I attended a 4 day part time workshop organised by Sutradhar Casting Agency .
The production at the end of this workshop was a more body based form of theatre performance. The performance was based on a selected poems of Chera Banda Raju and other revolutionary poets of Telangana. These poets triggered a social revolution merely by the content of their poems. As a result for the first time in the history, they were convicted of a conspiracy, arrested by the police and bruised both mentally and physically.
Although the content was from their poems, the underlying theme of the performace was state violenece arising out of religion, castism, poverty, arising global economy, graught or a disfuntional state.
Through the course of the workshop, i wasnt quite sure how the production would turn out, its impact. Having come from a more vocabulary, diction, voice throw and modulation based background in acting, I was a bit apprehensive of the outcome of the workshop.
Pranab (the digdarshak-as he would like himself called), kept telling us to feel the lines in our mind. He made us remember some of the most disturbing images from our personal lives. The workshop as such was pretty tiring and ohysically bruising.
Ther performace was titled "Otherness of the body". On the day of the performance Pranab kept telling us to be confident, and use the proximity to the audience to psyche out the audience. Our motto was to break down the audience with hard hitting scenes of violence and awake the sensitive self inside each one of them. Little did i knew that there is an otherness to the mind as well. While being the medium between the poets and the audience, the victims and the audience, my job was merely to trsansfer the agony in time from past to present.
But I underestimated the impact of the subject, poetry and the form of thatre we used. In the course of the performace, every audience that smiled, or mumered, pierced my heart. Every un-effected individual started looking like a threat to me, my family, the society and the generations to come. I might have taken all this too seriously, but the end result was that after the performance I broke down and wept like a baby. It was a bit confusing for my co-artists, but may be someday I will personally share with them some of my experiences from the past that lead to this outbreak.
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