything together in any way. We were playing, exploring, experimenting, creating, discussing, dispensing…

It was only very late in the day that very tenuous connections began to occur to me. Each piece that we had had zeroed in on as a final selection seemed to have something to do with desires and dreams expressed or withheld, fulfilled or neglected, remembered or forgotten. The words ‘dream’, ‘dreamed’, ‘dreamt’, ‘dreaming’ and various references to and images of ‘home’ recurred in the texts and lyrics we had selected as both as initial impulses and as responses during the process of work – apparently purely by coincidence.

I began to look at the act of dreaming as an expression of secret desire, of memories real or imagined, of regret and loss, of reaching out to achieve or touch something just out of reach – unattainable but very much there. Why was it not achievable, what obstacles blocked the way… each separate piece we were working on seemed to be finding answers to this question, seemed to be striving to reach a particular point, seemed to be – indeed – dreaming of creating something that existed only in our heads and refused to actually take shape in space and time.

A strange jigsaw began to emerge of a plethora of characters – some related, some not, but all with dreams they reached out to, all with obstacles that hindered them, all with a desire to find themselves in another space, another time, another home. The dreams could be triggered by memories tinged with regret, secret sorrows, lost loves, wanting to be loved or even the urge to dance freely and joyfully. The metaphor of this dream-space became embodied in the idea of a pomegranate tree, a pomegranate grove – somewhere one wanted to be but couldn’t. How could one get there? Why could one not? Was there a spirit which called to us from that grove urging us to keep trying, keep pushing till we found a path to the garden, to the fulfilment of what we dreamed?

Dreamed is the first time any of us in the repertory have attempted to work in this fashion. I have myself never devised work collaboratively or alone, in fact have steered clear of it. This experience has touched not only on devising together, but on drawing together varied performance elements that many of us are only just beginning to discover for and within ourselves. The group comprises performers from a range of backgrounds and levels – some experience, some still training – all stepping out in some way or the other from their comfort zones of performance that they are familiar with into trying, playing, dreaming with a little something else.

We do not call Dreamed a production – it is not one. It is an expression of the very nascent stages of an idea of how one can work, can create, can play in a performance ensemble. We present it as it is – complete with its rough edges, unanswered and unasked questions, trailing threads and unattained possibilities. Dreamed is therefore perhaps only the beginning of a dream we have yet to travel through.

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

2011-05-11T11:00:00.001+05:30

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.

Watch related video


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.

EXPLORING UNRELATED TEXTS - 7 May 2011

2011-05-07T18:49:00.003+05:30


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.

Watch related video

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.

Watch related video

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.

----------------------------------------

'ANKUR 2011' - Call for Applications

2011-05-07T18:22:00.001+05:30

Committed to nurturing new talents in and new audiences for Indian performing arts, Ranan initiated ‘Ankur’, an annual event for emerging talent in the Indian classical dance, in 2004.

‘Ankur 2011’ is scheduled for 16 September at Gyan Manch, Calcutta this year and will form the second evening of the annual programme of Brindar - Ranan’s Kathak training wing. Applications for solo recitals in any classical dance are invited from prospective participants between the ages of 18 and 30 as on 1 July 2011.

Applications will be screened by an expert committee and two selected candidates informed by end-July. Established professional performers will not be considered.

Applications should include:

* A complete CV of the candidate with all contact details

* A VCD or DVD of not less than 20 and not more than 30 minutes duration

We are unable to accept video cassettes

* Two letters of recommendation, including one from the Guru / Institution

* Copy of any age proof document

Please mark applications ‘Ankur 2011’ and send to:

Debashree Bhattacharya

2C, East Road

Jadavpur

Calcutta 700 032

The last date for receiving applications is 30 June 2011.

Please note:

* Ranan is unable to return any application material

* The decisions of the expert panel are final

* Live music accompaniment is mandatory for the performance

Premiere of 'Return' and 'Dreamed'

2011-05-05T00:24:00.001+05:30

Ranan announces the premiere shows of a double bill of work reflecting both our roots in classical dance and our experimental creative processes.
Return and Dreamed premiere on 20, 21 and 22 May 2011 at Gyan Manch, Calcutta.
For more information on the productions and regular blog posts, click here

How does one reconnect to one's own art, how does one return?
How does one knit together Kathak; fragments of text by Peter Barnes, Imtiaz Dharker, Tariq Ali and Anjum Katyal; classic songs by the like of Simon & Garfunkel and Harry Belafonte; and an exploration of desire, yearning and loss? Hmm...

read on...

Ranan's 'Rangeeniyan' at the Beldih Club, Jamshedpur

2011-04-06T08:40:00.000+05:30

Ranan performs Rangeeniyan - a production celebrating the many moods of the seasons and the journey of love - at the Beldih Club, Jamshedpur on 7 April 2011 for an international conference organised by Tata Steel.

Click here for more details on this production.

IN SEARCH OF BALANCE: HOW DO WE STAND? – 28 March 2011

2011-04-01T02:58:00.009+05:30

[Ranan is working towards a new experimental production to premiere in May 2011. Tentatively titled 'Conversations', the production emerges out of a year's work with the Ranan Repertory playing with elements of Kathak, spoken text, music impulses, movement, song and more.

Over the next couple of months this blog will carry rehearsal notes from director Vikram Iyengar, responses from performers / co-creators, photographs and video clips of the creative process - a lot of work flavoured with an indispensable touch of madness!]

A response to a piece of text by Debosmita Roychoudhury – Ranan Repertory member and Brindar student.

- Vikram Iyengar

Debosmita's text:

"The world comprises various diversities. Each race has its own language to connect to the rest of the world. But Art is the only language which is perceived by the whole world as one.
Onto that I hold, Dance is the one through whom I can connect myself to the world.
A little girl who was gifted by the Almighty so well that she couldn’t even stand on her own feet, but dreamt of making a stand among those who touch the sky. Well, that’s me.
It was the word ‘Kathak’ that brought me from being a no one to being a someone.
It was a time when I was too little to even know the meaning of Kathak. But it was the only petrol which could boost my passion. And above all it was the heavenly blessing that all children are entitled to – my mom, who carried me all the way from that dream to reality."


Process Photographs: 28 March 2011

A text from a dancer with one false leg, a text which addresses something that most of us take for granted: how do we stand, how do we balance?

For dancers, for Kathak dancers in particular – how do we stand? Where is the centre of balance for each stance, for each small movement? How and where do we hold our bodies?

I thought of thaat – the intraform unique to Kathak, where the slow pace sees an unfolding of the dancer through typically Kathak poses and graces, defining a very particular concept of the body and its balance. What did the dancers think of when they thought of thaat? Immediately, a technical and telling definition: “daranor bhongi” – ways of ‘standing’. Associations beyond that? A slew of words: precision, peace, patience, sama (the first beat and fulcrum point in a rhythm cycle), nagma (a rendition of the whole time cycle on a musical instrument), therav – how does one translate that – to do with slowness, but not in a negative way: with depth, patience, dignity and maturity, an internalisation of sorts, an inner silence and balance…

And of course, the word that never emerged, but that was a central ingredient – ‘balance’.

Asked the four dancers to separately select five unconnected movements predominantly used in thaat pieces. String them together in a loop. Performed together with the dancers juxtaposed against each other in a cluster, there was already a sense of design, patterns, touches of relationships. But rather technical, almost military like – “we have been told to dance thaat, ours not to reason why…”. What was the sensibility of thaat, hold on to that – regardless of tempo, regardless of music, regardless of the fact that you’re not dancing a full thaat, but just a random snippet. Keep in mind the words we came up with, keep in mind therav…

[Watch related video]

Introduced a loop of music. Nothing at all to do with the world of Kathak, but seemed to me to have a parallel sensibility to thaat – with its fluidity on the one hand and seamlessly worked in pauses and silences on the other. The five movements were placed on this audio framework – immediately there occurred an instinctive equilibrium between music and movement. Now to be aware of the visual relationships, the little stories that the juxtaposition of four dancers created among themselves and with the music – what did the audience read? Which movement of Dancer A seemed to be instigated by a movement from Dancer B? What did a particular movement of Dancer C – only when performed to a specific phrase of music – communicate about her possible relationship with Dancer D?

[Watch related video]

Now suppose we were to perform the same movements to the same music over and over again – starting with 20% of the movement, moving through 40%, 60%, 80%, finally arriving at 100%, the full movement. And then going beyond 150%, 175%, 200%? What does it mean to minimise or expand an accepted dance movement or pose? How far can one push it in either direction? Does it make us think anew about how many muscles and sub-movements and sub-gestures go into each executed movement, where are the balance points, where do we pull to reduce or push out to expand from? Not just think anew, but actually deal with our own bodies which perform for us literally without a second thought. What does it do to our sense of time, our sense of balance, our sense of what is beautiful in dance, what makes dance and what un-makes it … where is that balance for each of us?

