Breaking new ground

This year’s Bharat Rang Mahotsava saw new trends and newer impulses being inducted
by younger artistes, writes Chaman Ahuja

OF the 62 productions showcased this year at the annual NSD festival, Bharat Rang Mahotsava XI, as many as a dozen were from outside India. The festival can legitimately claim to have graduated into an international festival — a far cry from the purely national format of the maiden event in 1999.

Even otherwise, in the first decade, the focus has been changing gradually in response to the lessons learnt from experience. In the first year, the Hindi plays and productions of the NSD repertory were most conspicuous because of their numerical strength; also, the effort was lavished on getting together the still-current masterpieces of the veterans. Since these old-time ‘classics’ were criticised for being rather jaded — and since most of them got accommodated within a couple of years — stress shifted gradually to ‘freshness’ and to the representation of all regions. By and by, there started the practice of featuring plays from the neighbouring countries — mostly Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal. Then the net was thrown wider and there came plays from Korea, Japan, China, Iran — as also from the Middle East and even Europe.

This year, there was greater visibility of the efforts at documenting the plays as well as the interviews; also the visiting artists appeared to linger longer for a while. Most conspicuous was the huge, colourful marquee called Food Hub, which, in the evenings, afforded musical entertainment and thus lent a truly festive touch to the cultural milieu.

Coming back to the theatrical fare this year and what the visitors felt most about, the festival bustled with experimental innovations of the new generation. True, the playwrights included Sophocles, Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen, Brecht, Camus, Tagore, Tendulkar, Karnad, Rakesh, Utpal, Mohit, Ellkunchwar, Alekar, et al, and some of the directors were such well-known names as Kanhailal, Sircar, Bibhas, Arun, Rudraprasad, Jalan, Usha, Sathyu, Bisaria, Bajaj, Ankur, Nadira, Jayshree, but the real talk of the festival were the new trends, the newer impulses that are being inducted by the younger artists like Koushik Sen, Suman Mukhopadhyay, Santanu Bose, Gowri Ramnarayan, Jyotish M G, Chetan Datar, Bahar-ul-Islam, Zuleikha Chaudhri, Shanmughraja, Thaninleima, etc.

Perhaps the right approach would be to see how Indian theatre today is struggling to strike a balance between the old and the new. Although the inaugural Marathi play, Awagha Rang Ekachi Zaala, did not impress many, its theme — need for the fusion of the traditional music and the modern music — did serve as a keynote for the entire festival.

Interestingly, at the inauguration itself, one witnessed what most theatre buffs declared the best performance of the festival — Zohra Sehgal reciting "Abhi To Main Jawaan Hoon." That no one could excel the ‘young’ lady in her nineties confirms the general notion that, despite all the training facilities, the art of acting on stage has refused to go far enough; in fact, it has been eclipsed by directors and designers.

The contribution of the entire Hindi belt comprised no more than five plays. Five of the 15 Hindi plays were NSD productions, with two each from Kolkata and Mumbai and one from Assam. With 15 productions, Bengal led the way, followed by four productions each in Marathi, Malayalam and English, three in Manipuri, two each in Tamil and Assamese, and one each in Punjabi and Kannada. With six productions based on his plays and stories (Dakghar, Muktadhara, Raktokorbi, Bidushak, Giribala, Madhyabartini), Tagore was the most performed writer at the festival; what is more, Dakghar, featuring Sabitri as Amal under the direction of H. Kanhailal, was the most widely admired production of the festival.

Besides myths from The Mahabharata being transformed into contemporary parables (in Agnijal, Kirit Parva, Karna Katha), there was a haunting presence of the political themes and, understandably, the constant refrain was violence in terror-stricken times — in plays like 1957-Ek Safarnama and Traitors (in the context of ‘Mutiny’), 59 Minutes and 60 Seconds (Naxalism), Waterlilies (9/11), Manto aur Manto (the Partition), Girija Ka Sapna (nuclear family), Aurangzeb; even Laila-Majnu myth tended to underline the impossibility of love in an age of fear.

On the formal level, the most conspicuous trends pertained to the reconciliation of tradition with modernity, realism with stylisation, representational with presentational, the verbal with the non-verbal. Above all, there was an obvious will to go beyond cultural specificity. More often than not, text was only a starting point; what followed was theatrical innovation. Th tragic story of Macbeth became an excuse for philosophising about existence in general and desires in particular — all told through reflections in moving mirrors.

Likewise, the story of Antigone was told through a large number of ritualistic elements. Sahyande Makan was a solo performance about the life and death of elephants, using the techniques of Noh and Kabuki. On Seeing was an installation piece in which a male character moved among tube lights transforming a text into a series of visual registers in such a way that although the text and the action ran parallel to each other, the two remained unrelated throughout. In Hawalaat, this happened between narration and choreographic acrobatics. In several productions, video-visuals were used but most effectively in Waterlilies, where these helped in establishing the locale and the landscape and in creating the relevant moods. The festival underlined the fact that, struggling to move away from the back-to-roots movement, Indian theatre today is a medley of traditions and technology.

In this context, it is rather sad to realise that the productions of the NSD, which was credited in the 1960s and 1970s with revolutionising the Indian theatre through brilliant repertoire, look so old-fashioned today. Having stuck on the ‘modernism’ of that time, even its experimental works look so stale and derivative: they belong neither here nor there.

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