A dialogue with reality

Two young directors tell us how women are finding their self in theatre with closer-to-life roles, stories and setting

March 08, 2019 12:08 pm | Updated 12:08 pm IST

Girls, uninterrupted: A scene from “Bhaagi Hui Ladkiyaan”

Girls, uninterrupted: A scene from “Bhaagi Hui Ladkiyaan”

Gender and identity have always been important themes in creative arts. But more often than not, theatre practitioners view them from a distance or try to situate a foreign play in a local milieu. However, two plays at the ongoing Mahindra Theatre For Excellence Awards in New Delhi reflect life as it is. Original in their content and form, ‘Bhaagi Hui Ladkiyaan’ and ‘Agarbatti’ give vent to voices that are often muzzled or moulded to suit urban sensibilities. Performed by girls of Delhi’s Nizamuddin Basti and mounted by Aagaaz Theatre Trust – which seeks to create dialogue among diverse communities, ‘Bhaagi Hui Ladkiyaan’ opens a window to the life of girls who are thrice removed from society. They are female, they are from a slum and they are Muslim.

Dhwani Vij

Dhwani Vij

“The basic concept is about looking at your own self from the lens of gender, class, and religion. How does the world look at me and how do I look at myself? The girls begin by sharing their every morning rituals with the audience while we hear advertisements playing in the background. They are about how the world wants the girls to be — the hair should look beautiful, the roles are defined — you are either a mother or a sister. You should dress up because you should have male friends. That is juxtaposed with the everydayness of their lives. And the play proceeds from there,” says director Dhwani Vij, the co-founder of Third Space Collective, known for its work on socio-political themes.

Dhwani says home becomes a place of liberation and also space where they are boxed. “There is always a tension in the house as they are supposed to be cleaning, cooking, etc. The parents behave as if they are ‘allowing’ the girls to go out to study and train at the theatre repertory (of Aagaaz). We lost so many girls, initially. There was a cast of six girls doing the performance and we were not able to continue because they were not allowed to step in.”

It is not just the parents, neighbours also put a restriction on these girls. “The form that we are looking at is testimonial theatre where these girls play themselves. They pick incidents and instances from their own lives which reflect upon their reality. The instances keep changing with every performance because something new could come up, which they would like to share. So, the stories that they narrate to the audience keep changing.”

Interactive experience

The play is interactive as Dhwani allows the audience to step on stage and the girls take them to the tour of their basti . “Girls bring property from their homes to create the basti on stage. We create incidents through these objects.”

In such a form, there is always a danger of it becoming a kind of exotic experience for a section of urban audience. “It is one thing that we have been working on. The stage should not become a museum. We are trying to make it universal because of the kind of things that they talk about could have happened to anyone. The world that we are living in is not a very liberated world. The question that the girls ask when you enter their basti is that kya aapke saath aisa hua tha (Did something like this happen with you?) . For instance, one girl shares the story about a park where there is a big banyan tree. Whenever she struggles with her situation, she gets out of her house and sits under the tree. The tree becomes her source of happiness. She asks the audience if they have something like that in their life.”

As a director, Dhwani, who has worked extensively with Keval Arora during her college days, says, she has ensured not to make the piece look too prepared. “Things are improvised on stage. As soon as I start taking calls on what could look theatrically good, or making a particular portion more dramatic, we start doing ‘museumisation’ of the idea. We start trying to make it beautiful. My role is to make it more coherent.”

On their acting skills, Dhwani says, “Some of them have been doing theatre from the age of six. They are trained in voice modulation but in this production, I have not worked on their voice. I haven’t told them how to say the lines better. It changes in every performance. Sometimes one part is rushed through and the other gets elaborated. It is a decision that the girls make.”

For Dhwani, trained at Royal Holloway, the University of London, it is a different form of expression. “I have not delved into this form before. In the past two years, the play has made me reflect on the kind of world I come from. Every performance makes me question, what kind of privilege do I have. And that also keeps the play changing. I come from a family which is really supportive of my decision to have a career in theatre. I do have a financial cushion. But this daily negotiation where I am made to feel that I am a girl, that I have to look like this, still continues. It could be something as small as when you are sitting a bar, the bill is handed to the man sitting on the table. These kinds of things keep coming to me. But at the same time, I also wonder whether by putting this play on stage, am I trying to tell the audience how things are difficult for girls... Dekho ye bechari ladkiyan,” she muses.

To tackle that, Dhwani adds, the girls share their process of grappling with problems on stage. “They could say that they are not sure why they are telling this story or why they are following my instructions. We want to open up the struggle.”

