A Report on ‘Dialogue with Directors', a five-day workshop on Directorial Styles, Mumbai, 22nd-26th April 2009
The National Centre of the Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai in collaboration with the National School Of Drama (NSD), Delhi and the Directorate of Cultural Affairs, Govt Of Maharashtra conducted a theatre workshop with five well-known directors from across the country. The aim of this workshop was to share with participants and audience observers, each of the unique directorial styles and methodologies that the select directors brought to rehearsals, and which finally reflected in their productions.
The participants were predominantly actors while the observers represented a wide class of theatre people ranging from actors, directors, playwrights to theatre journalists, critics and included even the odd theatre enthusiast. The workshop transpired over five days, each day being allotted to one director.
Each of the directors- Anuradha Kapur, Roysten Abel, Abhilash Pillai, Neelam Mansingh Chowdhary and Vijaya Mehta talked at length of their individual processes of mounting a production. If one of them was interested in exploring the visual aspects of a production, the other was keen to delve into the auditory. The physique of an actor was of prime interest to the third while emotions were all that mattered to the fourth. The common factor however to all of them was the ultimate need to find a theatrical context that would best put forth their vision.
Owing to the large response to the workshop, it was not possible for everyone to be a participant and experience for one's self the process that an actor goes through as the director wants him/her to. Those who couldn't be participants became the observers, although some chose to be observers. I was an observer but not out of choice! It was a strange feeling. Workshops are meant to be participative. This one broke the myth. It became equally exciting to observe what was going on and then ponder over it through lunch and tea breaks. Both directors and actors are likely to have gained some insights through this workshop but a confusion was voiced on the last day as to whom the workshop was actually meant for - actors or directors?
Some participants also found it odd to perform the exercises with an audience gazing at their bodies, as they struggled to bring out meaning through their actions. In instances the workshop actually ceased to be one and turned more into a presentation of the director's experiences.
But history was revisited, especially when Vijaya Mehta & Roysten Abel went through their work in the form of video clippings. Mehta's internationally acclaimed SHAKUNTAL and her rendering of NAGMANDALA were path-breaking milestones for their time. Similarly Roysten Abel's adaptation of OTHELLO, which too received international recognition, exemplified his individual style.
The directors shared many anecdotes that went into the making of their productions. As personal and professional histories merged, the audience was able to appreciate the journey that each of these directors had been through. I was unable to attend Anuradha Kapur's session on the first day but here's a summary of the four days that followed.
Roysten Abel's journey in the theatre could perhaps be best described as a director in search of a form. This journey can be traced back to his NSD student production of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. Abel graduated from the NSD in 1994 but wasn't too happy with things. He found the NSD largely uninspiring. Everything was too mechanical for him there. He was however impressed by the European Cinema that he watched in those days. From his school days, Abel had developed a great liking for Shakespeare, thanks to his school teacher who had a very animated way of teaching it. His interest in Shakespeare sustained and he spoke of how Shylock's character had fascinated him. Words such as 'a spurned dog' evoked images he wanted to explore. This association with words and imagery continued to inspire him.
However, Abel was not too happy with THE MERCHANT OF VENICE. His productions and the then parallel running productions based on European plays always had Indians dressed in European costumes and speaking Hindi. Abel found it quite odd. There was a lot of meaningless cultural pot-pourri and it made no sense to the people who watched it. He spotted a lot of 'Indian Village Realism' - a term coined by him, which made theatre resemble the typical Hindi film setting in that era. Hence, Abel moved out of India to apprentice with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) under the able guidance of Cecily Berry.
Sadly, the RSC was no different. In his words, it was boring, unimaginative and full of rhetoric. The RSC was followed by another apprenticeship with Simon McBurney's theatre company Complicite. There Abel witnessed one of the best improvisations of his life. He recalled a session in which Simon's brief to his actors was only this: 'You know what a dream is like'. What followed has stayed with Abel for all these years.