- Vikram Iyengar

Crosssings & Equus in Kolkata

2011-03-07T14:56:00.009+05:30

For more information,

email rananindia@gmail.com or call +91-9831256730

Read our regular blog posts:

Crossings: exploring the facets of Lady Macbeth

Thursday, 17 March 2011

Equus: a staging of Peter Shaffer's landmark play

Friday, 18 March 2011

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'VAICHITRA' at the Delhi International Arts Festival: 8 December 2010

2010-12-03T13:14:00.007+05:30

Ranan has been invited to perform on the first day of the Choreography Festival within DIAF 2010. We will present Vaichitra, a collage of Kathak pieces including excerpts from our productions Shunya Se and Rangeeniyan. The dancers are Vikram Iyengar, Sohini Debnath, Samila Bhattacharya and Sreyashi Chakraborty and the lights will be manned by Amlan Chaudhuri.

Venue: Azad Bhavan ICCR, IP Estate, near ITO
Date: Wednesday, 8 December 2010
Time: 6pm

All are welcome.

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"Sheer poetry!"
The Telegraph, Calcutta
September 2005

"A spectacular Kathak performance exploring tradition to modernity in all richness and grace."

The New Indian Express, Thiruvanathapuram

January 2007

Kathak, the classical dance from north India is known for its precise and scintillating pure dance, elegant and subtle grace, and nuanced expressional pieces. The form has also responded exceptionally well to various experiements and interactions. Vaichitra presents Kathak in all this range, richness and innovation.

The selection embraces the gamut including pieces from the traditional Kathak repertoire, innovative and experimental numbers choreographed to a variety of music genres and interacting with a range of other artistic media such as film and visual design, and extracts from Ranan’s acclaimed Kathak productions.

The performance of Vaichitra in Delhi will include excerpts from Ranan's productions, Shunya Se and Rangeeniyan.

The Choreography Festival of DIAF features two groups every evening. Ranan is slotted second on 8 December, and we expect to start our performance around 6.45pm

For further information on DIAF, please visit http://www.diaf.in/diaf2010.html

Friends of Ranan programme

2010-12-02T13:36:00.001+05:30

The Friends of Ranan programme is based on several similar schemes via which performance groups of all shapes and sizes garner support in order to sustain themselves and the arts which they work for. Please follow the link below for details and help
MAKE PERFORMANCE MATTER!

The Friends of Ranan programme

Read on for a list of those who have already pledged their support through this scheme:

Shefali and Sumeet Salwan, Singapore
Carole Paul - Noida, India
Sanjoy and Smitha Roy - Bangalore, India
Sumit Jamuar - London, UK
Prarthana Mitra - London, UK
Joyee Deb - New York, USA / Mumbai, India
Faaeza Jasdanwalla - Aberystwyth, UK / Mumbai, India
Peter George - Thiruvanathapuram, India
Suleena Sapra - New Delhi, India

Join us!

IGNITE - FOURTH AND FINAL AND HIP HIP HURRAH: 13 November 2010

2010-11-14T20:30:00.000+05:30

A large part of the last day of Ignite was dedicated to a Network seminar exploring the needs and possibilities of the dance community in India to create a network amongst themselves. A network that would not look only at the issues we face while creating work on a daily basis – infrastructure, finances, subsidies, sustainability and more – but also at points that facilitate the activity of dance and dancers – policy, representation, support, post-career situations, sharing of information and resources – all of which happen on an occasional basis, but there is no concerted collective voice of the dance community that can speak, stand up and be counted.

Chaired by Sadanand Menon, the morning session presented varied approaches and views on the idea of a network from five different voices and backgrounds: policy researcher Anita Cherian, India Foundation for the Arts Director Anmol Vellani, Asia-Europe Foundation representative Anupama Shekhar, myself as practitioner and director of a performance group, and Sanjna Kapoor as one of the initiators of the India Theatre Forum. In addition there were inputs from several others including Anita Ratnam whose pioneering narthaki.com is a boon for the Indian dance community the world over, and Pooja Sood of the Khoj Artists Collective who shared her experience of a network based in the world of visual arts. In the afternoon session we broke up into five groups and talked about various divisions of a network – assuming one was conceivable, possible, necessary and deserving – such as funding, possible activities, structure interventions in policy, etc. Mr. Jawhar Sarkar – Secretary, Department of Culture – joined us for this session, and his inputs about government policies and plans really underlined for us that this is a potentially very powerful moment for all arts practitioners: where we have a proactive Secretary who is actually personally interested in the furtherance of arts and artists support on the basis of what the community expresses as needs, rather than what often disconnected government committees may decide. And while the two sessions obviously did not result in the miraculous formation of a utopian dance network, several questions have been tabled, discussed and provoked. And that’s a start that we – as a community – need to take forward. The ball really is in our court – we can’t carry on blaming the rest of the world for not looking after us without asking the very basic questions of what we have done to look after ourselves or deserve support in the first place!

Being very much a part of this seminar meant I missed out on the two masterclasses by Chris Lechner and also the second Emerging Artists Showcase. Once again, though, a dancer friend told me that she was severely disappointed having seen the latter, and that – again – it was very Gati Residency led. Gati needs to understand that decisions like this will only undermine its own reputation and the reputation of the festival as serious, non-partisan concerns committed to the development and furtherance of a contemporary dance culture in India. I refuse to believe that there are no interesting and dynamic young choreographers in the rest of the country – choreographers who have never had anything to do with Gati and maybe never even heard of them, but who are working in their own spheres and forging fresh ideas and pathways. This is something that absolutely must be addressed if the credibility of Ignite is to grow from strength to strength.

Preethi Athreya, Sweet Sorrow

The first performance I did see was Preethi Athreya’s Sweet Sorrow, which I had missed it when she brought it to Calcutta in September. It was an absolutely quirky delight! With kinds and levels of sorrow as her starting point, Preethi crafted a tapestry of movement and sound which played with juxtaposing tempos in various ways. Several sections were performed in silence or to the beat of a metronome. Playing with projections intelligently, we were often brought up short with subtle choices: what we assumed was her shadow carried on moving or started moving out of time with her all of a sudden, and then returned to being ‘part of her body’. I confess that I did find the short section early on with a chair as suddenly lacking in energy and purpose, but that was the only moment when I felt disconnected. She made brilliant use of the Bharatnatyam technique as well, and the deliciously dead-pan manner in which she managed to make self-deprecating fun of how Bharatnatyam is often ‘explained’ today through enacting gesture with words existed side by side with the heartache of loss that the form can truly touch and evoke in the most authentic manner. Distilling the form down to interpret a well known ‘item’ of Bharatnatyam to just beats of the feet in aramandi and the simplest of hand movements brought me face to face with those moments when one is struck dumb with a utter despair and shock, and yet internally railing, raving and tearing ones hair in agonised rage. I have rarely seen such an internal, personal emotion expressed so powerfully without using the external indicators of emotion that Indian classical dance does so well. It was moving and amusing, and did not take itself self-importantly seriously – which is so often my problem with ‘experimental’ or ‘contemporary’ dance (several examples of which were thrust upon us in the name of Emerging Choreography at this very festival).

The last performance of the festival, though, disappointed me: Incident Compromised by Sudesh Adhana along with a Norwegian acrobat. The premise of the idea of prisons and imprisonment was an interesting point of departure, and Sudesh first conceived and created this work when he was a student of Contemporary Dance in Oslo. The piece, unfortunately, has remained a good student piece showing no signs of coming of age. There was a lot of bumping around, butting each other and violent acrobatics and a fair amount of tongue-in-cheek humour performed engagingly enough, no doubt. But there was also a huge amount of aimless walking about and lack of specificity and focus apart from the gratuitous rope work that I’m quite tired of now. And not even rope work that would wow anyone – rather tired stuff. A friend of mine from a theatre background asked me, quite rightly, after the show suddenly decided to end (it was as if they said, okay enough of dribbling football now. I’ve got to get home): “So when does movement become dance?” Or choreography, for that matter. I’ve seen spectacular and beautifully moving work with circus acrobats crafted and choreographed by performance directors, work that had clarity of thought and direction which is what makes it theatre (or dance) rather than just circus virtuosity. Everyone knows of Cirque du Soleil, for example. And this work is just two guys playing around and dabbling in stuff they know. Not that I expect them to be like Cirque du Soleil – Sudesh is just starting out – but I saw no acknowledgment or attempt to actually progress from a cool and forgivably superficial student project into something more with more depth of intent and exploration in content, form and performance. Speaking to Sudesh before I had seen his work, he said he was always interested in finding new movement languages for every project depending on impulse and response. That’s all very fine, but WHO are you then? What is your identity? There must be something – if not a choreographic stamp, then a philosophy, politics, intellectual approach… something that develops and evolves and that defines how and why you work from piece to piece. Otherwise it becomes the dance version of carpetbaggers.

