On Sunday, at the Horniman Circle Gardens at Fort, an uncharacteristic sweep of seemingly transfixed bodies traveled down a public promenade at a glacial speed for nearly an hour, beginning at about two past noon, when the afternoon sun usually encourages siestas on the patches of shade scattered around the park. The congregation, of roughly three dozen ‘types’, first surfaced at the steps of the adjoining Asiatic Society of Mumbai. With its Doric-style Greek columns, it perfectly offset the chorus of actors, who leisurely, but never languidly, completed their initial excursion at the main entrance of the garden diagonally across, turning each inch of concrete into a moment of lived experience inexorably stretched in time. They held their hands close to their ears as if they were clutching a mobile phone, absent but no doubt contributing to the vacancy of their expressions, which almost indicated a state of blue funk.
The actors belonged to Loop 2020 , a live durational performance directed by Atul Kumar of The Company Theatre, that is part of an ongoing art exhibit at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, in which a “coalition of artists, architects, performers and filmmakers present site-specific architecture housing installations, performance art, sound art, sculptures, interactive utopias and dystopias, to provide the audience with an idea of what the future might hold in store”. At various spaces around the garden, makeshift venues and offerings of ‘public art’ were in a state of being installed or dismantled, somewhat unsettling the ethos of the performance. Even as Loop 2020 got underway, volunteers waylaid the entrance to the park to hold back the installation of a garish tube-light tunnel (a corporate promotion by Bajaj) on the front pathway. By the time the actors reached them, all offending traces of industrial detritus had been removed.
On home ground
An important feature of a durational performance is the endurance exhibited by performers and onlookers alike. A two-hour illustrative presentation can hardly compare to seminal works around the world that run into days, months, even a year — in 1980, Japanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh punched a time clock every hour for 12 months for his Time Clock Piece. Yet, under an unforgiving sun (albeit mild by Mumbai standards), the actors focused and persevered, with scant protection from the radiation. Some walked barefoot on the baked asphalt, others had chosen leg warmers or hoodies. A couple selected marathon wear, another was kitted out simply in black underwear. Heat took its toll, as beads of sweat clouded their eyes. Some stooped over majestically as they lurched forward, others were stiff as ramrods. Their faces indicated that they were wilting in the sun but they pressed on ahead till the very end.
There were varying degrees of conviction but a quality of shared adversity was sometimes discernible. Afterwards, the actors casually dispersed to assorted stations in the middle of the park, where they transformed into live art installations for yet another hour, still remaining in an incongruent state of agitated repose. The garden does not really afford vantages in all directions, and there were far too many onlookers, with too many cameras, but the characters that emerged were certainly intriguing. A man with a basket of old newspapers (Ashish Joshi) was given to fitful bursts of energy, as he frantically sprinted past. A broken but stoic woman (Abir Abrar) dragged along a burnt pram. A dandily dressed man (Himanshu Singh) circled the pathway with flowers in his hand. As connoted by the title, these actions (or rather, movement scores) were performed in loops, allowing us more than just a fleeting sense of their situations.
Dramatic response
The idea of punishment was taken further as the characters appeared to be drawn out and quartered by their circumstances, and oppressed by regimes, both personal or otherwise. One image stood out when characters came together. As Joshi remonstrated with himself, a schoolboy flew paper planes into nothing, a lungi-clad Muslim man carried his belongings, and a corporate man in formal-wear lugged along implements for ablutions, with which he would wash the feet of passers-by. It gave the sense of a grand commute, and given the could-be-vintage clothing, it indicated the rites of passage of a nation, a snapshot of history rather than any post-apocalyptic scenario that 2020 organisers may have been angling for. Of course, with only a week to prepare, the enterprise did not wholly transcend the idea of being a consortium of workshop exercises, rather than a feat of dramaturgical design.
The resident watchman at the garden with the birds’ eye view, Mishraji, who had possibly caught some of the run-throughs as well, perhaps has one of the most profound takes on Loop 2020. He said, “It is an exploration into the minds of people driven to the very edge of madness. This is complete science, nothing else.” The verdict may be still out if this was an interesting aside or something more innovative, but the performance did, without a doubt, invigorate the space in a mesmeric manner rarely seen, even if the gardens themselves are no to cultural activity of all sorts.