Coming back to Delhi with the aim of doing Shakespeare in English, he founded the Indian Shakespeare Company in 1995. His production of MACBETH was a musical. The three witches in the play were actually performed by members of the Indian Ocean band. With this experiment he started groping for ways to extract performances from actors. He started looking out for new processes to entice an actor. The aim was to get an actor do more than what he (the director) expected or at least arrive at what he had in mind. Abel wished the actor to surprise him. ''As a director that's what I want from my actor. To surprise me!'', he says.
Continuing with his explorations with form and process Abel decided to do Alekar's MAHANIRVAN - a highly successful and respected piece of text. Consequently, he ended up changing the play a lot. Narrating a funny incident of Alekar coming to watch the show, Abel described how he had tried to run away from him after the show. The next day however Alekar managed to corner him. Apparently, the celebrated playwright told him that while it was not his play, he had liked what Abel had done.
Steering the discussion to his most successful production ever, OTHELLO IN BLACK AND WHITE (1998), Abel said that he is the kind of a director who would react to an external stimulus and then find a play to address it. Like his MERCHANT OF VENICE, which had sprung from the Babri Masjid massacre, his OTHELLO found its roots in the class/caste/regional hierarchies in India. Stoppard, Pirandello and the Indian scenario itself influenced its making. The process was exciting for him. He had five directors belonging to five distinct theatre groups in Delhi as actors for his play. The celebrated Barry John, Vivek Mansukhani who was famous for his comedies, Lushin Dubey, Ritesh Shah who also wrote the adaptation and Daniella, an Italian theatre director believed to have trained with the great Roberto Benini. Abel soon found himself flirting with a double edged sword - on one hand he was struggling to find his own form and on the other he was trying to create a process that could lead him to the production that had such a volatile cast. As he later discovered, the process originated from the people involved. The key was to let things happen and allow them to co-exist.
Questions popped as Abel reminisced through his artistic travels. Answers became more personal and honest. At one point, he considered skipping the clippings of his earlier productions knowing that they were not worth showing. He said he had come a long way from that. The audience still pressed for them and while he blushed at the thought, he went on to spot the shortcomings in them during the showcase. Although Abel's form and process saw a diverse change through the years, his instincts were still the same. He is still drawn to the murky backstage than to the glamorous front-stage. The dark, dusty backgrounds of the stage still remain to be his first love. The floodlit stage doesn't excite him as much. As for theatre he says, theatre neither happens on the stage nor in the audience. ''It happens somewhere in the middle'', and he pointed upwards. That for him is truly the magic of theatre.
Talking about the academics of theatre, Abel said he adored theatre exercises. In fact, he loved to have them in his plays. Exercises are a useful tool for him to arrive at a particular scene. Many theatre exercises carried out by his trainers had influenced him. According to him exercises help overcome inhibitions and bring the team together on an emotional level. One such exercise that he liked was saying 5 good and bad things about a person in one's team. These things had to be said to the person without any inhibitions. An actor doing this had to be aware that his counterpart too would be doing the same and hence actors got a chance to self-evaluate through corresponding with partners who were new to them. As an example of using such exercises in his actual production, Abel showed a clipping of from the film version of his production- OTHELLO IN BLACK AND WHITE. The above mentioned exercise was used in a scene between Othello and Desdemona and gave it a new dimension altogether.
As an aside, in the last scene of the film, a rose comes out of Desdemona's mouth while one expects blood. It was a magical experience to witness. Abel found that experiment stunning because it gave rise to multiple possibilities and meanings being derived from the metaphor. What excited Abel in these experimentations is that he could take a scene from Shakespeare and make it multi-dimensional. 'Contextualise', is his word for that. A greater challenge while doing this was to find find a form that was richer, poetic and larger than life.
