Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry on the language of metaphors

Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

FRENCH stage director Ariane Mnouchkine, who founded the stage ensemble Théâtre du Soleil, stated: “What interests me in Asian theatre is that actors are creators of metaphors. The actor’s aim is to open up human beings as pomegranates. Not to display their guts, but to depict what is internal and transform it into signs, shapes, movements, rhythms.”

We keep on hearing the word ‘metaphor’ constantly in art and in life. But what exactly does the word mean? Metaphor is itself a metaphor! The word has a long history and has its origins in the Greek language. It means “to carry across or beyond”, combining ‘meta’ (beyond) and ‘phero’ (to carry). Metaphors enrich the language of the arts and even in our classical arts, the costumes, the hand gestures, the facial expression, the make-up, all add up to create an interpretive language. Metaphor becomes the container and transporter of meanings. But apart from enriching the imagery in the language, metaphors also have a functional purpose: to elucidate complex conceptual and metaphysical ideas that are not always possible through the tools of realism.

In Girish Karnad’s play ‘Nagamandala’, the philosophical theme of a man transforming into a snake was done through a simple device — a black tinselly cloth. The suggestion was established by the actor through his performance by wrapping a black cloth around his neck as a symbol of a snake. Through his conviction and faith, he transferred that ‘truth’ to the audience. The moment the black cloth came on the stage, the audience connected with the metaphor and accepted the cloth as the snake. This is the power of the metaphor if done with thought, clarity and emotional engagement. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher (384-322 BCE), defines metaphors as “the application of something that belongs to something else”.

We live in times of flux, changing with a speed that makes it impossible to keep pace. When dark clouds cover the sun, it becomes essential to admit that old forms will not work; everything has to be remade, relooked, reshaped and reimagined to reflect the art of our times and not to fail in doing so.

The idea of reinvention takes me to the life of Elvis Presley, an American singer and actor, known as the king of rock and roll (1935-1977). His singing drove my generation crazy with his hypnotic gyrations and a voice that seemed to slither out of his mouth. Watching his films in a rundown cinema house on a Sunday morning was no less than a bacchanal in the late 1960s. The madness that he generated made one forget the conventional realities of one’s life. The dark auditorium gave us the freedom to allow our locked energies to explode. Dancing with abandonment in the aisle of Ashoka Cinema in Amritsar became a moment of reprieve in the prescriptive world that we inhabited.

It is said that at the height of his popularity, ‘Elvis the Pelvis’, as he was called, developed a terrible pain in his hips, which became a serious issue for his agents and record companies. A combo of the movement of his hips, accompanied by his seductive lyrics, made his fans swoon with excitement. Presley worked through a series of possibilities and decided to shift the energy from his hips to his fingers. Much to the surprise of his agents and record companies, the substitution did not in any way diminish his charm, but inadvertently enhanced it. Of course, the audience had no idea that this shift was due to medical reasons. This acted as a fresh impulse and he soared to unimaginable heights on the popularity chart. The snapping of his fingers became almost a leitmotif of Presley’s alluring charm and the shift was seamlessly achieved.

From this story, I recognised that if an artist is willing to articulate differently in the face of change and transform himself, as in the case of Presley, it could be considered a powerful metaphor. A search for discovering new shapes and forms within the body despite ambiguities and uncertainties.

The question that emerges from this example is: what is the least you can put on stage for the audience’s imagination to participate? What do you do to release the power of the audience’s fantasy? I have realised that realism has been so thoroughly explored that there seems nothing new to discover. We need to turn to unrealism to discover new truths. When we speak in a language of metaphor, infinite possibilities emerge. For me, the fantastic has been a way of adding a myriad dimension to the real in a way that experiences get enrichened and intensified. Nirmal Verma, the famous Hindi writer (1929-2005), once said: “Words are like congealed blood on the pages of a book, when a reader reads them, the blood flows.”

My thoughts went to the works of Shakespeare and the line from ‘Romeo and Juliet’: “Juliet is the sun”. Romeo’s analogy to Juliet being the sun contains layers of meaning: she is the person who provides light and love in his life, and is the centre of his universe. Metaphors through minimal means can convey epic emotions.

In art, we use metaphors to try to share the core of the meaning. When an actor coos and cuddles a little baby swaddled in a piece of cloth and comments on the innocence of the child, one part of his brain is seeing a plastic bottle wrapped up, while the other part of his brain sees a sweet, innocent baby. It is through words and action that the imagination of the actor and the audience is tapped. There must be enough signals to make the audience feel free to interpret the situation in multiple ways.

Girish Karnad’s ‘Hayavadana’, written in 1971, tells the story of two friends who fall in love with the same woman and the woman loves the body of one man and the mind of the other. Through deceit, she swops the heads of the two men after she receives a boon from the goddess. A difficult scene, which could not be choreographed through realist tools — masks or artificial blood. I tried using a length of white mulmul cloth which the actors manipulate as a symbol of their disembodiment. Through a series of movements that required gestural precision, clarity of line and a bringing together of both a sense of extreme truth and extreme artifice, the actors managed to convey the complex metaphor of transposed heads.

It is a well-known fact that fairy tales and mythology involve metaphorical and symbolic imagery. The fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson and ‘Panchatantra’ blend the real with the surreal, the natural with the supernatural, where animals talk, carpets fly and imagination takes wings. These series of interwoven stories use metaphors of anthropomorphised animals that seem to have all the virtues and vices of human beings. They do not provide literal descriptions, but invite the readers’ participation through interpretation.

In every work of art — painting or books, dance or theatre — interpretive adjustments are made. Metaphor is not some stylish flourish, but a conceptual system used as a reference to indicate a way to think and a way to believe! Clouds, shadows, water puddles, doodles create stories in our head and heart. Art is a metaphor and metaphor is transformation.