It is a kind of cathartic experience for girls but Dhwani underlines that at the same time they realise that their real context is not changing that rapidly. “However, the power to fight with that context is increasing. We are not giving solutions. You have to reach there on your own. Yes, you could find ways of fighting it.”

title

The title came from poet Alok Dhanwa’s eponymous poem that attempts to remove the stigma attached to girls who run away from home. “When I read it, a lot of images from the play came to my mind.” The poem talks of teenage crush and romance. “It was already there in the story. The girls are from the age of 15 to 19. They are dealing with crushes and love and parents not allowing.”

Gully girls

Though written much earlier, in many ways, the play reminds of Zoya Akhtar’s “Gully Boy”. There is a scene in the film where Safeena, who is studying to be a doctor, tells her conservative mother that she lies to her because she doesn’t allow her to do things which other girls normally do.

“A lot of the time they don’t lie,” says Dhwani. “It is more often like ‘maine to apni maa ko sab bata diya hai… pehle to maa theek thi (I have told everything to my mother. At first, she was ok) but I don’t know what has suddenly changed. Sach aur jhooth is not very clear!”

The stink of patriarchy

Dr awing from a real story, “Agarbatti” shines a light on what ails a patriarchal society. Mounted by Samagam Rangmandal, it is an original play written by Ashish Pathak. “It starts with the Behmai massacre,” says the young director Swati Dubey. “The story is about the widows of the Thakurs who were killed by Phoolan Devi. It is about what happens after that. The widows don’t see anything wrong in the atrocities committed by their husbands on Phoolan Devi. In fact, they see the revenge of Phoolan Devi as something out of place. They feel how could a lower caste woman could do that. It should not have happened. Patriarchy is deep-seated in their minds.” Then their perception changes.

Swati Dubey

Swati Dubey

As a fictional element, the play shows that the government opens a factory of incense sticks for these widows. “Gradually, they realise they are also victims of the same patriarchal society. That a sinner is a sinner even if he is a part of the family. Towards the end, they come up with the realisation that their husbands were wrong. There is a woman who had vowed to immerse her husband’s ashes only after killing Phoolan Devi. But in the end, she mixes his ashes in the agarbatti powder of the factory. She says the sinners should meet gradual death.” An alumna of the National School of Drama, Swati says she hasn’t romanticised the rural space. “It is in Hindi and Bundeli. We keep changing the proportion according to the audience. The audience always get the essence; it is the critics who fuss over issues like the dilution of language.”

Swati, who hails from Jabalpur, says that she took to the theatre in college. “There was not much support from the family. So I did an MBA from Gujarat. However, I continued to feel a vacuum. I felt that what I wanted to say, could only be said through theatre.” On the progress back home, Swati says, “Things haven’t changed much. All this talk of gender equality is limited to four-five big cities. When my mother watched ‘Agarbatti,’ she didn’t like it at all. She advised me to do something else. Over the years, I developed the courage to make my decisions. Perhaps, because of financial security. But I have yet to become a role model Reinterpreting a classic

Reinterpreting a classic

Dr. Chavan Pramod, who has brought the Gujarati adaptation of Dharamvir Bharati’s iconic play, “Andha Yug” to META, says cultural destruction is today’s Mahabharat. He has presented, Gandhari, who is one of the three main characters in the play, in five forms. “It was important to present the multiple layers in the character, besides the requirement of choreographic pattern.”

According to Chavan, Gandhari is a metaphor for land. “Man has created boundaries. For her, it is one world and whenever anybody dies for these man-made divisions, her heart cries.”

He reminds how Gandhari tells Duryodhan that those on the side of dharma shall emerge victorious. She doesn’t sides. She remains neutral.” Chavan says a woman is a symbol of fertility, she not only gives birth to offspring but also to new thoughts and ideas. “In Gujarat, theatre is more commercial and film-oriented. People are financially sound but there is a lot of turmoil when it comes to ideas and thought process. We need a revolution of ideas.”

in my family.”

The idea of ‘loose women’

Meanwhile, Maya Krishna Rao continues to have fun with “Loose Women” (English) as the veteran theatre practitioner creates the idea of a loose woman, which is used as a throwaway expression by just one sex, through different episodes where music and dance come together to create an experience that is thought provoking and witty. From her morning rituals to ‘crossing the line’, Maya paints a vivid picture as she takes her “Walk”, which she created as a response to Delhi Gang-Rape-2012, one step

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