After tasting success with Othello, Abel confessed that he became a little over-confident. For his next offering GOODBYE DESDEMONA, he booked theatres in Edinburgh well in advance. This time he was exploring ROMEO AND JULIET in a novel form; Romeo and Juliet, both being men. Devising a play had worked for him and with his international audience in the past. So he decided to continue along those lines, although he had realized that devising a play was not particularly easy. A lot of 'opening up' was needed in this process. As a director who devised plays, Abel believed in coming in with no baggage. He said that it was risky to devise but then one has to trust himself and believe that the magic will happen on the floor.
His star player Adil Hussain and Barry John who had performed together in his OTHELLO came together again in GOODBYE DESDEMONA. However watching the clippings of the play post lunch, made one rather drowsy. The experiment had the déjà vu effect lingering from OTHELLO IN BLACK AND WHITE and inspite of its bold theme of homosexuality, didn't prove to be as interesting as its predecessor. This may also be attributed to the clippings being only a part of the original production, presumably somewhere from the middle of the play. Abel's successive experiments included productions like MUCH ADO ABOUT NAUTANKI and A HUNDRED SNAKE-CHARMERS. The latter production was his protest against the government policy of banning snake-charmers. The production had a hundred professional snake-charmers standing on stage and playing their pipes in unison.
Besides doing Girish Karnad's FLOWERS with Rajit Kapoor, Abel said that he had increasingly found himself drawn to experimenting with other professional artistes such as musicians and dancers. His ongoing project, THE MANGANIYAR SEDUCTION has 43 Manganiyar performers from Rajasthan, spanning four generations. The traditional music is performed against the backdrop of the red-light district in Amsterdam.
The stage setting, the light-effects and the live music resulted in an emotional elevation that lasted with the audience even as Abel exited. He signed off with a statement that befitted his final offering, 'Theatre should go beyond the mind.' But this statements like previous other statements of his do call for a more critical inquiry.
While Abel ruminated on his personal journey as a director, the celebrated Abhilash Pillai - Dean of the NSD's academic division started off with getting the participants on their toes, right from the start. The morning began with the participants scattered around the auditorium, swaying their bodies to particular rhythms. While the hand was made to perform one action repeatedly, the leg was trained to do an entirely different action altogether. After a while both these actions had to be done together. The exercise was aimed at synchronising body movements and at the same time seeking to separate them in one's mind. Control over breathing and learning the basics of rhythm were other objectives of this exercise.
A short while into the proceedings and the music came in. The participants had to now respond to it. Pillai asked them to go 'literal' with the music. They had to now speak through their bodies in response to the sound they were hearing. While explaining the objective of this exercise, Pillai said that there is a thought for the body with every change in sound and the aim of this exercise was to chrystallize that thought. Participants were then seen running helter-skelter through the auditorium. It was amazing to see different interpretations coming out of the same piece of music. Every mind conjured up a different image in response to the sound track and tried to portray that through the body. In the process the particopants ran, crawled, stumbled, climbed up, down, swayed, swooned and even fell. For a while, the exercise seemed fine but as time passed the actors were seen repeating their movements. It might have been better to keep the exrcise short.
After warming up the actors with this preliminary exercise, Pillai moved on to his next exercise by distributing a story to all those present. The story was read out by one of the participants and everyone was given time to think about it. Later, the participants were made to narrate one incident from their life, which they found to be similar to any of the incidents happening in the story. The aim of this exercise was to personalise the story by attaching it to one's life. However, the need of personalising was not clearly explained. Maybe Pillai wanted to demonstrate a process of studying a text wherein an actor could find some form of personal association with it. A less direct objective may also have been to make the participants open up by narrating personal experiences and generating a sense of togetherness amongst the team. This however was not achieved since Pillai himself looked detached. He seemed more like a classroom teacher directing or narrating from a distance, instead of actually stepping in and becoming one with the participants. However, the participants left no stone unturned in making this exercise a success. Accounts popped up from the deepest and most personal of their experiences and it was comforting to see them empathizing with each other.
