Over the past couple of weeks, assorted sets of Mumbaikars have witnessed a disarmingly offbeat offering from Bangalore-based theatre worker Anish Victor. Koogu , as the piece is called, means a ‘shout’ or a ‘cry’ or a ‘call’ in Kannada. At the Brewbot Eatery and Pub in Andheri on Sunday evening, Victor performed the last of his dozen-odd shows in the city. He is certainly an indomitable presence on stage with an expressive physiognomy that would be a motion capture artist’s delight. Here, as elsewhere, he reaches out to his audiences with an outstretched countenance and fashions an evening of what can perhaps be termed true communion, given how easily the audience is lulled into empathy for his woes and victories. Intimate stories from his life are interspersed with more corporeal interludes, and in these moments, Victor is the embodiment of equanimity and the slow, meditative fluidity of his movements is simply mesmerising. With dramaturgical inputs from Michel Casanovas, a French choreographer, Koogu offers up its actor’s body as a canvas for an exploration that activates our instincts and memories.
Likeability is certainly an important part of Victor’s spiel. His residual charm aside, he engages in engineering a facile kinship with onlookers from the moment they walk into the performing space. He makes eye contact with some, engages in reassuring small talk with others, all with an air of empathetic concern that never seems contrived. In many ways, this cushions the blow when he unleashes darker material. The agents of oppression evoked by Victor cut across a wide range, from colonialism, Catholicism, child abuse, Afzal Guru’s execution to the brutality of life itself. Kolar Gold Fields, where his grandfather worked, is likened to a giant sink-hole, which sucks everything in. There are stretches of lugubriousness in the text, and the piece has been cast in the mould of a testimonial, so the language of victimhood common to such pieces is easily recognisable.
Yet, these detours are very momentary, and one cannot help but speculate upon why these earthly concerns — part and parcel of our lives — must be sugar-coated to such an extent. There comes a point when the warmth and geniality ceases to be a quality of the production and becomes a compulsive symptom.
This is wholly unexpected. Here, the generosity of spirit devolves into a cloying neediness, and the desire to please people. Perhaps this points to a deeper malaise slowly being unearthed. Each segment transitions into the other with Victor suddenly flopping down on the ground, to audible gasps from the audience. At one point, he induces the audience to chant a refrain, seemingly from a nursery rhyme, as he recites a poem which changes tack very quickly, from relative innocuousness to an act of sordid personal violation. We are all suddenly complicit in this even as we continue our incantations. Once again, this disquieting moment is very fleeting, and the play returns once more to seduction and cajolery.
There are too few of such interludes and much time is squandered in the longing for connections that ultimately become the millstone around the performer’s neck, and perhaps stops the performance from reaching into the recesses of the wisdom held within.
Yet, Koogu perhaps signals how empathy can become a coping mechanism, and how a stricken figure, knotted up inside, can be released from his hidden torments. The most powerful moment is the play’s denouement, a choreographed spiel of internal resistance, in which the body fights the cultural expectations that suppress its own native urges. This is certainly not a piece that intends to just warm the cockles of our hearts, even if that is the overriding language employed. Koogu also means release and there is no denying the catharsis implicit in this performance. It is a wonder that it is performed as frequently as it is (with the Mumbai tour, the show has completed a hundred performances) given the toll it surely must extract of its performer.
The writer is a playwright and stage critic
Koogu also means release and there is no denying the catharsis implicit in this performance
