Beyond bollywood bhangra...

Theatre beyond words threw up some interesting personalities to interview. Whether you agree with their ideology, aesthetics or not, what's worth admiring in each one of them is the tireless passion with which they're paving the way for something radically new in their sphere of work. It takes courage and dedication to unbelong. Was especially impressed with Mansingh's work becasue she touched a chord. Her work is an answer to the Punjab-isation of Bollywood or Bollywood-isation of Punjab, that so many of us frown over. Punjab is more than just the stereotype that popular culture has imposed onto it. Mansingh, then, is truly breaking stereotypes. Here's a look at her efforts...

When the convent-educated, NSD graduate, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhury, first performed her play Kissa (based on the Heer-Ranjha folk story) in 1984 in Chandigarh, the audience was disappointed. “They came expecting a play in English, following my reputation of being from an English-speaking background,” Mansingh recalls. That reaction made her resolve of making plays in Punjabi — a mother tongue which she had forgotten because of moving away from Punjab — even stronger.
“The people of Punjab have abandoned their own language. They speak in English even among themselves,” says Mansingh, who took up the challenge of learning her language again and bringing the glory back to her mother tongue and culture. “Somewhere down the line, there had been a major image distortion of what Punjabi and Punjabiyat seemed to represent. It was supposed to be about this rough language and robust culture, which has only thrown up bhangra and gidda. This projection of Punjabi culture was very different from what I’d learnt from the folk tales and Sufi influences and the rhythms of Punjabi life that I picked up from my parents and grandparents when I was growing up in Amritsar. I wanted to go bring out that side of Punjab again,” she says, explaining the motivation behind starting her theatre group The Company, which insists on using regional aesthetics to put forward national or Western themes.

“I got a chance to work with the acclaimed theatre director B V Karanth, when I was staying in Bhopal. He told me, wherever you go, you must work in the local language and with the local people,” she tells us of the two lessons that she has always followed. “Language to me is not only about scripts and sounds; it’s about capturing regional impulses, regional energy, myth, history, emotions and so on,” she says. Though her plays are steeped in regional essence, the appeal is universal. The stage has a lanuage of its own and the energy that doesn’t need words to be communicated. Thus her play The Suit, based on a South African tale dealing with apartheid and performed in Punjabi, finds an admiring audience in Pune.
“I had no first hand experience of apartheid or of caste realities in India. But the story had enough rupture in itself for me to develop on it,” Mansingh, who brilliantly transformed the basic conflict in the original play to one of gender politics, explains. ‘You can’t be truly contemporary without having strong roots’ is her message, which she’s effectively putting across various stages in the country and beyond.

language of silence

Here's my interview with the one and only pantomime artiste Irshad Panjatan. His performance at Amol Palekar's theatre festival was simply overwhelming. I'm glad I pushed myself out of my desk-imbued ennui and watched his act. Was fortunate enough to have a word with him before he made the grand return to stage after a self-imposed creative exile. It's after such interactions that you want to pat your own back for taking up this profession :)

There is something inherently touching about 77 year old, internationally reputed pantomime artiste, Irshad Panjatan performing his piece “Walk of life” before an eager audience in Pune. One look at this frail, stooping “young” man (who enthusiastically gets up from his seat to demonstrate to us a few steps of Kathakali - the dance form that has immensely helped the physical craft of his chosen art) and you know that he earns the right to portray the long journey that human beings make during their lifetime. What also makes his performance special is the fact that he is returning to the stage after a 15 years long sabbatical. Refusing to call it a ‘comeback’, he says he came for the sake of his dear friend Amol Palekar, organiser of the three-day festival “Theatre Beyond Words”, for which he has flown down from his home in Germany.
The emotional build-up to the event is, thus, very palpable. It is no wonder then that the septuagenarian, who was “nervous and afraid” hours before the show, receives a standing ovation for his depiction of a man’s life, from the innocence of childhood to the adventurous spirit of youth to the loneliness of old age.
When the voluminous shaft of the spotlight first falls on his painted face and his body clothed in a white one-piece, he’s a newborn reacting to the blinding brightness of the outside world, the soundless cry of being cut off from the warm security of the womb escaping his coiled up body. The child has been born, the actor has come to life. The spotlight is the stark space in which he builds his invisible world. Yet, for the next hour or so, you are completely drawn in to the experience of the child’s first encounter with death after he accidentally kills a butterfly, the thrill of freedom when he first rides a bike as a teenager, his tremulous excitement when he meets his lover as a young man and finally, the heartbreaking acceptance of old age when he waves his children goodbye.
While the exaggerated gestures or physical movements make for easy and hearty laughs, it’s the minutiae of existence that Panjatan so effortlessly captures that move you, take you through a range of emotions. “ Fortunately or unfortunately, I haven’t been through any formal training in pantomime. I learnt the physical aspects of this art from books and masters whom I met briefly. The difficult part is to imbue soul in to your performance. For that, you have to have the ability to imagine how a child would react, his perplexity, when he sees death in the form of a butterfly which refuses to fly when he blows air on to it,” Panjatan says.
It is the same soul with which he glibly slips into the role of a woman who’s dressing up to meet her man. The nuances of expressions which flit across his face - as he becomes the woman who goes about putting hairclips in her bun, making pleats of the saree she’s about to drape, dabbing excess lipstick on a paper and admiring herself in the mirror - are worth the resounding applause that he elicits from the auditorium.
But there’s more than just laughter and applauds that Panjatan evokes. He appeals to the universal core of human nature, which smiles when it sees a happy child and saddens when it sees the decline of old age. “Tragedy is the seed of comedy. If you see Chaplin, all his stories are basically sad. The way they are presented causes laughter, but eventually they all make you think,” he explains, unintentionally summing up the effect that his own performance has had on all of us.