The exercise with the story was then extended to accommodate the navarasas (the nine emotions according to Natyashastra) in them. The stage was very systematically divided into nine blocks, each of which was marked with one rasa (emotion). The actors then had to voluntarily play characters from the story. With this brief in mind, the participants jumped in to perform. They had to tell the story through an emotion that belonged to the box they were standing in. Actors then began to move, giving different shades to their characters while playing the same character in a different rasa each time. This worked out to be an effective improvisational device for the actors. Their creative abilities were put to test under the given constraints. After the participants had improvised to the best of their abilities, Pillai expressed his views on what he saw. He said:
- 'Each actor should explore a particular rasa for a considerable period of time before moving on to the next one. They should also help the other actor do the same.'
This was important since actors were seen gliding from one rasa to another without making enough sense of either the character or the rasa.
- 'The aim of the actor should be to tell the entire story as s/he move through the rasas. Whenever a particular actor leaves the exercise and the other replaces him, the character should be played ahead from where it was left.'
This seemed unnecessary since the aim was not to complete the story but help an actor respond to his senses.
- 'Voice should be used along with the body as it prompts movement of the body.'
Very few actors were seen using their voice to improvise the scenes. The rest of them improvised in complete silence as if they were collectively told to do so. It could have been the effect of earlier exercises that some participants forgot to use their voices. This was unusual but worth noticing.
- 'Interaction limits improvisation but an actor has to find a way out. Live his life.' In their bid to make their improvisations livelier, actors had started interacting while performing. The presence of an observing audience also must have led them to do things that they thought worked for the audience. Pillai's plea hence made sense under these circumstances when he maintained that an actor has to keep on improvising according to his personal instinct, while interacting at the same time.
With these observations, lunch was announced. Pillai promised to come back with more improvisations of the same kind based on his observations. He wanted to carry out an iterative process in which actors could manage to overcome their shortcomings till they could come up with a pure, honest improvisation. However, that did not happen. The post-lunch session commenced with the clippings of Pillai's works that have gained large national as well as international acclaim.
Pillai's first clipping 'Helen' was a part of the project commissioned by The Japan Foundation, which had directors from three different countries working on three productions. Pillai represented India. While Uzbekistan and Iran came with 'Medea' and 'Jakarta' respectively, Pillai did 'Helen'. The play was written by Sujit Shankar who also acted in it. This was a novel experiment for Pillai as he brought together a force of multi-faceted minds in this play. Like Shankar wrote and acted, the other members of the cast helped with composing music as well as designing costumes. The look of the play was very stark with a silver faced body (probably Helen) lying on a stretcher and delivering lines in an unusual position. Weird, larger than life characters kept coming in and going out of the play. The haunting music gave the play a fakely mysterious feel.
His next offering BHOOT GAADI fell under a genre, which he describes as horror-comedy. A production involving final year NSD students, BHOOT GADDI was however an example of shoddy acting and fillumy effects with no limits. The usage of the typical red light, the flicker and the sound effects that seemed to have been picked directly from Ramsay flicks made one doubt the credibility of the director. One wondered whether it was done knowingly and if that was the actual intended comedy in the play. Seemingly, it wasn't.
Pillai's next proud presentation was based on Salman Rushdie's MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN. The production involved a large cast, which helped Pillai understand the actor-director relationship. He also learned about group politics and individual politics from the play. Visual effects formed an important part of it with video projections spanning the entire length and breadth of the stage. The content however was utterly unimaginative and fillumy (again). The music was a relentless bombardment of harsh sounds which made it disturbing to watch the clippings after some time.
Pillai's next clippings were of KARNA and TAJ MAHAL. While KARNA was specially designed to aid a Korean student in the NSD, for whom the existing syllabus seemed outdated (and which apparently also prompted the NSD to design a course for international students), TAJ MAHAL concentrated on the conflict between Aurangzeb and his brother Darashekov. KARNA was repetitive in terms of its presentation with the actor painted entirely in silver (like in Helen). However, for Pillai it was again a novel experiment since it involved working with one actor. He termed it as a 'collaboration' between the performer and the director. Taj Mahal's video clippings were unavailable and hence one had to suffice with photographs.
