Does water have memory? Can a river look back 2000 years, when it ran pure and deep and strong? And now, when ‘there is poison mixed-up in its life’, and salt has killed the lotus plants and blue-footed tortoises — and even the tree averts its gaze from its murky depths — does a great sadness flow alongside its currents?
Water might not have those feelings, but watching a rehearsal of the highly evocative Lotus Leaves, Water Words invokes plenty. Three pairs of hands trace the flow of water; and one voice pours like it, in song. “Look at it not like it is your hand, look at it as you will look at water,” the director instructs an actor. A classical dance is performed to the strains of the guitar; a huge wave is generated, water ebbs and flows; the drama is sustained.
Directed by Prasanna Ramaswamy — winner of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award 2013 for theatre — Lotus Leaves, Water Words , her 23rd play, is a continuum from her work from 2014 (also for The Hindu , Lit for Life), about the river Kaveri. This year’s production, elegantly mixing song, satire, text, data and dance, begins with Philostratus’s work, published in 220 C.E., before it slips back in time, to the Rig Veda, dancing forward to the beautiful Varuna Sandhi, and then, through Cheran and Subramania Bharati’s powerful poetry, and Kashinath Singh and P. Sainath’s striking prose, it places you squarely, in the lap of today’s exploited and endangered mother Nature.
Initially, Prasanna did want the production to contain the five elements — which it does reference; later, she settled on water, and the insensitivity and greed, and of course, the sheer helplessness, in the face of its over-exploitation. In 2005 , a contemporary piece of text from an article by journalist P. Sainath says, “a huge ‘Fun & Food Village Water & Amusement Park’ popped up in Nagpur (Rural) district. That, in a period of real water stress. That Fun ‘Village’ had 18 kinds of water slides. It also had ‘India’s first snowdrome’ along with an ice rink. It is not easy to maintain snow and ice in 47-degree heat.”
The play is her way of intervening. “Art can only speak about the anguish, it cannot provide a solution; it can evoke a feeling in you. In that way, an artist and activist are very different; their realms of work are also different.”
In this production, she strikes back with lashings of satire: an extract from Kashinath Singh’s story Kaun Thagwa Nagariya Lutal Ho — God is abducted, and taken to a five-star hotel in Mumbai, by tycoons, where plans are made to hoard clouds and contain the sun in blast furnaces.
This celebration of words in Lotus Leaves, Water Words came together through memories and associations, says Prasanna, adding that there was “no scheme” about making it a trilingual play.
“The Nava Sandhi is one of my earliest memories of elements. I have heard the Rig Veda many times at home.” Similarly, Bharati, who sees Nature as Kali (Prasanna sees Nature as Shakthi) and the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (who energises her, and helps her introspect) are “internalised discourses”, and they find a prominent place in the play.
The play uses stage as a “moving installation”. Prasanna prefers to work on an empty space, one that she can fill with movement, with words, with music. “In India, theatre is not merely the spoken word,” she says, and it is this tradition that she stylises in all her works.
The play’s cast include veterans, who shoulder, ably, the director’s vision — P.C. Ramakrishna, Anita Ratnam, R. Rohini, Sushila Ravindranath, Nellai Manikandan, Niran Vicktor Benjhamin, Anandh Kumar and Revathy Kumar.
Prasanna never works with a linear or chronological narrative, she tells me later, over coffee, “one that an audience can sing along”. Instead, she fills it with rhythm and rhyme, and opens it a crack here, packs it there, exciting the audience, getting them to react. And often, the stage seems to vanish; in its place are waves and movement and song.
( Watch Lotus Leaves, Water Words: A Reading Performance , directed by Prasanna Ramaswamy, at The Hindu Lit For Life, on January 18, 6.15 p.m. -7 p.m.)
