The body meets the mind

Veenapani Chawla hailed as the most original voices of Indian contemporary theatre made a horribly shocking exit on November 30. The 67-year-old theatre director who spent her entire life reforming performance methodology, believed that theatre had to address more than the real. Little did one imagine that this interview with the amazing Veenapani would turn into an obituary…

December 11, 2014 06:52 pm | Updated 06:52 pm IST

Theatre person Veenapani Chawla. Photo: T. Singaravelou

Theatre person Veenapani Chawla. Photo: T. Singaravelou

As I type the words “last interview” my fingers feel wobbly and weak. It is a not journalistic compulsion that guides me to say this; it is the shock of the fragility of human life. Roughly a month ago, Veenapani Chawla, India’s leading theatre directors, was in Bangalore for the Rangashankara Theatre festival. That evening when I went to meet her, she had just arrived and her entire team was in her room chatting away busily, probably about their next evening’s show, Ganapathi . Veenapani looked very frail, “I haven’t been keeping well for nearly six months now. I am hoping to see a good Ayurvedic doctor in Bangalore,” she said, with a cough that wouldn’t leave her. I felt guilty about not giving her any time to recover and rest from her journey, but as soon as we got talking Veenapani was so full of passionate enthusiasm that she couldn’t care about the cough that nagged her. Now and then, her very first student Vinay Kumar came to make sure everything was okay, and she even quietly told him “don’t worry”. “I must take proper care of my guru, isn’t it?” he said in a light-hearted way, leaving some soup for her. “Write to me when you feel like coming to Adishakti,” she had said warmly before we wound up. To believe that Veenapani made such a sudden exit seems like a good author horribly messing up with his last scene.

Excerpts from an interview:

Your interests have been multidisciplinary – Trinity College of London, singing and piano, voice training at the Royal Shakespeare Company of London, Mayurbhanj, Chhau, Kalaripayattu, Koodiyattam and Dhrupad. How did they all culminate in theatre?

I am not a master of any of these. I learnt a little bit of everything and one form enriched the understanding of the other. For instance, music can become musical without sound. Rhythm need not be percussion, but how do we understand it through a melody? What is half beat? The connections one discipline makes with the other is really not articulated in any of our practises. As you study them, you understand it more in the analytical sense.

I began my journey, and found a lack in myself; I could not give things the shape I wanted to because I had no formal language. I went looking for aids and realised that at least the metropolitan cities were inundated with western theatrical texts. I felt the kind of theatre that we were doing had a derivative quality. I started looking at Indian forms at that point. For me, it was very important that we develop a language for theatre that doesn’t borrow from the west. But at the same time, our texts and ideas could work in a parallel way. I however got a fuller picture of what I wanted to do from my reading of Aurobindo. It took a long time, and the journey is still on. Like a Koodiyattam artiste nurtured in tradition, I do not have anything to fall back on. As an outsider to many of these great traditions, I can at best work as someone who can renew it, which will perhaps work like a coming together of many things.

Ancient knowledge systems and traditional practitioners have always fascinated you…

Theatre began in Bombay and it was quite an accident. It started in this school where I was a teacher of English and History. Slowly I became a part of amateur theatre groups. Every evening, after we finished with our day’s work, we all came together to do theatre. There was no sense of permanent theatre. I had the desire to research and study because during many of our rehearsals -- when I did Oedipus , The Trojan Women and others -- I felt that I could not enable co-performers as much as I wanted to.

It was at this point that I realised that realism did not touch my spirit or imagination. My mind was getting filled with the metaphysical and philosophical. If philosophical ideas were going to be the theme of my theatre how am I going to find a language to express it?

Traditional forms and practises use performance languages which have aided our formal and imaginative directions. In fact, they have equally stimulated the traditional artistes to discover old forms anew. The gurus that I went to believed very strongly in what they did and were not ready to be questioned. It was about memory. The guru will not tell you, but it is up to you to find the answer. Which means self knowledge is very important. You must be very careful about what is happening internally, or experientially. Yoga is really that. Subjective experience is very important. Guru Amanur Madhav Chakyar, the koodiyattam maestro was very enigmatic. He would let out small details. And like a naughty child I would keep asking him questions. And he would answer me. Mere cut and paste job was not interesting to me. Systems can change and need not change. But something at the core of individuals has to change. That is when I strongly began to feel that the kind of theatre I do had to engage with ‘work on the self’. In the later years, this was what I did at Pondicherry.

What led to the founding of Adishakti?

After doing Aurobindo’s Savitri , I went to Pondicherry. Vinay came to me, he had no job. Then I got this idea that we should do something permanent that generates revenue from theatre. Someone gifted me the piece of land on which Adishakti now stands. Finance was the greatest difficulty. But somehow we believed that money will come.

Anmol Vellani enabled me by suggesting that I visit Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret. That experience was remarkable, and I felt that the benefits that I got there had to be extended. The work at Adishakti is not just about developing a craft of performance as end in itself, it is a response to something that emerged out of the larger world. It has always endeavoured to evolve a language of performance and a new aesthetic.

It also helped being in Pondicherry. This kind of displacement makes you very creative. In a way, it was good that I did not become culture specific. At Adishakti, we wanted to widen the scope of theatre, making it evolve beyond where it has been so far. According to me, the contemporary mind needs multiple views of the same thing, it looks for something beyond aesthetic repetition.

Did you want to dislodge the centrality of the literary text and make performance text central to your productions?

The training methodology of the west is cerebral. The actor is always thoughtful. He has to take in the idea of the text. But I felt that we had to use processes that are emotional and direct. I used to feel that we should be able to pull together a whole lot of processes that are both internal and external, but in a spontaneous manner.

The final moment or the climax is true for the West. But I have always tried to battle that finality. I believe that the final moment brings you back to the purposelessness of the real world. Stories can never end, as we approach what is the grand moment, it has to be followed by subversion, immediately.

Body and consciousness are the two aspects that have always caught your attention. How have they shaped the language of your theatre?

Even the body is consciousness. The body was an important instrument in the journey. Aurobindo’s philosophy stresses that this instrument has to be tuned so perfectly that it helps the seeker achieve his spiritual purpose. If you look at the past, all along there has been a rejection of material life. Working on the self is not just psychological but it is also work on the consciousness that is so dense. Make it less tamasic, make it light. Working on the body leads you to the consciousness. Most art in Kerala is influenced by the tantric, which is bringing this entire unit of the self to a point of awareness. I don’t believe in obscurity. We have to be ruthlessly honest with ourselves.

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