City-based poet and dancer Meera Nair is opening a new chapter in her life, this time on stage as a performance artiste. Meera is teaming up with a group of international artistes for a stage performance, ‘Metajingle,’ under the aegis of the Alliance Francaise de Trivandrum (AFT). It all began when Zazie, wife of Françoise Grosjean, director of AFT, gifted a book of Meera’s poems to well-known French poet and theatre person Marc Delouze. “Marc got in touch with me for more of my poetry and for the past two months we have been writing to each other,” says Meera.
Their exchanges were subsequently compiled and their script drawn up for a stage performance that will have Marc and Meera collaborating with musician John Anthony and French juggler Françoise Chat. “The theme of the script is the ocean. The first passage he wrote to me was about a man sitting by the seashore in Fécamp, Normandy, where he is based, and I responded with one about a woman sitting by the seashore in Thiruvananthapuram and so on and so forth it went, with the underlying thread being the sea. We are yet to work out the details for the performance but knowing Marc’s style of theatre it will be an abstract work and John, I understand, has recorded the natural sound of the sea for the performance, ” she explains.
What has been most enjoyable about this exchange for her, as she explained in a post on her Facebook page, “is that there were no predefined rules or notions about what we would write. And writing without boundaries has been a blissful experience.”
According to a spokesperson at AFT, ‘Metajingle’ is a performance that combines various genres, which will also have four artists, namely Robert Lopez, Jayasree, Aswini Kumar and Udayakumar, giving a visual interpretation to the script. The performance is on November 8 in the city. The production is also travelling to Jaipur Literary Festival in January and then Kolkata and Chandannagar in February.