The climax and great highlight of the post-festival part at Max Mueller Bhavan was a comic turn by the inimitable Maya Rao. Forty-five minutes of stand up comedy where she took off on Shobana Jeyasingh and her company in particular, with generous references to Navtej, Preethi, Sudesh and others – who were all there and rolling about with laughter. I’m not going to try and describe it – comedy is never funny unless you were actually there to experience it. But it was a wonderful choice to end the festival. There is such a danger in getting caught up in the idea of importance and taking one’s work seriously – I’ve already said this is a malaise I see in much of new work in dance. And ending on this note of hilarity helped us both let our hair down at the end of a packed four days, and keep our work as artists in perspective. A little poking fun and caricaturing never hurt anyone!

All in all, though, Ignite has been a wonderful and incredibly important moment in the recent history of dance in India, and we cannot let that go. It has to grow, morph, travel year to year, and place to place with regularity and openness. It can truly be a vital catalyst in opening up more avenues in how we think, create, perform and view dance in India today.

Congratulations Gati! You deserve all the kudos you are getting.

THIRD DAY AT IGNITE – TWO THUMBS UP, ONE DOWN: 12 November 2010

2010-11-13T08:14:00.000+05:30

A short day for me today at Ignite. I went in only in the afternoon missing the morning paper presentations. Post-lunch, moderated a conversation with Padmini Chettur, Veena Basavarajaiah and Sudesh Adhana. Since the last has not shown his work yet, it was really difficult for the audience to engage with him, and most of the questions at the end of the session went – understandably and most deservedly – to Padmini, touching on questions of tautness and tension, audience behaviour, whether a choreographer’s note is necessary or not… all to do with her work, but many also questions surrounding the performance, perception and development of an Indian contemporary dance.

Fabian Barba -
'A Mary Wigman Dance Evening'

We were then in for an unexpected and utterly absorbing presentation by the Ecuadorian choreographer-performer Fabian Barba. Fabian has been fascinated by the works of Mary Wigman, one of the pioneers of German Expressionist and Abstract Dance in the 1920s. Fabian has reconstructed nine of her solo pieces through references to very limited video material, photographs Wigman’s own writing and writings by others, and training with three living choreographers who have worked with Mary Wigman – one of them being Susanne Linke. The ambiance of the period was aptly created by three dim chandeliers in the intimate British Council auditorium. Each piece was performed in a single light state and, along with the recreated costumes and somehow scratchy music (the original pieces Wigman used), really managed to set a tone of the time. I was transported to the ear of silent film. Little touches like the graceful and grave bows at the end of each piece were lovely. A brief post show conversation threw up some interesting connections from the audience – specifically from Sunil Kothari and Sadanand Menon. Zohra Segal had met Mary Wigman in

Germany

and began working with her. She later joined Uday Shankar – also a friend of Wigman. Madame Menaka of

India

was working at the same time and they had both met in

Germany

as well. And of course, the ‘new’ dances being created in Europe and

America

at that time by the likes of Wigman, Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis – a rejection of the stately classical ballet and an embracing of a more earthy, meditative movement – were all inspired by a highly exoticised idea of India, and collectively called ‘Hindu Dances’.

Post this, however, I was appalled by the next presentation. British Council has a large walled in courtyard – with a sculpture at one end and two wide and high passageways leading through the surrounding building on two sides. The fourth side is the main building from where we emerge into the courtyard. Rajyashree Ramamurthi had created what she called a ‘site-specific’ performance in this space, hanging tiny bells in one passageway and what looked like fairy lights in the other, and making a trail of white footprints from the sculpture to the bells to the lights…. Over and above anything else, my question is – what makes a work site specific? Having done some amount of such work with a couple of the most experimental directors in Europe, my understanding is that it must in some way come out of what the space gives you, demands – your response to the physicality and the ‘ghosts’ of the space. Therefore a site-specific piece demands and assumes a conversation with a space that affects the everyday perception of it. Hanging bells does no such thing and choosing to dance – no, let me rephrase that to choosing to move convulsively – now in front of the sculpture, now in one passageway… without so much as a second glance at the space itself is absolute nonsense. How is it essentially any different then, than Parsee theatre companies performing before drop scenes? It is actually – at least the scenes acted out in front of specific drop scenes take place in the locations depicted: they wouldn’t use a drop scene of a palace when a deer hunt in a deep forest was in progress. It was by far the most self-indulgent and shallow work I’ve seen so far at Gati – not that I could bring myself to see all of it. Never mind content or form – there was no energy for me to respond to as an audience as she staggered and fell along her path to God Knows Where and What and Why! A contemporary dancer friend and myself escaped to the canteen. ‘Dull’, I said – trying to be polite. ‘Dullness I can stand’, she retorted. ‘It’s the complete randomness of it that gets me’. True, too true!!!

Aditi Mangaldas Dance Company -
'Timeless'

The evening ended on an upward curve with Aditi Mangaldas’ Timeless – exploring time. Time is a brow-beaten theme and point of departure for every Kathak dancer doing traditional or experimental work, and I can’t say there was anything really new or exciting about her interpretation and exploration of Time. It became – as is the norm in Kathak – all about rhythmic complexities and interplay and a show of virtuosity. Be that as it may, it was performed with élan, style and energy – though a little more thought to the graph of the pace would have been nice. Other than an evocative beginning shrouded in mystery and minimal movement, the piece rarely dropped from a frenetic pace. Spins, footwork, bol parhant, live pakhawaj playing, sharpness, staccato moves, flamboyance – all the usual suspects of Kathak were out in scintillating force coupled with a superbly timed and specific light design. My favourite moments though were Aditi-di’s solo. Performed to two repeated lines of a thumri sung in alaap by the inimitable Shubha Mudgal (one of the rare drops in pace), it reminded me yet again why she is such a brilliant performer. Alone on stage – and she is as petite as you can get – she filled the space with even the most subtle movements of the fingers. It was sheer poetry, and I for one would have loved to have seen more of it rather than the display Kathak has become so known and feted for.

So two thumbs up, and one thumb way down. Not a bad day at all!

SECOND DAY AT IGNITE – HO-HUM AND PADMINI CHETTUR: 11 November 2010

2010-11-12T01:47:00.002+05:30

Padmini Chettur's Pushed

Hmm! An uninspiring day at best and a ‘what-were-the-organisers-thinking!’ day at worst. But rounded off by an extraordinarily powerful performance by the Padmini Chettur Dance Company from Chennai – I forgave everything after that experience!

Began the morning by sitting in on a ridiculously short masterclass by Shobana Jeyasingh and her company – a mere 90 minutes while ideally it should have been at least double that. Not surprising then that the session was a bit tepid and structured more as a ‘have a taste’ kind of teaching workshop than a masterclass.. Didn’t really get to enter or engage with any questions of creative process or impulse that the company work with. In fact, an observer observed (!) to me that, considering this was her first visit to India, she would have expected the session – short as it was – to be structured keeping in mind the culturally different but also deeply connected histories.

We did try to address some of these in the conversation with Shobana later at Max Mueller Bhavan. The conversation was moderated by Jyoti Argade (scholar, lecturer, and producer from London) and myself. But this too was painfully short – 45 minutes, though we dragged it to about an hour. That was just enough to touch on some of the issues surrounding Shobana’s work process, impulses, and contribution to dance in the UK but not enough to probe or provoke a deeper, more thoughtful and enlightening discussion. I spoke to some people after the conversation, and there were several unresolved issues on the one hand and also unsettling questions for the choreographer on the other. Several people echoed my own hesitancies about the company – wowed as I was by the sheer physicality and technique of their work – and such conversations should provide space to respectfully bring up some of these. It’s not just an opportunity to hear the choreographer out and applaud, but also to give her honest and constructive audience feedback – something I gained tremendously from at the ‘Meet the Director’ session at the NSD festival in January this year. Something for Gati to keep in mind for next time.

The screening session later in the afternoon showcased some little seen work – but also some downright self-indulgent stuff – in my book, at least. Thankfully, these ones were short! An unexpected treat arrived in the form of two cheeky and dour films by Britain based dancer-performer Hitain Patel.

