It is no secret that, when it comes to creating soundscapes or scores for their plays, theatre groups often rely on the vast repertoire of musical elements or ‘found music’ freely available on the great vast Interweb. In films, gone are the days when composers stockpiled vinyls, cassettes and compact discs to get ‘inspired’ from. Intellectual property regimes that have been put into place (especially on the digital platforms that are now the mainstay of music distribution) makes ‘borrowing’ more and more difficult. In theatre, where the reliance on music is much less substantial, creating an entire soundscape from scratch is yet another overhead to conveniently ‘forget’ about. Of course, as we have noted in this column, more and more theatre composers (a growing breed) have created some remarkable background scores for theatre in recent years, in plays like Khwaab Sa , Wildtrack , Elephant in the Room , Club Desire or Far Away . They are still the exceptions that prove the rule.
Ethically speaking
Copyright protected or royalty free, the lure of a digital portfolio that can be summoned at the click of a mouse is something that can scarcely be avoided. Permission for use is likely never sought — these are processes deemed too convoluted or even expensive. Some groups seek out music that is obscure (read, Eastern European) and therefore relatively unregimented. Internationally bound Indian productions (another growing tribe) find themselves caught in the net, because venues abroad insist on all permissions to be in place (and on paper) before programming their itineraries — something Indian establishments have long thrown in the towel about.
Keeping aside the ethics of musical appropriation in a cash-strapped arts industry, the use of international music can sometimes affect the works in question in ways less predictable than simply providing musical accents to the shenanigans on stage. Watching Indian performers move to the beat of Ukrainian rhythms certainly brings in a kind of exoticism or catch-all universality that cannot be conjured up by the style of performance alone. The use of pre-existing Indian music often adds a sense of period, location or ethos that mere words would be hard-pressed to similarly define. Similarly international sounds come with their own baggage that it is often hard to dispel. When it comes to music that is particularly famous the plays inherit the pop-cultural trappings they arrive with. This can be used wisely, but also unwisely. As an aside, the broad canon of western classical music has passed out of copyright. What this means is that while a composition may be in the public domain, the recording of it by, say, the London Symphony Orchestra, would still be copyrighted. Often these recordings are used as is in Indian productions rather than performed live by musicians in a pit.
Usha Ganguly’s play Hum Mukhtara is an adaptation of rape survivor Mukhtar Mai’s inspirational autobiography, In the Name of Honour . In the play there are dance interludes featuring fully veiled actors dressed in facsimile outfits. They are a chorus of women who are kindred spirits to the play’s subject. Strangely, the choreography is set to musical interludes from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake . The raw earthiness of rural Pakistan where the declamatory play is set is immediately transported, to its detriment, to a more derivative realm, unreal and distant. We are reminded of the intrigues of Odil and Odette, the troubled princesses in the ballet, rather than real authentic women sacrificed at the altar of patriarchy. In a talk at Kerala where the play was staged, Ganguly did talk about the ballet’s music being a personal favourite and her penchant of using it liberally in her work, almost like a signature theme that does not bear her personal stamp.
In Manav Kaul’s Chuhal , the overture features the middle movement from Bach’s stirring Concerto No. 5, and its melancholic strains appear to fit in quite snugly with the play’s small-town ethos. Arguably, the ‘frozen in time’ visages of a single file of transfixed women with beguiling, plaintive eyes, could have provided the strong bearings to anchor the sequence but the music appears to do the heavy lifting. Similarly, plays like Ila and Fly By Night from the Patchworks Ensemble feature at least one signature movement sequence set to a overblown score (albeit not one that is easily identifiable) which add layers to the actors’ gestures, a pathos that does not seem entirely deserved. Similarly, in Kiran Pavaskar’s solo production of Sita , when the protagonist enters the forest, we’re accosted with music by the composer Tan Dun from Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon , which conjures up images of tall bamboo trees and high flying kung fu sequences that could arguably well serve the Ramayana very well, but none of it is really forthcoming in Pavaskar’s by-the-numbers rendering of Devdutt Pattanaik’s book.
The right notes
An interesting conundrum was posed during a recent staging of Maya Krishna Rao’s Khol Do in Kerala. It is based on the eponymous story by Saadat Hasan Manto set against the backdrop of Partition, and Rao has been performing the piece since 1993. She is a performer of rare virtuosity who can move her audiences to tears, as evinced even in this performance. Her body carries the stories, appearing to bear the weight of her gender (and yet seem genderless), her age (and yet seem timeless) and her cultural make-up (and yet seem universal). In this mix, what is thrown in rather disconcertingly at first, are sweeping compositions from Philip Glass’ now seminal early work, Glassworks (1982), that imprints its own authoritative stamp on Khol Do . This raises questions about the authorship of an emotion and also about whether our tears have been manipulated by the Glass soundscape or by Rao’s essentially silent gravitas, or the low hum of her voice. We leave chastened. Later, during a post-show valediction, Rao felt compelled to bring up Glass, who is not a flesh and blood collaborator, of course, but still real enough to feed the impulses that allow her body to negotiate the pain and conflicts of a survivor of cataclysmic abuse.