Then came Pillai's most celebrated work -ISLAND OF BLOOD which is based on Anita Pratap's book. The experiment in this was that the entire play happened in a pit filled with red coloured water. Actors performed in the pit. The play was highly location-specific and could not be performed anywhere else but in Hampi, since apparently the conditions there were favourable for the production.With other clippings being showcased, one could spot a pattern in Pillai's works. A hard-hitting trance-like music remains to be his favourite. Also, video projection seems to be an element of novelty to him. In one of his plays, he used more than six screens, the number of which went on increasing as the play progressed. Pillai also said that the 'Theatre Of The Roots' movement had a big impact on his work. Sound equally plays an important role in his life and hence he is very choosy about the music for his plays.
Neelam Mansingh Chowdhary who runs her own theatre group in Chandigarh, kicked the day off with a comment on the previous day that she couldn't spot oneness amongst the participants as they went through the exercises. She said that she would therefore like to commence with certain exercises that could help bring the participants closer. She immediately took centrestage and then throwing off her chunni as a sign of her participation (unlike Pillai who seemed distant), goaded the participants to be on their feet. Seeing this sudden twist from the pervious day's sessions, some observers too were prompted to join the action. Music was ordered to be played. The first exercise was to do nothing but walk… and keep walking, without stopping, without pausing, one had to follow one's bodily instinct and just keep walking.
Mansingh had definite objectives with her set of exercises. While joining the participants in the 'walk through space', she kept instructing as to how the walk should be. The most important prerequisite for the walk was to walk free - free of any mental, emotional, physical burden and walk one's natural walk as briskly as one can. A couple of her students who had accompanied her also joined in as models. The exercises were cumulative with different elements being added each time. These elements were aimed at creating the awareness of one's body as the well as the body/ies one came in contact with through a multitude of situations.
An actor always has to be aware of the proceedings on stage whether s/he is a part of it or not and 'timing' is so important that one cannot rely on calculated moves alone. Instinct plays an important role in performance. The additions that followed only helped the actors to let go off their physical inhibitions. While explaining the importance of these exercises, Mansingh said that every exercise has a certain value, which can be used or transformed into a practical decision during the making of a play. She was quick to show a demonstration of this with her actors performing a scene from one of her plays that involved coming together physically.
Mansingh's session stood out in the sense that she did not have any clippings of her work to show. She got her performers to act out scenes that were relevant to the kind of exercises she made the participants do. This made the experience theatrical in the real sense. Another effective and important exercise employed by her actually helped her actors arrive at a particular emotion that was needed in a play. The exercise involved exhausting an actor of all his physical energy and then making him perform. It turned out to be a rather long exercise since everyone took time to get exhausted and also there were too many rounds of it. But Mansingh wanted everyone to do it. She said that her actors did this exercise everyday during the rehearsals. They exhausted themselves backstage and then gave the performance. She believes that the body gets energised after long rehearsals and uptil the show day, the body remembers the level of exhaustion. She maintained that 'the body has memory'.
When the participants were asked about the usefulness of this exercise, they maintained that it gave them a different feeling while performing certain scenes from their earlier plays. A whole new meaning was derived by them as actors and it felt refreshing to do the scene anew. They felt they had gained something as actors by doing the same scene in a different and more effective way. While discussion continued on the exhaustion exercise in particular, one of Mansingh's students came up with an observation that it was very necessary for the body to actually get exhausted. Many a times it so happens that the thought of getting exhausted overrides the body's actual exhaustion limit and one thinks one is exhausted quite earlier than one actually is. In such a case, she said it is very important to battle one's mind and do the exercise.
