Think of Common Wealth Games 2010 and images of unsavoury incidents from bridge collapse to stealthy reptiles conjure up. Of course, the spectacular and flawless opening ceremony made up for the initial shame and did help to straighten India's dented image in the global arena.
In this hullabaloo of conducting games, our ancient city Madurai silently added a feather to its cap with one of its prominent citizens, Prof. Parasuram Ramamoorthy, participating in the festival of performing art traditions organised by Sangeet Natak Akademi to coincide with the CWG. His contribution was a directorial venture, ‘Kul Varnika' (the story of human race) under the Common Wealth Literature in Performance section.
Poet, playwright, director, drama pedagogue, actor, trainer and retired professor of theatre from Madurai Kamaraj University, Ramamoorthi is known for using masks, drama and facial paintings as a therapy for Autism Spectrum Disorder.
In the 30-minute slot, he translated five Nigerian poems into performances titled Mallie – The Mother. The performance, staged on October 4 and 5, was divided into five segments – the first depicting birth of civilisation, which was filled only with music and movements portraying the joy of creation, being born, living in harmony with nature and its five elements.
The second segment illustrated a baggage one carries on the back. The arched back suggested the weight of colonial impact. The section presented what happens to a civilisation when other civilisations gain entry.
The third segment highlighted popular short Nigerian folk story about a mother and daughter - the Earth, showing how human beings ignore nature and fail to treat the Earth properly.
The fourth and fifth segment included five Nigerian poems – ‘The Intuit's Vibe' and ‘Refugee Mother' and Child' by Christopher Okigbo, ‘Polygamous Moon' by Niyi Osundare, ‘Creation' by Ifi Amadiume and ‘Recession' (Mahapralaya) by Wole Soyinka – depicting problems of modern Nigeria like violence, abuse and starvation and how an archetypal mother tries to save her child but fails.
“In the last segment, the performance builds on idea of mahapralaya, the great flood that consumes all known life, to encapsulate rituals of birth and death in the liminal space that women occupy,” explains Prof. Parasuram Ramamoorthy.
Destruction engulfs the world. The performance ended with a young girl carrying her mother on the back and saying Mother, I am mothering you, he adds.
"The mother here is used metaphorically as the mother of all human civilisations and the performance was in post modernist style," he says.
Anita Ratnam, neo-classical/contemporary dance-actor and choreographer, presented, choreographed, and performed the dance programme.
But why Nigerian poems? “Sangeet Natak Akademi wanted us to perform only in Nigerian poems, while few other teams performed poems from England and other countries,” he says.
Having lent his directorial skill to ‘kul varnika', the professor feels it still has space for refinement since it is the story of human race where words are translated into performance.