The 4.30pm session at the LTG auditorium – smelling awfully of kerosene for some odd reason – featured the first set of Emerging Choreographers. Here Gati is to be questioned. Out of the three choreographer’s presented – Lokesh Bharadwaj, Veena Basavarajaiah and Post Natyam Collective – the first two presented self-performed solos created at the Gati Summer Dance Residency earlier this year. Participating in the Gati Residency should not be a recommendation to get into a Gati-organised festival of this nature and stature (at least stature that it should aspire to) – especially when the two pieces were pedestrian at best. Apart from the installation of bulbs in the first piece and the intelligent light design in the second, I don’t think I came away with anything. In fact, Cynthia Ling Lee’s (of Post Natyam Collective) delightfully mischievous and sprightly solo – Rude, huh? – was the one bright and enjoyable spot in otherwise dull (and even self-indulgent) fare. If these are among the best Emerging Choreographers India has to offer, that’s very sad indeed!

Another surprising disappointment was Navtej Singh Johar’s solo, Grey is Also a Colour. I usually love Navtej’s work. As a dancer he is magnificent, and his understanding of the abhinaya of Bharatnatyam inspires and urges him to create wonderfully evocative and emotional work. Combining yoga, Bharatnatyam and touches of contemporary dance, his productions – for me – have been truly path breaking AND soul-stirring. But today Navtej presented a more dance and theatre piece, where he was speaking on stage, which just did not work for either for me or for others in the audience who share my passion for his dance work. In fact, the most potent sections for me were those when he sat quietly totally inhabiting a subtle movement or expression.

And now let me be clichéd and quote Shakespeare – “All’s Well That Ends Well” – to describe an anything but clichéd, mind-blowing and powerful performance by the Padmini Chettur Dance Company – Pushed. As I entered the hall, someone behind me said, ‘her work is slow, wonderfully slow’. I didn’t know whether he was being sarcastic or actually complimentary. I admit, I walked in with trepidation having heard so many good and bad responses to Padmini’s work. I’ve only seen some bits she has shown on DVD, and enjoyed working with her in a short workshop situation in Calcutta last year. But I could see even from these short interactions that it was not my kind of work at all – and it still isn’t. And yet what depth of beauty it had! Yes, it was slow, but it pulled me in. It drew me with a force that I cannot articulate into a measured, meditative, moody world of gradually forming and dissolving images. Her choreography has a precision that the Swiss would be envious of – and I’m not talking just timing here, which is difficult enough considering the music had no recognisable markers of rhythm or time. Precision; brave, astonishing and deceptive simplicity; gentle fluidity; forceful power; and immense focus and poise. All contributing to a strange rollercoaster ride – one that was slow often to the point of being stationery, and yet ruthlessly and poetically dynamic. Every movement, every choreographic decision was so deliberate and detailed down to the swish of the feet on the floor and the intricate, yet almost invisible changes in timing – it was masterful! I felt as if I was at a Noh performance: where the slowness and control of each little gesture, each created sound weaves its own web of attraction for the audience. But it is a performance that demands as much of the audience as it does of the performers: intense concentration, the end result being that you emerge from the experience both exhausted and exhilarated.

I happily forgive everything else today and thank Gati wholeheartedly for gifting me an experience so precious, so pure, so pleasurable.

WATCHING THE SHOBANA JEYASINGH DANCE COMPANY: 10 November 2010

2010-11-11T09:02:00.002+05:30

Kicking off the Ignite Festival at Kamani Auditorium yesterday evening, Anusha Lall – Festival Director – put things in perspective. Ignite, she said, was a festival centred on contemporary ‘Indian’ dance – both by artists from within India and abroad. All the artists and performances engage with Indian-ness in a variety of ways: either experimenting with traditional forms, or forging connections with other cultures/countries or – as in the case of Shobana Jeyasingh (though this is not the only thread that draws her in) – working with Asian/Indian experience in a different culture, drawing on forms both remembered and found.

Shobana Jeyasingh is a dance icon in the UK. And unfortunately, though I lived there for three years, I was in Wales – far away from the dance circuit that her company moves in. So never had the opportunity to see her work. But hear about it constantly, I did. And this is her first tour to India since she set up her company in 1988. By training she is a Bharatnatyam dancer, who moved from Chennai to London. But her work situates itself squarely in a very different socio-cultural and political experience. The double bill we were witness to yesterday – Faultline and Bruise Blood – are both inspired by extremely unusual – even harsh – triggers for dance as we in India would see it.

Triggers: this is the first thing that struck me about her work when Anusha contacted me last month asking me to lead a conversation with Shobana Jeyasingh after the performance (a couple of hours from now actually). Her starting points for both pieces are Asian/Otherness experiences in so-called multicultural societies. Faultline is a response to Gautam Malkani’s “vivid portrayal of disaffected British youth” in his novel Londonstani. Bruise Blood has as it’s starting a point a line taken from the testimony of a wrongly arrested Black man during race riots: ‘I had to open up the bruise and let some of the bruise blood come out to show them…’. Both very strong impulses for any sort of performance.

Secondly – form. Watching her work, I was struck by the seamlessness of the choreography and the ease with which it was performed – the former a credit to how she constructs work, and the latter a credit to her brilliant ensemble of 8 dancers. The work is remarkably physical and must be exhausting to perform. It’s rough, raw, edgy – perhaps the themes demand it – and involves an enormous amount of physical contact and supporting of each other’s weight, but not at all in the display sort of way that Ballet would perform it. Here, one gets more of a sense of disturbing and potentially dangerous encounters between physical beings and mental attitudes. Woven in are sudden snatches of Bharatnatyam phrases – but again not performed as ‘Hey, look I can do Bharatnatyam too’ (which is often the case in a lot of crossover dance) – but as an integral part of a movement pattern that tries to express an extreme of suffocated desperation. There is constant conflict in the breathless pace of both pieces – conflict and challenge, the dancers somehow conveying a feeling of existing on the edge of a precipice. Would violence erupt if they were given another push, or would they set their teeth and give in to their lot? Though speaking to a Delhi-based performance director after the show, he did say he had seen far more violent performance work including dance on these themes: he in fact referred to these performances as comparatively “polite”. Not having seen the others, I can’t comment.

Having seen a lot of contemporary dance where the content and it’s relation to the resulting form are both too abstract or obscure for me to grasp, the obvious relationship between the impulses and performance here were fascinating. The three male performers who led Faultline were impeccable – and the punctuations of poses and posing of young men in dead-end situations spoke volumes even about disaffected youth we see in our own cities let alone the UK. Personally, I felt more connected to this piece than Faultline – both due to the content, perhaps, and the fact that the form – I felt – worked better (or expressed the essential content better?) than in Bruise Blood. The latter, to me, took some time to get off the ground, so to speak.

Lastly – and very quickly since I have to leave – the music. The soundscape for both pieces is absolutely astonishing. Shobana Jeyasingh’s choice of music – a soaring live and recorded soprano for Faultline and a percussive, Black street music feel Beatboxing for Bruise Blood (again performed live) – would fill pages of analysis in itself. Both the choices are so specifically made and feed the dance so much (and vice versa). This to is so different from my limited experience of contemporary dance where often I have felt the music incidental to the movement and performance – something that Indian classical dancers have a very hard time conceiving or appreciating. In fact, another comment I heard was that the music was stronger than the dance. But I’ll leave that in the air as a provocation!

Yesterday’s experience throws up so many questions about Shobana Jeyasingh’s creative and thought process – both intellectually and in the studio with the dancers. I hope to have some of them addressed by her today in the very short time we have to converse with her. It’ll be up on the blog tomorrow!

IGNITE FESTIVAL, DELHI: DAY 1 - ARRIVAL

2010-11-10T17:35:00.001+05:30

[Vikram Iyengar - Artistic Director of Ranan - writes a daily update on the Ignite Festival of Contemporary dance, Delhi]

ARRIVING AT IGNITE: 10 November 2010

I landed at Delhi just past 9am and – with Paromita Saha of Sapphire Creations Dance Workshop, who had wisely pre-booked a taxi – navigated through terrible airport traffic to arrive at the Ignite Festival Hub at Max Mueller Bhavan, Kasturba Gandhi Marg. I have a soft spot for MMB’s: the Calcutta one has always welcomed me in for as long as I can remember, and the atmosphere of openness, at-home-ness and come-and-make-yourself-comfortable-ness has been no different at MMB Bangalore and Delhi the few times I have visited them. And if the atmosphere at the Hub is anything to go by, they have obviously welcomed Ignite and Gati as their own with open arms.

Walking in through a polite and completely non-intrusive security, we came upon the lawn and café space at the back of the white bungalow that is MMB, Delhi, flanked on the far side by the glassed in Library. It was as if I was walking into a college canteen – so many young people chatting at the tables, enjoying the café fare. And on the lawn preparations for Ignite: a bamboo structure with oversized wind chimes, a reception table set up with laptops, the Ignite team – Anusha, Mandeep, Ewa, Harriet, Abanti – all overseeing things and, simultaneously drawing fresh arrivals effortlessly into the spirit of things. AND takhats with thick gaddas being laid out covered with black spreads and seasoned with plump red cushions. One couldn’t imagine a more generous and clear invitation to let your hair down, relax, enjoy, imbibe, eat drink, chat, exchange, discuss, debate… already I feel the vibe of the festival. It’s young at heart, it’s accessible, it’s approachable, it’s varied – and though we’ve barely stepped into it – it’s organised! When was I last at a dance event in this country which brought together all this with the quintessential air of a mela? Probably never!

