Performing the Protest
Two performances last week - one in the city, and a second at Shantiniketan are significant documentation of our time, thoughts and the what the young generation has to convey as its reaction to such a time.The first one, a one man act by Sambaran Das, took place at a protest stage at the Esplanade metro station, in Central Calcutta, on 14th March in a protest met headed by Medha Patkar against the Nandigram issue. But this time , through the performing arts - recitation, vocal music and plays - all of which are seemingly blatant weapons for protest. Despite much of the spirit celebrating the Nandigram issue waning off, the protest meet reinforced the fact that protest against a true and graver cause does not need an appropriate time. It knows no bounds.
Sambaran Das is a passout of the Faculty of Visual arts, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. Ever since he had wlked into the faculty, he always wanted to react/protest against all that he could not accept ideologically - be it the Vice Chancellors unjust policies, or the Nandigram issue. Sambaran has also spent days working with Medha Patkar and travelled quite a portion of India in the course of such awareness programmes.
His performance was based on 'regimentation', as he puts it. A regimentation that programmes our times and the inexorable changes that hides the human being underneath all the 'isms' - Communism, Marxism, consumerism- and so on and so forth. An issue hardly retains its significance the third day after its appearance in the newspaper. It gets gulped down by all that which surfaces everyday, ranging from Basmati rice add to what our new leaders hatch out each day as strategies. He covers his face witha canvas mask and walks on a stage strewn with newspapers all over. The victim of all this gets covered up underneath them all. Layer after layer. Everyday. Sambaran illustrates this act by swallowing strips of news paper in a frenzied gesture, searching for self amongst it all, as he enacts. However, he features himself as failing to trace 'himself' within the continnum. He uses a pair of sunglasses to simulate our own faulty vision of our times.As though we look about the world through coloured glasses. His performance reaches its climax when he walks about with a stick in his bum to simulate our predicament as though in a paralytic fit.
A second one, a collaborative performance by the students of Kalabhavan, Shantinikeatan was staged on 22nd March at the Kalabhavan premises. directed by Taufik Riaz, this one, once again was areaction against our numbness, our failing to bring about changes through a well bonded mass movement. It seems we have grown immuned to the wrong doings of our times and display a strange compliance with them. Taufik , however does not confine his play to the limits of the stage. Instead, his characters inhabit all the four corners of the campass. their enactment seems to follow the stream of conscious process, often appearing to be surrealistic and consequently too abstract, and incoherent at times. A projection on screen of the dance sequence from Satyajit Ray's film 'Pratidwandhi' with two performers engaged in the act of dancing, which once again appears to be a frenzied and insane movement, lead to simulate the mechanical, puppet-like humans , faling prey to our own state of self complcency. We have forgotten to raise our voice against the petrified systems of a moribund society.
Off stage, two riders, one a male, the other a female, arrive the center riding on a bike. Their heads, covered with helmets conceal their identity. Circumsribing the area amidst the startled audience, they set fire along a chord that was laid on the ground, dipped in kerosene. The flame follows an extensive trail as the chord burns away, producing a stunning visual. At another direction, at the back, a square enclosure, made with nets and tiny rice-bulbs forming a canopy over them lights up and the audience move up to it to find two female participants reciting excerpts from Tagore's play 'Rakta Karabi'. With them finishing, the lights in an area on the left go up, the audience moves up to a second screen, where, once again , the choking sequence from the same film by Ray is projected. This time a most contemporarily dressed up female feeds her male partner with grapes from a plate. alongside, two performers , a male and a female cross each other with the former carrying a tree from which broken glass sherds hang and the other carries a tree of candles. Their juncture of meeting produces a meek reflection from the two cutting across each other. A shrill cry startles the audience now. To their suprise they discover a fleeing joker with a group of people chasing him. He struggls to run away from them. But fails to do so. He runs up to the dias and gets trapped in the hands ,of the chasers, who carry him away off stage. Meanwhile, the screen on the dias shows clippings of Maradona's historical goal using 'god's hands' successive clippings showing the celeb cudgeling his brain after a failure. Finally this is followed by another equence from Ray's 'Charulata' when Bibhuti stretches his palm towards that of Charu's in a vague attempt to hold her, but the short freezes before they actually unite.
Taufik's way of inhabiting a space with the audience shifting from their original places to catch a glimpse of each of the sequences in the play, taking place at a different section of the campus is a novelty. This recalls coreograher Firenza Guidi's own concept of making the audience shift places, makong the very act of viewing, a parcipatory action. Also in Taufik's case, lights play a pivotal role as they direct the focus on a particular area . With a haunting background score enhancing the eerieness of a frozen time, when action seems to have come toa stop, Taufik's rage come out, protesting against the fossilized society. The play, dedicated to Che Guevara and Fidel Castro perhaps only enhances our crippled state of being. Taufik's position could perhaps be righly compared to with John Osborn's sixty's protagonist, Jimmy Porter, whose futile annoyance was a protest against his time. However, owing to too much of incorent references, Taufik's play lost much of its vitality.
Notwithstanding all the criticisms, both the plays continue to reassert the fact that its from the young generation that all our revolutions spur out. The war continues, no matter how futile they are.
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