Show nights at Adishakti theatre somehow manage to heighten the aura of magic and mystery of the bewitching environs — like that metaphorical place in the woods of a fairy-tale, that invites, yet intrigues the explorer.
Over the years of its intense engagement and experimentation with the spatio-temporal dimensions of stagecraft and its cross-disciplinary possibilities, Adishakti has become a hub of eclectic theatre that has ranged across Indian mythology, Greek epics, Sanskrit dance-drama, Noh plays, musicals and movement performance.
As it turns 40, the Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Art Research pays tribute to its founder and one of the pioneers of experimental theatre Veenapani Chawla with a month-long cultural celebration. A variety of shows have been planned for the sixth edition of “Remembering Veenapani” festival (April 5 to May 2).
Adishakti was established by Veenapani in 1981 as a theatre company in erstwhile Bombay marking her transitioning from a history teacher at Arya Vidya Mandir who staged plays with students, to a self-taught theatre practitioner. This was a phase of stage adaptions of existing scripts such as Sophocles’ “Oedipus”, Tom Stoppard’s absurdist “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”, Euripedes’s “Trojan Women” and “A Greater Dawn” based on Sri Aurobindo’s “Savitri”.
“Oedipus, where she approached the text not as a tragedy but as an interpretation of blindness and the character’s inner journey to enlightenment, was a breakthrough in many ways,” recalled Vinay Kumar, Artistic Director and Managing Trustee of Adishakti.
Featuring Naseeruddin Shah, the play would also be the first production under the Adishakti banner, and perhaps also broadly set the template for future forays.
“This was also a phase where Veenapani was increasingly turning increasingly inward and grappling with questions of the self...her identity as a displaced Punjabi groomed in Bombay and her Indianness”, said Vinay Kumar, who along with Arvind Rane and Nimmy Raphael, were among her early disciples. The shifting of base to Puducherry in 1993, and subsequent relocation to its own three-acre sylvan campus adjacent to Auroville in 2000, marked Veenapani’s quest to evolve a new language of theatrical practice that synthesised the traditional and modern aspects of theatre, and life.
“Her legacy is the evolvement of a hybrid theatre with a pluralist aesthetic that broke the Euro-centric mould of theatre that was the standard till then”, said Vinay.
This was a form of theatre that was multi-dimensional, bridged the traditional and the modern, and was liberal in its assimilation of eclectic forms spanning music, movement, performance, visual and gestural art.
If “The Hare and the Tortoise” is a dramatised interpretation of the fable where the two represent archetypal competitors who open up different ways of understanding temporality, “Impressions of Bhima” approaches the Mahabharata through the perspective of Bhima as a solo act. “Ganapati” meditates on the infinite loop of creation, celebration, destruction and reincarnation and “Brhannala” expands the story of Arjuna living in the guise of a woman to engage in gender dialectic.
This interpretative re-telling and interpolation of debate over ethics that are relevant to contemporary contexts is a flagship trait that guides Adishakti productions. Their latest play “Bhoomi”, is based on an episode from the Ramayana about the king Dandaka who is cursed to ruin till kingdom come for defiling the daughter of sage Shukracharya, and dissects the power dynamic in gender relations.
Since 2003, workshops have featured collaborations with a range of traditional knowledge systems such as Koodiyattam, Dhrupad, Kalaripayattu, yoga and vedic chanting as well as voice training and other performance techniques from the West. Sessions bring together Koodiyattam performers, Noh exponents, poets, musicians, cultural psychologists, philosophers, film makers, and actors to exchange views on ‘breath’ as a source of expression.
Veenapani’s core convictions continue to guide Adishakti — one was the belief that only the middle ground in ideological spectrum offered a truly inclusive, pluralistic space. The other was her remarkably prescient realisation that a failure to constantly engage with traditional knowledge systems would lead to their appropriation for sectarian ends, said Vinay.