WHY DANCE: a response to Ranan's adda with Janet Smith of Scottish Dance Theatre

2010-11-08T23:39:00.002+05:30

Ranan Repertory Member Lav Kanoi writes his impressions of our adda with Janet Smith of SDT on 18 October 2010, throwing up several questions that bear thinking about.

Why dance?

It’s too damned hard, requires too much training, and too few can do it.
One loses the beat, trips and despairs. What is the point?

Janet Smith, Artistic Director of the Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) would give you several: dance uplifts, inspires, transforms lives; it keeps you fit, gets you moving. And contrary to popular belief, anyone can try it.

For example, Caroline Bowditch, SDT’s ‘Dance Agent for Change’ is wheel chair bound, but boy can she dance!

Inspiring images of Caroline Bowditch were shown by Janet Smith, who is no less inspiring herself, in an adda session with Ranan. Amanda Chinn, General Manager of the SDT, was also present and provided unfailing support to Janet Smith’s narrative about the SDT, dance history, contemporary dance, and Dundee.

Perhaps this is not quite the place to comment on the history of western dance, or the earthy (grr!) masculinity of Scottish Highland Dance versus the refined femininity of Classical Ballet, or how they may be synthesised in contemporary dance.

For starters, I’m no expert. However other questions that were raised in the adda will interest the specialist or the amateur: If “dance keeps you fit, gets you moving,” why not just do, say, aerobics instead?

Dance, you may say, is beautiful.
But what is beauty?

You wouldn’t be the only one asking such a question. Janet Smith asked it, for example, and contemporary dance asked it of classical dance, and posits very different answers. What’s more, contemporary dance, says Janet Smith, asks questions about, and prods people into, investigating what it means to be alive today. (That’s another reason to dance.)

This is no abstract goal, and the goals are set higher than one might think. One definite item on the SDT’s things-to-do list is to revive the city of Dundee (which city, by the by, said Janet Smith, has jute links with Calcutta): Janet Smith and the SDT will use art to revive their city of Dundee.

This is an admirable goal, and we wish SDT every success. On a theoretical plane, however, is this the point to art, or specifically to dance? Must art/dance carry out social service to be considered valuable? On the other hand, if an art or its practice could be of substantial material service to society, would it be a lesser art? Are art and social service incompatible?

Would it be art if it were entirely contained within itself, alienating audiences by an obsessive self-experimentation? For Janet Smith, how does the dancer do something very new, without at the same time alienating an uninitiated audience; how does one find the balance between audience and experimentation? Is it possible to direct the mind and attention of the audience: say, have them look at a performers feet, or the way a finger twitches?

Of course, an audience’s attention can be focussed by diverse stage devices like lighting, costume, blocking or even dialogue. The idea isn’t so much as to plant an exact thought in the rasika’s mind (I prefer this term to ‘audience’ or ‘spectator’ ever since our adda about the Nātyashāstra with Smt Vandana Alase Hazra) as to stimulate any response.

In dance, there is something for the dancer/performer and for the viewer/audience. Perhaps this is why the term ‘rasika’ (nagari: रसिक) is so attractive. It could mean both the performer and also the audience. Perhaps both the dancer as well as the viewer are the rasikas of a dance performance. In this sense also, dance is inclusive: it involves Janet Smith and you and me.

Perhaps you, reader, will share your ideas on art and society, dance versus choreography.

And we might end with adapting an old proverb: those who wish to dance always find a beat.

Click here for photographs of the adda with Janet Smith

Responses to screening of Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' for Ranan Repertory

2010-10-31T22:25:00.005+05:30

Indrani Roy Misra and Katy Roy - regular guests at Ranan events and screenings at repertory sessions - on the Ranan Repertory session where we watched Matthew Bourne's version of Swan Lake at Ranan, 27 October 2010, preceded by a brief discussion on ballet in general and Bourne's work in that context.

"It’s the other face of a swan. It’s another face of ballet. A tale yes, but without the ‘fairy story’. It is down to earth. Downright beautiful and unforgettable. Mathew Bourne has turned the story of Swan Lake on its head without losing either the balance or the magic."

[Indrani Roy Misra]

"Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. What? Really? You mean the one with the all male swans? Seriously? I read about it somewhere in the last century and was intrigued. Then I watched the film Billy Eliot ; the brief glimpse right at the end of The Swan, leaping on to the stage to Tchaikovsky’s familiar music – how exciting, how I would love to see this."

[Katy Lai Roy]

INDRANI ROY MISRA

It’s the other face of a swan. It’s another face of ballet. A tale yes, but without the ‘fairy story’. It is down to earth. Downright beautiful and unforgettable. Mathew Bourne has turned the story of Swan Lake on its head without losing either the balance or the magic. It’s contemporary without being disdainful of the past. It is different not for the sake of change in style, but for the change of perspective as per today’s scenario.

The Prince is there. The Queen is there. All the royal trappings are there. Along with the feeling of being trapped. In pointless tradition. In suffocating form. With truncated freedom.

Mathew Bourne tells the story of a prince, not that of a cursed princess who’s turned into a swan. It is the story of a prince cursed by customs of royalty who longs for the freedom of a swan.

The swans in this Swan Lake don’t just glide along gracefully, pining for freedom. These swans show the strength of their muscles, they flap their wings in protest. . They are no pushovers. They make their power felt. And this is how.

Mathew Bourne doesn’t use a magic wand. He uses imagination. In story telling. In choreography. In the use of Tchaikovsky’s hauntingly beautiful music.

This Swan Lake tells the tale of today’s Prince Charming, saddled with do’s and don’ts, lonely to the point of desperation, preyed upon by the paparazzi, with no freedom of choice. Bourne tells this tragic tale with subtle humour. It is satiric in every step of the queen, every jut of her chin, every move of her regal head and every look of her eye. The drama is revealed convincingly through the dance movements and the use of the body and facial expressions.

The sculpted body of the prince in all its muscular strength is contrasted by the look in his eyes. Confused, lost, yearning for the comfort of love and a taste of freedom. His attempts at breaking the law only to be pulled back, summararily by the authority of the queen and the system, has its own tragicomic nuances. While you laugh at the situation you cry for the prince.

This Swan Lake is male-centric. The men are shown at their physical best. The dances, the pirouettes, the hands and feet, the formations, the synchrony, the totality of it all leaves you breathless with its energy . Even the shadows are drawn into the mesmeric choreography!

It depicts the plight of a caged man surrounded by swans who are men. With strong instincts. Who can, at will, fly into the open sky. The stifled prince, in his gilded cage can break free only in death.

You don’t miss the fragile, ethereal beauteous swans at all. You are transfixed with the power of these swans. They may not be delicate, but they are spellbinding….

The use of contemporary costumes instead of tights and tutus hardly seems out of place.

The dancers twist and turn and tango as flowingly and airily as if the costumes were of no consequence. They leap into the air and turn on their toes dressed in gowns and suits and shoes, with utmost grace and abandon!

The sets are grand as the setting demands, but not fussy. Bold and minimal, yet forceful - a telling picture.

The music is used discerningly, portions repeated to highlight a situation. To make a mosaic of moods rather than depict a straightforward story through a series of cadences.

The dream like Swan Lake has broken out of its picture perfect frame into Mathew Bourne’s 3D rendition, through drama, definite delineation and a certain distinction between truth and beauty.

That was a sigh. This is a tug at the heartstrings.

KATY LAI ROY

Wednesday, October 27, 2010:- a Ranan film evening. Always interesting and stimulating. The discussions can go anywhere. And to watch Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. What? Really? You mean the one with the all male swans? Seriously? I read about it somewhere in the last century and was intrigued. Then I watched the film Billy Eliot ; the brief glimpse right at the end of The Swan, leaping on to the stage to Tchaikovsky’s familiar music – how exciting, how I would love to see this.

And now I find that Vikram Iyengar had this DVD up his sleeve, but under his hat, all these years!!

So first, over cups of tea, we shared our layperson’s impressions of conventional ballet. The ballerinas on points, the men in tights doing impossible leaps, lifting and supporting the prima ballerina. Stylised facial expressions, delicate dancing, formal posture. The romantic and fantasy depiction of a story drawn from distant legends. Remote. Idealized.

Then we watched some conventional Swan Lake ballet. It’s almost a cliché. Say “ballet” to most people, Swan Lake comes to mind. We all know the moonlit lake, rows of ethereal swan maidens in white tutus, the poses of the pas de deux, the cygnets’ playful formations, the ballroom with the dances from different countries, the black swan, the dying swan….

