Prasanna Ramaswamy’s play Valarkalai (The River Flows) — as a part of the ongoing Sangeet Natak Akademi festival by SNA award recipients and Fellows for 2013 — will be presented this Thursday evening. Describing the theme of the production, she says, “When the Tamil people of Sri Lanka are destroyed both in body and spirit, stripped of all human and civil rights through a brutal State which doesn’t adhere to any regulation and the constituted policing/mediation bodies playing their own political games, worst of it being fielded by the Indian State, the discourse inevitably is specific, Sri Lanka centric.” Using poetry from “James Joyce and Anna Akmatova through Bertolt Brecht to Wislawa Zymporska, from Cheran to Manushyaputhiran and Kanimozhi,” linked by her script, she has also found a resonating parallel to the violence in verses from the Tamil epic Manimekhalai , which speak of “how the different flesh eating animals are feasting on humans and ghosts are dancing with the kill.” No doubt the work will be both fascinating and disturbing. Excerpts from an email interview with the director:
Will the multilingual nature of the play make it possible for non-Tamil speaking spectators to follow it? Also, how much significance do you feel the spoken word should have in a production’s ability to reach out to diverse audiences?
The spoken word, for me is only one part of a ‘play’, a very important part of course. It is layered through many other aspects, like paintings, installations, music, movement and even sounds that emanate at times from the actors form an integral part of ‘speaking the play’. A stance, a look, a shadow has much to ‘play’. We have taken special efforts to speak many lines in English, specially for the Delhi performance which otherwise would have been in Tamil. Much Hindi couldn’t be achieved as we were not confident about memorising the lines.
In this production, you mention using a wide range of textual material, from sources that differ widely, whether in terms of region, language, culture or period. What thread bound them together, made them apt to be in this work?
I always begin with several sources, rather resonances of that particular script in my head...in fact when these source texts start leaping out of my head and body and enter into the space of rehearsals and catch on to the actors, the process of alignment begins. It is, to speak of known references, somewhat like a painter struggling on the palette, a musician travelling through different notes, registers and timescales to give a dense body to a raga.
During this process, the actors receive the word, music, sound, colour and movement, go through their own processes with my help and embody that universe, repossess the given and then the dominant colours acquire shades. Then the magic of a fluid luminous space emerges, where the imagined and the unknown together acquire a Form, a Form which appeared in my nightmares and dreams with its sounds and colours.
Some actors find it extremely engaging and become part of the madness, and some find it difficult to deal with and some never enter this dizzying world. Having said it, none of my work could have been created without all the actors, singers and dancers who worked with my madness. As for the varied text sources for this production, almost all of them poetry by great poets (attached info) and texts by me, are voices that represent the dominant state of being of people annihilated and brutalised by a military State, the lost paradise of the people, the extreme conditions and hopelessness in which they continue their existence and also voices of those like us who may feel but helpless and but go on with our own lives; the specific reference from the UTHR Reports strings the narrations and turns the spot towards the apathy by the rest of the world, particularly the Indian State. A section from the Tamil epic “Manimekhalai” is placed as a parallel of the “Mullivaikkal” which evokes the actors to speak about the Sri Lanka episode. A musician friend of mine and his partner saw a rehearsal and she said, “the abstract parts of the first part already is evocative enough for me, I don’t seem to need the specificity...to which he responded, it is like you sing a raga and also follow it with a composition in that raga to give it a completion...”
Today, while some stage productions dispense with the need for a bound script altogether, evolving through the actors’ rehearsals and workshops others still rely on the classic works of popular playwrights and start with the reading of the script in the conventional sense. Is the conventional script an outmoded concept if theatre is to speak of and to today's unruly world?
How can any great text be outmoded? All of them are of great value and relevant. I have woven excerpts from “The Trojan Women” in three of my productions and each time, I keep the sthayi bhava and the spoken word intact but ‘play’ it differently by embodying the character in another garb and locating in another realm...for instance, I create a refugee woman, highly educated in her homeland but is turned into a charwoman in a supermarket in the exiled land, as everything that she is, is devalued in that migrant status...a status which is feared and lamented by Hecuba as her future. While the ‘classic Hecuba’ and her world with the key inhabitants appear as a ‘played’ memory in another Form, the refugee Hecuba’s past and present is peopled and narrated. I don’t work on a single narrative but through multiple narrations and this makes it impossible for me to work through one text; I also find poetry with its brevity and density much liberating as it gives me the freedom to create characters and voices. I work on evocation through archetypes and stereotypes which take form through different characters in one play itself and therefore I can’t rest my work on stories moved through characters, linearity and singular meaning. I strongly believe that Art is meant to liberate you from this life mired with meaning and definitiveness. Once or twice when I did work with one story, I realigned them, interspersed them with songs and gave them a multiplicity. On the flippant side, I also write a good part of my plays and I can do it freely when I am not working with one text.
As a fearless artist, you use theatre as a voice of dissent. Do State sponsored awards and honours have the potential to come in the way of this fearless expression?
Whatever has come my way, has happened only based on the body of my created work, which is pretty much the same I am capable of creating. I am convinced that we all create in a certain way not because we ‘decide’ to do it in a certain manner but because of what we are, a certain intellect, aesthetics, life experience, sensitivity and the most important aspect, the instinct. Like if you fuse Kant and Brecht...”How do I know...and what do I do with what I know....”. I don’t think I am fearless, but I create only to overcome fear, for starters, my own.
Valarkalai (The River Flows)
April 17, Abimanch, NSD Campus, New Delhi 7.30 p.m.
Duration: 85 minutes
