Maas by Jyoti Dogra was hilarious, unsettling and terrifying. Maas, when pronounced with a slight nasal overtone, is Hindi for meat and flesh. Resonating with mass or matter in English, Maas packed more than a punch about the personal politics of flesh and flab in female bodies. The play recently premiered at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC) as part of the 25th year celebrations of Prakriti Foundation.
Maas served up society’s gaze on “a fat, female, middle-aged body,” as internalised by the conflicted owner of the said body. In a carefully sculpted performance, Jyoti presented her body as the platter from which we were invited to eat our twisted perceptions, biases and judgements about female bodies.
From Jyoti Dogra’s play MAAS. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
The play needled the agendas of many trillion dollar industries like beauty, fat loss, food and fitness, firmly lodged under our skin. Through her play and stellar performance, Jyoti invited the audience to feast on the folly of derecognising the body as home.
From Jyoti Dogra’s play MAAS. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Opening with a dream sequence, the play hit hard at a reality that we could immediately see was collectively ours. Juxtaposing potent silences with dialogue-rich sequences that left the audience laughing out loud, Jyoti brought us characters we know from our homes, neighbourhoods, schools, colleges, families and workplaces. These characters spoke to us in voices we have heard from within ourselves as much as from our surroundings. Infuriatingly “helpful” and well-intended, these characters lovingly showered an abundance of unsolicited advice on how to dress with “grace,” why a woman needs to comply, how to protect men from feeling threatened in their own homes and the importance of covering one’s body in a way that the personality doesn’t bulge. The success of the play rested in how it chose to spotlight an internal landscape where a version of these characters is alive in us, rather than stereotyping people from our social environments.
Eerie music, crackling chips, a jiggling belly, a furiously wagging finger, a T-shirt mask – these were some of the motifs that turned into metaphors in Jyoti’s masterly depiction of a body in conflict. She brazenly and skilfully delved into rage, shame, vulnerability, pleasure and rejection of the self – demanding that the audience laugh all the way to some very uncomfortable truths.
From Jyoti Dogra’s play MAAS. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
Speaking about the process of creating the play, Jyoti shares that she began working on Maas when the pandemic struck. Used to making solo work, Jyoti says that she usually spends two to three years making a play and a typical day involves long hours of devising, after a round of warm-ups and voice work. She starts work after a heavy breakfast and no lunch or dinner is cooked until she has shown up to what the day’s work has offered, she says. “There are times when I am simply standing and listening to the body speak,” she adds.
The starting point for Maas was rooted in the responses of friends, peers and family to her body on stage during her previous work Black Hole, she shares. She was first urgently informed of how much weight she had gained and then praised for her performance in the play that was widely well-received.
Her curiosity was ignited and she was drawn into exploring how, as a society, we view weight gain, especially in women’s bodies. Mostly, no considerations are applied towards context, age or boundaries, she says. She dived into making notes on the culture of gentle to harsh policing (and shaming) that exists, expressly to nudge and judge a woman back on track towards an impossibly shapely body. Having set out to make a “ha ha ha funny play about a woman who is gyming and gyming but cannot lose weight,” Jyoti says she was shocked when she encountered humungous shame and rage within. She could not but address the need her body expressed to speak about that shame, “whether or not people wanted to hear about it.”
From Jyoti Dogra’s MAAS. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
As the play-making unravelled, she found herself surprised at many stages. She even worked towards gaining six to seven kgs for the play because she was told that she was “not fat enough” to make such a searing play on being or fighting fat. She redirected the violence she found in herself and in society’s responses to “being or becoming heavier,” back into the work, she says.
If the success of a play is in making the personal highly political, Jyoti Dogra’s Maas walks the talk of theatre in the most entertaining and disturbing ways.