Revelation Number 1

It’s not a cliché! It’s many ballet companies using the same music and inspired by the same choreographic text, by Petipa, was it? That’s why it’s all so familiar!

Then we watched Matthew Bourne’s version for Adventures in Motion Pictures. I’m still in a blissful state of shock.

Revelation Number 2

A known piece of classical music can be re-interpreted to mirror contemporary society. Characters added, subtracted, stories rewritten. A satire even, commenting on paparazzi, royal families, rigid protocols, dysfunctional families, even a sort of send up of ballet, in the play within the play.

Revelation Number 3

Contemporary dancers can also be powerful actors, expressing with their faces and their bodies much more detail, characterization, emotion than I have ever expected from conventional ballet….the young cadet’s swagger, the Girlfriend’s class difference from the Royals, so many small touches in minor and major characters. The unfolding facets of the Queen’s character was brilliantly expressed by Fiona Chadwick.

Revelation Number 4

Swan Lake without ballet shoes or points! Tchaikovsky in high heels, doing Elvis, disco, in Fred and Ginger routines; did not look incongruous. Brilliant concept, sharply presented.

Revelation Number 5

Vikram had told us to look out for this…especially at the ball, each bit of the dance took the story forward, not just another set piece showcasing a dancer’s ability.

Revelation Number 6

Oh my god, the swans. When you actually think about it, swans are not fragile slender creatures. They can be vicious, territorial and fierce. The athleticism of the swans reminded me of good male Bharat Natyam dancers I have seen, graceful, dramatic, powerful.

Revelations Number 7, 8, 9 and 10

Adam Cooper as The Swan. At the lake he was elusive and enigmatic; he was a non human, wild creature, not tameable. As the Black Swan/Stranger, we immediately understood him because of the contemporary context, and then by his amazing dancing and acting. This was the most opposite I have ever seen between the White and Black Swans …the Black Swan expressed all the latent cruelty and danger that I’ve never seen from any Odile in black tutu.

And after seeing Adam Cooper, oh yes the Prince probably was a good dancer too, I wouldn’t know, I wasn’t watching!

I wish our two Alan Strangs could have seen this; they would have sat at the edge of their chairs throughout, as I did. Are you listening, Shadab and Lav? Call Vikram at once.

'ADDA AT RANAN' - Creating Dance: Content, Context, Confluence

2010-10-05T22:14:00.005+05:30

As part of INTERFACE 2010 - the biennial performance festival presented by Sapphire Creations Dance Workshop - Ranan hosted an adda with performance scholars, critics and participating artists - - Sadanand Menon (performance scholar) - Sunil Kothari (dance critic) - Jacek Luminski (dancer/choreographer from Poland) The varied adda audience and participants comprised dancers, critics, students, musicians and others. Click the image for photographs.

Sadanand Menon's opening comments:

This is a very, very comfortable size of a group for us to have a conversation. The idea itself is fantastic – to have these meetings and informal gatherings. It’s as important as working with the body – working with the mind, sharing ideas. And obviously even more important than just writing. I’ve been peripherally part of the dance world for some years, and the general experience is that there is a lot of conversation behind people’s backs – but nothing in front. And that is very, very important for anything positive to develop. Unfortunately the media scene in

India

at the moment does not encourage too much reflection around arts practice, whether fine art, literary art or performing art. So we’re left to ourselves to discuss our own work. It’s not in the newspapers, and publications are few and far between. We don’t really have a sufficient bank of Indian scholars who are reflecting on Indian dance. Much writing on Indian dance in the last five years has been happening abroad. We are in that kind of a context. So in this context, the theme that has been proposed of looking at the creating of dance, trying to understand the beginning point is very important.

At one of the seminars that we had in Jorasanko, Jacek Luminski had an interesting point. There were five of us from the Indian context, and he was listening but not being able to participate. So I asked him at the end, “what did you think of it?” He said, “It was interesting, but I’m not able to get an idea of what is your concept of the body.” And that should be the starting point for anybody in the performing arts: what is the concept of the body? Where do you start out, where do you place yourself? Does one understand the source of movement? You put your hand out – where is that movement beginning? You must know.

The creation of dance in

India

has had a strange kind of a politics and history in the last roughly 100 years, and that is linked to the national movement, that is linked to the need to create a sort of authentic Indian art… it has that kind of a complicated history. With the result that certain shortcuts have happened. When you want to make a dance revert to available material, available repertoire, you have mostly mythological narrative, storytelling through dance. So these narratives became the foundations for making dance. All this together created what I would call a rather unthinking procession of productions. The type of ballets that were done in Kalakshetra – Kalakshetra is

India

’s first and biggest dance institution in Chennai, where every year they train around 300 dancers. The themes for the ballets were invariably from the Ramayana, or from other mythological sources. The question would be, why the Ramayana? Why couldn’t have it been something more connected to that time? But this emerged as the most appropriate thing for the new Indian vision that was emerging, the new middle class… the most comfortable thing. And subsequently all the solo dancers have also followed that path.

So when you come to the contemporary moment, that is the post 1980s roughly, the question of content began to be something to deal with. I remember in my association with Chandralekha, this is something that occupied her mind in a very dense way. She used to narrate a very interesting story about her own arangetram in an auditorium full of very, very important people. This was during a great water famine in Andhra Pradesh. At one point she came to this abhinaya piece where the sakhis are talking about the return of Krishna from Vrindavan to Mathura. And everyone is very happy, they are cleaning the village, decorating their houses, they go to the Jamuna and collect water … and she is enacting this whole thing. She is playing the sakhis who are sprinkling water, and then in one flash of a second in her mind the thought broke, that here I am playing this abundance of water on stage through my art, but the context is water famine. What am I doing? She said, at that moment I became a split person. My dance continued, I must have broken it for a split fraction of a second. Nobody in the audience would have caught it, but my guru caught me. But that split between the beauty and sensuality of art and the harshness of reality … how to bring these two together?

And this became later her search for a different content, not the narrative, mythological content. Each production was abstract, the themes were non-linear, there wasn’t sequential story-telling. It was like breaking that strain of Bharatnatyam which is inherited. So this question of where does one begin became a very important point. It was very interesting how she was linking whatever was happening in her life with what she put on stage, her own preoccupations. They could be political preoccupations, community preoccupations, environmental concerns, they could be artistic and aesthetic concerns, but it wasn’t that life is separate and art is separate. There was an attempt to bring the two together.

Many of you may not know that we had a rather unhappy episode with the Tamil Nadu police for about 7-8 months, when they decided to charge both Chandralekha and me with sedition. We went to the court, it became a cause celebre, and this that and the other. And because that charge was sedition – today I can talk about it in a jocular way – but at that time it was chilling. Because sedition is not an ordinary case – it can fetch you the ultimate punishment. And there was a condition imposed that you had to go to the Magistrate’s Court every two weeks, and the atmosphere there is very brutal. So Chandra would come back and look very crumpled. She was known for her radiance and her personality, but at that period she was looking very crumpled. I said, look at yourself in the mirror. People world over come to you for inspiration, what is this. She said, what you’re saying is right. And that day she picked up the phone and called her nattuvanar saying, please come – I want to start my dance practice again. And she made Shree. In Shree there is a whole sequence of women whose backs are broken, who look like they are crawling and then the whole attempt to regain the spine. She said, that’s my story. When that court case happened, I lost my spine. There was a chill in my spine, the fear had entered my bones. Not that she was afraid politically, but the brutality of the whole thing, the ugly world into which she was thrown. And the only way she could recover it was to work with the body. And it was so powerful, that the group of nine dancers we worked with got it immediately – just that transmission ‘recover your spine’.

So how do you begin, what do you work with, what is the material that you have? I know for a fact that many of you who are working with new dance today in

India

are very young people. So this search: what am I looking for, what is my material? Because as far as technique is concerned, as far as form is concerned, as far as stagecraft is concerned that will come. But if you don’t have content, already you’re lost. And the search for content will have to begin with this basic question – how do I look at the body? What are the principles with which you understand your body? Ideas like weight, balance, gravity, lightness – very simple ideas, but begin from there and from there new content will emerge.

[More excerpts from the transcript will follow soon. We would welcome responses.]

'Adda at Ranan': The Lost Art of Dastangoi - photographs and comments

2010-09-19T12:32:00.001+05:30

Photographs by Indudipa Sinha

Mahmood Farooqui, Anusha Rizvi and Danish Hussain visited Calcutta for the first time with their acclaimed rendition of Dastangoi on Sunday, 12 September 2010. Their presentation formed the concluding evening of The New Festival at The Park Hotel.

The following afternoon, Ranan hosted the trio in an informal adda on their discoveries and experiences with Dastangoi. They talked about the history of the form and its present day situation, and answered several questions which their performance of the night before had thrown up.