As Mansingh explored and explained the importance of an actor's body, she quoted sentences that more or less defined her body of work. One of her statements, 'The instrument of expression is our body' underlined the kind of theatre that she did. When questioned about how she handles the text with such a physical perspective in mind, Mansingh promptly retorted that the text comes much later. An actor prepares before that.
Mansingh was also drawn towards different possibilities of using a space. While explaining this she said, why does a party always happen around the table? Why can't one have a party under the table, bizzare as it may sound? And so in SIBBU IN SUPERMARKET, Mansingh devised a scene where the character is reminded of being raped. It was a comment on the 1984 riots that took place in Punjab and the actress enacted her entire rape in the lower level of a supermarket trolley.
Elaborating on the importance of the body, Mansingh then got into an exercise that allowed the actors to know different parts of their bodies better. The thread exercise had two actors connect with each other through a thread. After these exercises the participants were then made to improvise, however under certain constraints. Mansingh decided to repeat the navarsa exercise, albeit with a twist in it. Nine boxes were again drawn on stage this time by hand, as against Pillai who had the grid drawn to a scale. I wondered if this little detail gave a further insight into the the methodology of a director? The twist this time was that instead of telling an entire story and enacting characters with a certain reference, actors had to blurt out a line once they entered the play arena. The other actor who entered had to say an entirely different statement. As they moved through the different emotion boxes, Mansingh asked them to find a connection between their statements with the help of emotions. The constraints were that the actors couldn't change their statements. This resulted in a host of improvisations that slowly tended to become comic as actors started improvising according to the response of the audience.
Mansingh then took the exercise to another level. She shuffled the pairs of actors. The statements however remained the same. She wanted to try out different possibilities that emerged from this and explore the connections that happened. However it did not materialise and Mansingh was unhappy. In the end, she only said, ''Too much action happened. If you move too much, I don't see you. If you talk too much, I don't hear you.'' Wasn't this a lesson in acting I wondered? One tries to make an impression by putting in that extra bit, which is perhaps absolutely unnecessary.
An interactive session followed. On being asked about preparing for a role that involved a young actor playing an older character, Mansingh riposted ''You never play age; you never play gender on stage. You play the character.''
The striking element of Mansingh's workshop was her focus on the 'body'. Her experiments in her plays were also centred on the actor's body. For her, it seemed to be the most promising form of expression. The formations that she managed to generate from the actors during the exercises and also in demonstrations of her plays were effective and completely true to the spirit of her theatre. No wonder the participants who were limping by the end of the day, found it to be a most constructive session.
The icon of the Marathi experimental theatre of the seventies and the executive director of the NCPA, Vijaya Mehta concluded the workshop. In her words, she was the 'tail-ender'. As she took to the dais and arranged her notes on the table, she talked about the advantages and disadvantages of coming in at the end. She said it was sad that some of the things that she wanted to discuss were already said but that she could now at least concentrate on points that were not talked about or missed. Beginning to talk of herself as a director, Mehta believed that she didn't know she was a director when she started. She discovered herself as a director as she went along. There was a constant search to create something new. 'What do I do if an 'X' does this?' Clarifying her position as a director, she said that she was not a trainer but a director. A director only briefs the actor and it's the actor's job to take it forward. Mehta said that she never indulged in instilling acting skills because that was just not her cup of tea. However, she did train actors while directing them. Hence she revelled in calling herself a director-trainer.
Extending her style of direction, she further said that while she is a director-trainer, she is also an actor-director. By this she meant that while she is a director who trains actors, she is also an actor who directs. ''I am an actor first'', she says. This helps her in aiding her actors reach their aim. Moreover she has a distant proposition fixed in her mind while working. And this factor also contributes immensely to her style of work.
