No cacaphony of barking greets me, as it usually does when I clutch the gravel that leads to the theatre. Adishakti’s dogs are an integral part of the complex, and some of them are avid rehearsal watchers, setting up a huge ruckus should anyone break into the close concentration of the workspace within. But, today, the dogs are silent. They lift their brown eyes, and put their head back between their paws.
Little else seems different inside the theatre. Three days after Veenapani Chawla’s sudden collapse after a fatal heart attack, her actors are carrying on where they had left off, working on the next show. There is grief, and an undercurrent of stunned shock and bewilderment, but Veenapani’s training holds good. The show must go on.
As it has done in the past. Halfway through breaking in her actors into learning the complex tribhanga stance of Chau, which would then be adapted into a vocabulary of eloquent movements to articulate the grief of the women of a fallen Troy, money would run out. Without a second thought, a once-cherished jewel would find its way into the market to be converted into payment for rehearsals, technical runs and theatre bookings. An occurrence repeated with variations through her career as a director.
Perhaps, because Veenapani ventured into spaces that were strictly non-conventional, moving between voice and body movement; exploring the spaces between breath and energy, expression and trying to create a new vocabulary, money was always an issue. Productions were hand-to-mouth affairs, and the verdant work space that she created to form a background to her work was always in danger of collapse due to lack of funds. Sometimes the crisis would seem inevitable, looming like an approaching monsoon cloud over the campus. At such times, Veenapani would put aside her own current creative work and craft project proposals that could garner funding. Be it a workshop or a Festival, such was the scope and sweep of her creative vision that the new project would dovetail into her current work, adding dimensions that she may have perceived only in the subconscious.
Veenapani’s creative vision was an extension of herself. She immersed herself in the adoration of The Mother of Pondicherry, who incidentally also gave Veenapani her name. Veenapani too shared The Mother’s commitment to the sadhana of the body, her respect for the people around her, as well as a deep and real love for the physical environment. In an interview in a chapter of the book The Theatre of Veenapani Chawla, edited by Shanta Gohkale, Veenapani explains how she used The Mother’s experiences of the body as mentioned in Notes on the Way, to work using the body and breath in dramatic expression.
It was the search for equilibrium between the use of the body as a means of expression and the breath as energy and a trigger for emotion that led Veenapani to explore forms like Koodiyattam, Chau, Kalaripayattu and delve into Shakespearean texts. In each, she found the diversely-expressed power that breath gave to emotion and dramatic expression. She also explored ‘the tactile effect of breath in the mouth in the saying of a word, the length of a breath through a thought in the text, and the emotional consequences and effects thereof’. It would all come together in her own crafting of her productions.
After her first few plays directed during her Bombay days, which were based on the work of other dramatists, Veenapani took to scripting what she wanted to direct. Whether it was the adaptation based on Sri Aurobindo’s epic, Savitri, or the productions that followed, including Impressions of Bhima, Bhrannala, The Hare and the Tortoise, Veenapani imbued the original story with her own understanding of it, which included modern idiom and classical allusions. When combined with the clean, pure lines of movement that combined breath with emotion and the sparse usage of explanatory lines of text, the result was a new and mesmerising performance that spoke to all the senses almost simultaneously. Often, watching a performance, I found myself, unknowingly holding my breath even as an exquisite movement worked itself out to end in a startling verbal statement.
But Veenapani’s true contribution stretches far beyond the confines of the stage. Her theatre, like her own persona, was inclusive. It respected and had an understanding of the role every object, method and living thing plays in the universe. And, in her little universe, she ensured this understanding and respect was evenly spread. Whether it was the poverty-ridden leather puppet exponent whose craft had lost its audience, or the cleaning woman whom age had cruelly overtaken and made incapable of serious work, Veenapani found useful lives for them all, integrating them into her art, and into her system in ways that gave them new life and a new dignity. She moved beyond her space to include the women of nearby villages, teaching them crafts that she hoped could be used in her productions.
Equally important is the fact that, a few years ago, with an eye to keeping the legacy of Adishakti alive, she empowered her actors —Vinay Kumar, Nimmy Raphael, Arvind Rane and Suresh Kaliyat — to write, direct and perform their own productions. The Tenth Head that Vinay Kumar wrote but requested Veenapani to direct, Nimmy’s much- acclaimed debut Nidravatvam, and Suresh’s Hanuman Ramayana, which took a lighter look at the epic, opened to packed houses at the Prithvi festival in Mumbai last year and won thundering applause.
Never one to rest, or allow her actors’ progress to slow down, Veenapani continued to work on fine-tuning her last production, The Tenth Head, where she also experimented with screen projections and shadow puppetry, even as she worked tirelessly on a new production based on Sita. One call from her a fortnight ago — “Get back to your work on voice, I want you in the vachika of my Sita” — had me start music lessons right away. The excitement was evident in the soaring of my otherwise disused vocal chords.
Sita may or may not happen but, despite health issues, her work on it was well underway. She would sit at the piano, composing, playing for hours till a few weeks ago. A day before she went, she had re-blocked entire portions of The Tenth Head and explained it in detail to her actor. Four days later, the group is serious in rehearsal. I watch as they work. Nothing has changed. Only the physical presence of Veenapani — directing, suggesting, sometimes gently admonishing — is missing.
And the dogs are silent.