COMMENTS

Loved the Dastangoi session. The informality of the space and the event will draw me back to the Ranan space in future too.

Kathakali Jana

It was really nice and interesting. Informative as well. I have got some very interesting insights into this ancient Islamic art of storytelling.

Sonu

Work and play at Brindar's 'Tridhara' rehearsals

2010-09-06T00:42:00.003+05:30

Click here to see the complete album of photographs of Brindar's rehearsals for 'Tridhara' - hard work, mad play, and downright fun!

Photographs by Indudipa Sinha

Tridhara and Ankur 2010

2010-09-01T14:38:00.016+05:30

From a novice to a performer: a dancer's journey

Brindar - Ranan's Kathak training wing - presents its students in their annual programme on 9 September 2010 at Gyan Manch, Calcutta. The following day we present ‘Ankur’, Ranan’s 6-year old national platform for emerging talent in classical dance. In effect, the two days exemplify a journey: learning the craft of dance to young dancers who stand on the threshold of their careers.

Thursday, 9 September 2010:

Tridhara

Conceived, choreographed and conducted by Debahree Bhattacharya. Performed by Brindar students

Friday, 10 September 2010:

Ankur 2010

Short Kathak solo by a Debosmita Roychoudhury, senior Brindar student
Kathak by Somdatta Banerjee, Kolkata - disciple of Smt. Rani Karnaa
Kuchipudi by Prateeksha Kashi, Bangalore - disciple of Smt. Vyjaiyanthi Kashi

The two day event will also showcase an exhibition pertaining to the performance created by Brindar students.

All are welcome to both these events
Contacts: 9830673030 / 9831256730 / rananindia@gmail.com

This two-day programme is supported by
* Sangeet Natak Akademi, Delhi
* Open Doors Event Management, Calcutta
* Uma Baleshwar Charitable Trust, Patna

9 September programme: Tridhara

MOJARU

A writer like Sukumar Ray is rare in the literature of the world. Pure, spontaneous laughter and joy is hard enough to find in the grind of our daily lives, without trying to discover it in our psyche. In his Abol Tabol, Ray effortlessly managed to communicate this mirthful delight through just pure fun, without relying on plots or narratives of any sort.

The young students of Brindar discover, experience and share this innocent enjoyment and fun through their dance and five poems from Ray’s Abol Tabol.

BADOL KOTHA

The Monsoon was Kabiguru Rabindranath Tagore’s favourite season. A large majority of his lyrics in the ‘Prakriti’ section of his songs reflect the many moods of the rains – joy, awe, melancholy, majesty and more. These varied personas find expression in this presentation choreographed to a selection of Tagore’s songs.

PANCHABHUTANI

Our five senses are held spellbound by the countless resonances that surround us, nature’s incomparable beauty, the world we inhabit tinted in myriad shades and hues. All created and sustained by the five fundamental elements that make up the physical world – earth, water, fire, air, space. The unity of these five elements connects our inner universe and spirit to that of the external cosmos in a constant dance of eternal life.

10 September programme: Ankur 2010

DEBOSMITA ROYCHOUDHURY (Kolkata) – Kathak

Debosmita has been undergoing Kathak training under Debashree Bhattacharya for nearly a decade. She has also trained in Creative Dance and Rabindra Nritya under Tapas Das and Polly Guha. She has participated in various dance presentations choreographed by Debashree Bhattacharya and Smt. Rani Karnaa. Her solo performances have won her a Scholarship from the Tagore Foundation as well as the first position in a dance programme on E-TV Bangla. She is a member of Ranan Repertory and a cast member of Ranan’s dance and theatre production, Equus.

SOMDATTA BANERJEE (Kolkata) – Kathak

Somdatta has been a disciple of Smt. Rani Karnaa training with her in Kathak for the last seventeen years. She has performed with her Guru in several festivals in

India

and received several State level awards for her proficiency in Kathak notable among them being from the Rajya Sangeet Academy and Rajya Yuva Utsav. In 2009, she was awarded the National Scholarship for Dance from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. She performs as a part of Samskritiki Shreyaskar (Smt. Karnaa’s academy) productions, and has also performed occasionally with Ranan, especially in the revival of Shunya Se in 2008.

PRATEEKSHA KASHI (Bangalore) – Kuchipudi

Prateeksha is the daughter and a senior student of Guru Vyjayanthi Kashi. She has been learning the nuances of Kuchipudi under her tutelage from the age of five. She has performed in various regional and national festivals in Bangalore, Aurangabad, Bhopal, Mumbai, Myore and New Delhi, playing many of the prominent roles in Kuchipudi dance dramas. Prateeksha has also performed at some venues internationally. At the age of thirteen, she topped the Karnataka state Kuchipudi dance exams. She was Secretary of the Indian Dance Association of Mount Carmel College. A graded artist of Doordarshan Kendra, Bangalore for Kuchipudi, Prateeksha is a recipient of Nalanda Nritya Nipuna, an award instituted by the Nalanda Dance Research Centre.

RANAN'S 'EQUUS' AT THE ABHINAYA THEATRE FESTIVAL, HYDERABAD

2010-08-01T10:47:00.002+05:30

Ranan's dance and theatre staging of Peter Shaffer's Equus will be staged as part of the Abhinaya Theatre Festival in Hyderabad. The festival is organised by the Abhinaya monthly theatre journal, and the image on the right shows a photograph of Ranan's Equus carried on the cover of their June issue.
The details of our performance are given below:

Date: Tuesday, 17 August, 2010
Time: 7pm

Venue: Rabindra Bharathi Auditorium, Hyderabad

The festival is open to all. For further details please contact:
abhinayamonthly@gmail.com / 9391111622

Ranan's Equus premiered in Calcutta in April 2009. Directd by Vikram Iyengar, it brought together a cast of dancers and actors, designers, composers and techincal personnel in a collaborative creative process which continues as the production grows and evolves. Equus was invited to the Prithvi Theatre Festival, Mumbai in November 2009, and then the National School of Drama's Bharat Rang Mahotsav in January 2010.
We travel to the Abhinaya Theatre Festival in Hyderabad with a few cast changes:

We welcome Lav Kanoi to his first project with Ranan. Lav takes over the central role of Alan Strang from Shadab Kamal who esaayed the character for nine shows in three cites.
Shadab himself steps into the shoes of Tanmay Dhanania who played several roles including the of Harold Salomon, Henry Dalton and a horse! We are delighted that Tanmay has successfully gone through a series of tough auditions and is now enrolled in an acting course at the Royal Academy of Dramatic art, London.
Ranan Repertory trainee and Brindar (Ranan's Kathak training wing) senior student, Surangama Majumdar replaces Debosmita Roychoudhury for the Hyderabad show, playing the roles of a horse and Nurse.

Cast and Credits

Concept and Direction:

Vikram Iyengar

Choreography and Movement:

Vikram Iyengar, Amlan Chaudhuri

Cast:

Amlan Chaudhuri, Daminee Mukherjee, Jayati Chakraborty, Lav Kanoi, Indudipa Sinha, Rhea Das, Shadab Kamal, Surangama Majumdar, Vikram Iyengar

Original Music:

Neel Adhikari

Sound Control:

Katy Roy

Stage Design:

Sukanya Ghosh

Lighting Design:

Sudip Sanyal

Costume Design:

Katy and Dana Roy

Properties Management:

Jayati Chakraborty

Production:

Amlan Chaudhuri, Jayati Chakraborty

Backstage:

Dana Roy

Administration:
Jayati Chakraborty

Poets in Conversation: Sampurna Chattarji and Anjum Katyal at Ranan

2010-06-17T11:49:00.001+05:30

Photographs of this event at Ranan on 13 June 2010.

COMMENTS FROM THE POETS

It’s a beautiful evening of new experience of learning

Joy Goswami

Thank you, good people at Ranan, for opening up this beautiful space. Reading from and talking about my first novel here has been an experience I shall cherish!

Love and hugs

Sampurna Chattarji

May this be the start of many intimate interactive sessions.

Anjum Katyal

Sampurna Chattarji reads from 'Rupture'

2010-06-06T21:23:00.004+05:30

Ranan is delighted to present the first public programme at our own space.

Poet Sampurna Chattarji will read passages from her first novel, Rupture, followed by a conversation with fellow poet and arts writer, Anjum Katyal.

On : Sunday, 13 June 2010, 6pm
At : Ranan, 8 Sultan Alam Road, Kolkata -33

All are welcome to this event, but since Ranan has limited seating space please call or email us to reserve a place:
9831256730 or 9432202045
rananindia@gmail.com

Click here for directions to Ranan

REMEMBERING SHYAMANAND JALAN: Vikram Iyengar

2010-05-30T19:15:00.004+05:30

Driving back home from a Ranan repertory session about 10.30pm on Monday, 24 May 2010 I received an SMS from one of the repertory dancers who is also a doctor at Kothari Medical Centre and Research Institute: “Shyamanand Jalan is no more”. He had passed away in hospital about 9.15 that night.

