The month-long artistic homage to Veenapani Chawla, Adishakti founder and one of the country’s foremost exponents of experimental theatre, will bring an eclectic experience to audiences this weekend.
The third weekend of the ‘Remembering Veenapani’ festival at Adishakti will feature four shows to celebrate the memory of a thespian, who invested 25 years of dedicated effort to, as one resident artist said, “create an ideal space that welcomes artists from across cultures to realise their creative aspirations.”
The weekend festival comprises two theatre performances and two movement performances. Slated for the opening show on Friday is ‘C Sharp C Blunt’ by Director Sophia Stepf.
The show centres on Shilpa, an attractive, interactive and user-friendly mobile phone app, that has been projected to be the most popular app of 2017. Created using the latest technology, Shilpa will sing for you – in the flesh----the songs you want to hear with her huskily sweet voice, and gyrate on command to your favourite tune. Perhaps, best of all, she behaves exactly the way women are supposed to behave in the eyes of men; that is, until the next update is released.
Starring singer-actress MD Pallavi in her first ever solo performance, this one-woman show is a witty, humorous and satirical interrogation of what it is like being a woman in the entertainment industry today.
The Indo-German collaboration explores the realms of digital dramaturgy, repetition and user choices to create a new hybrid form of theatre-meets-performance art. Next up is ‘Park’ Playwright: Manav Kaul and Director Nimi Ravindran scheduled on Saturday at 7 p.m.
The play is about “Three Men. Three benches. And, a Park, located just about anywhere” and the inevitable squabble for the best seat. Each man's claim seems to be the most fundamental. And, as always, there's never enough room for everyone. On the face of it, Park is a comedy about three men in a park fighting for their individual space. However, the playful banter escalates into violence as questions of space, territory and ownership become fraught with tension. “Queen-size”, a spectacle presented by Lalit Khatana and Parinay Mehra and choreographed by Mandeep Raikhy, is being staged over three shows on Sunday (7p.m., 7:30 p.m. and 8 p.m.) Entry is restricted to those above 18 years.
The show is designed to set you thinking whether performed intimacy can make an argument against an archaic law? As a response to Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalises homosexuality in India, Queen-size is a choreographic exploration that takes the form of a detailed study of the intimacy between two men. Played out on a charpoy, the duet examines the nuts and bolts — carnal, mechanical and emotional — of a close encounter between two male bodies. Queen-size also poses questions around spectatorship, privacy and dissent. The work has been inspired by Nishit Saran’s article titled ‘Why My Bedroom Habits Are Your Business’.
Monday night (7 p.m.) features ‘A Million Sitas’ choreographed and performed by Anita Ratnam. Sita is the central figure and link in this production which features four other pivotal female characters from the Ramayana –– Ahalya, Mandhara, Surpanakha and Mandodari and shows how Sita connected with them. Instead of following the popular Valmiki, Tulasi or Kamban meta narratives of the epic, Dr. Ratnam has researched and drawn from lesser-known retellings of the Ramayana in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Himachali, Oriya, and Bengali –– much of it from women’s oral traditions – even the Thai and Indonesian versions. Characters who were either misunderstood, remained shadowy figures or tarred with a patriarchal brush are all excavated, interrogated and re-framed for this compelling narrative.
Anita Ratnam synergises almost almost her creative arsenal; voice, movement, song, dance, theatrical improvisations and storytelling to illuminate the character of Sita — as daughter of Janaka, princess of Mithila, bride of Rama, queen of Ayodhya and mother of Lava and Kusa.
