It’s 3 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon. In the serene quiet of her home studio in Chennai’s Alwarpet, four women across age groups — Anita Ratnam (choreographer and dancer), L Subhashri (musician and stage manager), Sharanya Krishnan (singer and actor) and Arya Rajam (writer and activist) are enjoying a siesta of a different kind. They are — through text, movement, music, props and costume — invoking Sita, the protagonist who is the nucleus of Anita Ratnam’s creation, ‘A Million Sitas.’ Exactly an hour and 21 minutes later, when the rehearsal ends, the team huddles together over some ginger tea, to analyse the performance — sharpen the edges, make transitions (in music and props) more smooth and seamless, and overall, make the show tauter.
The U.S. tour
On August 30, Anita will present ‘A Million Sitas’ as the opening act of the Jomba Festival at the Sneddon Theatre in Durban, South Africa. Thereafter, the work will tour four major cities in the U.S., allowing both international audiences and the Indian diaspora, the possibility to recognise the relevance of the story of Sita in the world around, and within.
As a travelling production that is helmed by Anita, who has a keen understanding of eclectic audiences that appreciate dance and movement-based theatre, ‘A Million Sitas’ is minimalist and pragmatic in its form and unfurling. Like Sita, Anita is the centre of the universe she crafts, introducing her audiences — through an intersection of simple but significant props, unstitched cloth and costume — to the simplicity and complexity of these characters.
Along the way, we meet a host of women even as Sita comes and goes — Mandodari (wife of Ravana), Ahalya (wife of sage Gautama), Surpanakha (sister of Ravana), Manthra (trusted aide and maid of King Dasaratha’s third wife, Kaikeyi) and so on. And beneath the veneer of how they have been stereotyped, the work allows us a glimpse into their lives, and intrinsic nature. In Ahalya, we recognise a flawlessly beautiful woman who is cursed into becoming a stone for a single moment of desire. In Manthara, we meet an astute political or corporate strategist, who is almost at the fore of charting the course of the second half of the Ramayana. In Surpanakha, there’s a beautiful woman who is seething with passion for Rama, and is mercilessly mutilated for being vocal about her emotions.
“The thing about us,” says Anita, referring to artistes and audiences alike, “is that we tend to downplay our women in the epics. I decided that that was not to be. I also believe firmly that every performer should meet Sita most definitely at least once in their artistic career,” says Anita recalling how the production found its genesis nine years ago. “In one of the conferences I convened titled ‘Epic Women,’ I felt an impending desire to allow our women the opportunity to reveal their stories.”
The beauty of these stories is their sense of continuity. Although Anita constructed the work several years ago and presented several times, it continues to intrigue its maker and allows her to nurture it, with new movement, text, music, props, costume, etc. “I think ‘A Million Sitas’ continues to remain a work-in-progress taking a new form depending on the cultural and socio-political context of the times we live in, or the nature of the audiences,” she says.
There’s a sequence in the episode on Manthara, where a string of newspapers stitched almost into nine yards, becomes a metaphor to broadcast the ripple effects following Kaikeyi’s conversation with her husband, where she uses her two boons to banish Rama into the forest and crown her son as king. Yards of material in an array of colours also become powerful metaphors for melancholy, desire, beauty, lust and passion.
In its premise, the work is an investigation of the crucial role of Sita in the Ramayana. But in its celebration of the Woman, it forces us, the audience, to look both around, and inward, and re-visit or re-invoke Sita, who is a symbol of absolute strength with amazing grace.