The next day at his Alipur home a group of us from Ranan stood amongst droves of people who had come to pay their respects. I looked around at the spacious house and was reminded of a conversation with his wife Chetna Jalan a few years ago. She was talking about the revamping of the house while Shyamanandji was recovering from his paralytic attack: the installation of a lift to the mezzanine level dining room and his bedroom on the first floor, the remote controlled curtains which allowed him to open up or shut off a window that looked down into the living room, and many more such little additions. All of these, while practically invisible to those who did not know about it, allowed this man full control, access and enjoyment of aspects of life which are so often cut off by illness and disability. SJ – as he was referred to by so many of us – refused to let an uncooperative body interfere with his ever alert, ever young and ever enthusiastic mind. Till the very end he was brimming with ideas, pestering people to think differently and creatively, and fully and passionately engaged with every single pie he had his finger in.

Arguably, many people have this zest for life – but few can boast of being able to infect others with it. Fewer still can claim to possess his incredible generosity of spirit. He will forever be associated with Padatik, Anamika Kala Sangam and Natya Shodh Sasthan among other institutions which are now so much a part of the contemporary cultural history of Calcutta and India, but it will never be possible to quite determine how many individuals he drew to him – perhaps even against their will – and encouraged to forge their own paths, purely because he saw in them possibilities which they themselves may have been quite unaware of. And the true extent of the impact that Shyamanand Jalan has on contemporary Indian theatre and performance must take into account the continuing work of individuals inspired, supported, cajoled and – yes – pestered by him over decades.

I count myself among those un/fortunate ones who he turned this gaze upon in early 2005. Before this, apart from knowing and greeting him on a purely formal basis, I had had practically no direct exchange with him. All that changed when he came to see Ranan’s dance and theatre version of Girish Karnad’s Nagamandala in February 2005. Looking back now, my direction of Nagamandala was amateurish at best, definitely not worth the notice of one of the veterans of modern Indian theatre. But SJ saw freshness and the beginnings of a search for a new performance language in the production. He summoned me to him – yes, summoned is the word – congratulated me, asked me about future plans (including sustainability issues) and offered me then and there the Padatik spaces and infrastructure to show my work in whenever I wished. And the entire meeting cannot have lasted more then half an hour at most! In fact, I cannot recall any official meeting I have had with him over the years that lasted more than that. He was precise, practical and pointed – and he demanded the same of you. No vague wishy-washiness could last long in front of him. Clarity of thought and immediacy of action – that was SJ all over.

Since Nagamandala, he has followed Ranan’s work with the avid and personal interest that he was so known and loved for. An interest that was never reserved only for work that came out of Padatik or Anamika, but a completely selfless one that actively looked for, enjoyed and encouraged fresh creative work from anyone, from anywhere. At every new production a message would come from Padatik: Shyamanandji is coming, please ensure the side door is open and a side seat reserved for easy access. Whether it was Gyan Manch, Rabindra Sadan, Padatik itself or any other hall – this message arrived well in time, so that it never interfered with the smooth running of arrangements. And every hall happily complied with this request. Every venue was used to this, used to the habits of this unstoppable, invigorating man with this enormous appetite for and encouragement of performance.

Free with his praise, he was just as free with his criticism – but always constructive, always helpful, always insisting on pushing forward and discovering new areas. If you did not raise the bar for yourself, he always did it for you and did it with the complete belief that you had the capacity to raise it further. Having seen the first of only two shows of Nagamandala, he sent a small group of dancers from Padatik to see the second one. Years later in April 2009 – after having seen the first part of the preview show of Equus – he sent around postcards to several of his friends recommending the production. On his word alone, Anamika Kala Sangam booked 200 tickets with us for their members. I treasure the SMS he sent me after Act 1 of the preview show calling the endeavour “Brilliant”. Unfortunately, his health would not permit him to see the whole 2 ½ hour show in one sitting. He vowed to see Act 2 at a later date: my one regret will be that he never did.

This generosity and enthusiasm did not limit itself only to actual performances: he was interested in anything to do with furthering the cause of the performing arts. In January 2006, we shot our now internationally travelled dance film, Bahudha, at the Padatik Buildwell Theatre with Ranjan Palit. From March 2006 to January 2007 Padatik played host to the first year of our bimonthly informal discussion series, Proximities. And when he visited the new Ranan rehearsal and work space for our housewarming in June 2008, he nodded approvingly and stated with his trademark ‘do it now’ attitude: “I would like to contribute something to this space”. This philosophy of always giving, purely for the satisfaction of seeing something in which he had no direct stake grow and blossom, made him – and makes him still – unique.

At an individual level, I worked with him only on two projects. For both I received the ‘royal’ summons that cannot be ignored! The first was to put together the brochure text for Chetnaji’s last production E Mo Ko. Of course, most of my interactions here were with Chetnaji, but every now and again he and I would touch base. And each time I was struck by his incisive insight and clarity. He would have read through every draft before every meeting, outline his comments lucidly and convincingly always bringing you back to the central function of the programme brochure, and invite your responses and ideas – again, all within the space of half an hour.

Even with the Choreography Workshop of May-June 2009 which he asked –no, commanded – me to coordinate, my meetings with him were few and to the point. He constantly said to us – myself, Chetnaji, Sharmila Biswas and Priti Patel – take it forward and then come to me. And each time we did, he pulled our ideas together effortlessly, made calls to people we found unreachable then and there, egged us on our way and left us to it with full confidence in our abilities. And if any particular issue worried him or seemed to him not to have been adequately dealt with or articulated, he never ceased to exasperatingly harp on it until and unless we were able to clarify the matter for him – and often for ourselves. His ability both to see the bigger picture and to focus on the smallest of details was indeed something to learn from.

If you and your work were worth his notice and time, your response to his work was equally important to him. Not only did he invite and allow me to sit in on his final rehearsals for Madhvi, he turned to me after it and said – with absolutely no acknowledgement of the gulf of years, experience and expertise that divided us – “Batao, Vikram, what did you think?” This, from a director who has been in the field since the 1950s and whose impact and contribution to modern Indian theatre is lauded across

India

, to someone who is just starting out on his journey in the world of performing arts. And after the premiere shows, dragging me up to his flat along with others for dinner, to let our hair down and talk about the production and a dozen other things.

Working with him on the Choreography project over last year, I enjoyed several such interactions at his flat above Padatik and his Alipur home, with him and Chetnaji presiding as impeccable hosts. The playful and naughty child in him came to the fore on these occasions. His ample midriff would quiver with delightful chuckles at his own or someone else’s sarcastic and pointed jokes and comments. But equally he would draw visiting choreographers into discussions about the philosophy and practice of their work, and engage in the most enlightening conversations. And these conversations always included everybody, regardless of age or experience. He truly believed that everyone had something to contribute, everyone’s opinion and response mattered.

Turning to Kumudini Lakhia at one of these evenings at his Alipur home, he suddenly began talking to her about my production of Equus. And turning to me, Kumud-ji – an 80-year old Kathak pioneer – asked equally enthusiastically: “So when do I get to see it?” I think it is moments like these which bring home to us the true meaning of the word visionary. Visionaries are not those who merely carve out fresh avenues in their own work, opening up unexplored territory. That probably defines a genius, for want of a better word. But a visionary is someone who is constantly interested in the furtherance of his or her field not just through their own work but through the discoveries and explorations of others. A genius can be self- centred (using the word positively): a visionary never is.

Shyamanandji’s passing leaves a void in all of our lives, in the cultural life of Calcutta and all of

India

. And we must mourn it. But yet, my memories of him do not allow me sadness for very long. Anubha Fatehpuria – Ranan core group member and an actress who has worked closely with SJ – told me: suddenly you’ll remember something he said to you and you won’t be able to stop yourself laughing. The day after his demise when we met Chetnaji in the midst of the ceremonies at Alipur, she said to us: we must all meet and have a celebration in his name. And that is how we must remember and celebrate him: full of life and laughter. For wherever he is now, he is still laughing, still living (albeit in another realm), still giving, still pestering, still fully engaged with the next thing he has encountered. Of that I am absolutely sure. He could never be any other way. And that is his inspiration, that is his legacy.

SJ – we raise a glass to you and drink to the dregs, just like you always taught us to do.

'Exploring Shakespeare On Your Feet: a workshop by Rebecca Gould at Ranan

2010-05-22T22:51:00.003+05:30

The first set of photographs of Rebecca Gould's workshop at Ranan have been uploaded. Click the image to view the album