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Take me to the Other

Eight years on, Amal Allana's play, performed with verve and style, showed The Other Festival still lives

PHOTOS: S. THANTHONI

BURST OF ARTISTIC ACTIVITY A scene from "Erendira and her heartless Grandmother"

There is much chatter about the "Other" as might be expected as the Other Festival gets into its eight year.

Just as one dog year is supposed to represent 7 human years, is there a scale by which cultural events can be measured? Is the Other Festival facing a mid-life crisis as visions of the Other keep coming to you with distressing similarity? As endless bodies are being flung at you on the stage and voices chant mantras, or rasp poetry in such a manner as to be completely incomprehensible.

It's of course comforting to be told by Anita Ratnam in her soothingvoice: "It might at times be difficult to contemplate the Other and it's quite okay to be angry, or upset if you don't understand something, because that is what happens when we seek otherness." Or as she notes in the programme, "We welcome the burst of artistic activity around us and invite everyone to examine the `other' in our lives and our art."

Ranvir Shah, the "other" director of the festival, adds: "As we get to a more global world we must openly engage with the changes it brings...this is the other we must look at non judgmentally, while we create our own vocabulary to respond and deal with this we also create a new other for ourselves."

Since it's not possible to be non-judgmental in a review, let us say at once that while it's very important to explore other ways of being, why should we become passive consumers of other people's anxieties? Why should we not complain that parts of the festival this year were entirely forgettable?

Mask matter

From the Tami Dance Company.

There seem to be certain conventions that manifest themselves at the festival. One is: that sooner or later, everyone puts on a mask. This may be a reference to the post-colonial itch known as seeking one's identity. After dealing with the mask problem, the participants then turn around and consume their partners in pairs and trios, irrespective of gender. Nobody wears any make-up these days, everyone sweats a lot and at some point the whole troupe falls down on their backs and pretends to be dead. There's also a tendency to mime, screaming and laughing silently. Many of these features were evident during the performance by the Tami Dance Theatre from Israel. It also featured a skinhead type of young man who came and periodically declared that he had come to fix the Gas Connection. If this was a reference to the gas chambers it seemed in very poor taste, but then again, maybe he just was a friendly Israeli version of a Burshane gas assistant, with excellent public relations.

Magical realism

Fortunately, however, the troupe from Delhi more than made up for some of these excesses. "Erendira and her Heartless Grandmother", a theatre adaptation of Gabriel Marquez's short story by Amal Allana and Salima Raza, directed by Allana, was everything it set out to be, a play that brought to life the idea of magical realism with great verve and style. The rains had played spoilsport. The sets were still being erected onstage, as the audience waited first behind barred doors and then in their seats, very patiently for over an hour. Chennai audiences, whether at the cricket stadium or at the Museum Theatre, must be the most passive in the world. We waited and watched as miles of what looked like plastic sheets and tiny diyas with lighted candles were strung up on the stage, or placed in tiny niches, to look like the mud houses of the Thar desert. The set did create a wonderfully magical effect. It was like being transported to the bordello scene in the film "Moulin Rouge", which is not entirely co-incidental, since the story is set in the old deserted mansion of Erendira's Grandmother who is a voluptuous courtesan in retirement in Rajasthan. It's a marvellously over-the-top evocation of greed and goodness, told in a fairy-tale manner of how the Grandmother exploits Erendira and how Erendira submits to the tyranny without a word of protest, until she meets a young man named Ulasi. There were subtitles in English high up over the stage for those who could not understand the local lingo. The triumph of the horrid old grandmother and the utter cynicism of all the men who exploit Erendira is more like the film, "Chicago" particularly as Erendira finally takes her revenge on the Grandmother. The song and dance sequences with the gorgeous Rajasthani style skirts, scarves and masks, of course, with shades of Meena Kumari in one sequence, were executed with the same type of exuberance, a combination of Moulin Rouge meets Mira Bai in the kotis of Jaisalmer.

After seeing "Erendira" one could go home saying, "The Other Festival still lives!"

GEETA DOCTOR

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