A male actor stretches his hands up, his fingers spread out and eyes wide open. He looks stunned, shocked even. Another actor points a finger at the audience as if accusing them. In the unsettling calm of orange-tinted ambience and a white cloth backdrop with just one alphabet ‘A’ in Hindi, the performers recite, “Cuss at one and all; swear by his mom’s twat, his sister’s cunt; Abuse him, slap him in the cheek and pummel him…Call nobody too young, nobody too green to shag, lay them one and all.”
Poet Namdeo Dhasal’s words from his poem, ‘Man You Should Explode’ literally erupts in the performance space as some from the audience shift in their seats, few readjust their spectacles and some other scrunch their eyebrows. When theatre, music and movement come together it settles the unsettled and unsettles the settled. Blank Page , a 55-minute performance, conceived by veteran director and actor Sunil Shanbag and Sapan Saran does the latter.
Through powerful and relevant poems in Hindi, Marathi, English and Kashmiri Blank Page brings alive works of Kedarnath Singh, Arundhati Subramaniam, PS Rege, Sapan Saran, Anamika, Nissim Ezekiel, Sujata Bhatt, Meena Kandasammy, Taslima Nasrin, Adil Jussawala, Imtiaz Dharker, Pratibha Nandkumar, Waman Dada, Namdeo Dhasal and Radhey Nath Massarat.
Shanbag has used poems of resistance, conflicted relationship and those that challenge the status quo along with talking about writing as an act of creativity. “Poetry is very beautiful and far more reflective than perhaps any other written word,” says Shanbag. “This performance stemmed from the idea of diving into this kind of an artistic space.”
Blank Page was first conceptualised in 2015 and has since had 35 shows in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Delhi and Bengaluru. The performance is aimed at getting theatre professionals to understand and interpret written word, but by moving away from the poet. Shanbag calls it experimental theatre. While in India we have had a tradition of reciting poems, but it’s usually performed by poet themselves in what is known as sammelans and also poetry slams. In that sense, Blank Page stands apart.
Here the challenge was how to make text-like poetry come alive and be more accessible, says Shanbag. “Most people come to us saying that poetry is not their cup of tea and that they don’t understand it. How do you interpret something without hammering it inside a viewer’s mind?”
For the director, the feedback has been rewarding, “Its most satisfying when people walk up to you and say that the show has inspired/motivated them to read poetry,” says Shanbag.
Blank Page will be performed today, at 7.30 p.m., at Tamaasha Studio, Versova; details at bookmyshow.com