Describing her journey in the theatre and especially her early days as a director, Mehta again indulged in a comparative study with the other directors who had been part of the workshop. She said that like Roysten Abel and Ahilash Pillai, her work also started with a passion for images. Over the years though 'Sophistication in simplicity' became her motto. Reminiscing her influences, Mehta said that her first influence in theatre was Peter Brooks and Seneca's Oedipus. The usage of the golden cube as a device and the actors who wore no extravagant clothes but black, made a lasting impact on her. Brooks made such a deep impact on her that she incorporated his words in her style later as a director. Brook's words 'Every second has to tick' stayed in Mehta's mind. That is why she feels that every moment on the stage has to be potent. Not a single moment should be missed by the actor. Extending this theory to the concept of 'natural acting', she commented that it is insipid. Nothing is natural on stage. It has to be seemingly natural. Work has to be put in to make it look natural. However, there is a lot of study and research that goes behind it.
While she maintained that she became simpler as a director, it also led her to becoming more sensual than cerebral. She again cited examples of Abel and Pillai here. She thinks they too are sensual directors. But we could have one sense that is keener than the others. She said that if Abel is titillated by images and Pillai by sounds, her own starting point is the 'smell'. Now how does one convey smell in theatre? That point she left to the audience to figure out.
Talking of actors, she felt that actors today come with predetermined emotions and fail to discover anything ahead of them. They are too indulgent she thinks. For her indulgence is like bringing something private onto stage and that according to her is vulgar. The star-syndrome that is typically seen in today's budding actors is one such example of over-indulgence. Mehta hence is not comfortable working with such actors. She defined the star-syndrome actor as the one who is in love with one's self and loves to exhibit it. Here, Mehta cites a quote by Stanislavsky who said, ''Love more the art in you and not you in the art.'' - so apt for a generation which is taken in by the shallowness of the star system that continues to rule (and destroy) the nation's film and television industry.
Mehta worked with Tamasha actors in her production of Karnad's HAYAVADANA. She learnt that many actors are intuitive. The director need not feed everything to them. Talking about expectations from her actors as a director, she says that she is her own actor. Hence what she feels about herself as an actor helps her understand the actors who work with her. She looks at acting entirely as a performance skill and rules out any rumours that actors are better at role playing in life. Mehta grew animated while talking of herself as an actor. She said, ''While I am acting I am the character. I am also the member of the audience watching me play the character.'' She thus believes in having an existence on and off stage at the same time. The thought of this led her to extol to the actors in the audience that they should feel fortunate for getting the privilege of being reborn each time they act. Some important traits of acting according to her were fluidity, gullibility and a childlike simplicity. Acting blooming out of these traits would always be honest.
Coming back to her theatre, Mehta said she depended solely on imagination. Quoting Abel who said 'Seeing is creativity' and Muthuswamy - a thespian Mehta respects a lot - who said 'Excellence is creativity', Mehta maintains that 'Imagination is creativity' for her. Her plays always sprung out of her imagination. She mentions Picasso who said that theatre is the greatest lie. She extends Picasso's quote by saying 'Theatre is the greatest lie that takes you closer to the truth.' Her imagination was her truth. Mansingh, in her workshop the previous day had mentioned that she worked from the outside to the inside, which was quite evident from her style. Mehta followed the opposite. She worked inwardly outwards. For her emotion mattered the most of all. Her final aim however was to reach abstraction - abstraction through all the concrete elements of body, voice, etc.
She then said that she had never done a political play. That was her choice. No play on women's rights either. But she believes she created work with tremendous political comment. Her PURUSH she thinks, is an example of the same. Mehta is of the opinion that a political play is a substitute for the platform and that she is not interested in such work. One of her achievements in the theatre she then said was to work with manuscripts, except for NAGMANDALA and HAYAVADANA, whose scripts were already in print.
Mehta started with experimental theatre, moved on to professional and then went on to do international theatre. This also represented a personal journey as she, a Lamington road, middle-class Marathi girl, moved on to Cuffe Parade and then went abroad with her plays. Talking the audience through all this, Mehta showed clippings of her work intermittently. Her SHAKUNTAL, which is considered to be a master-piece had an Indian as well as a German version. For the German version, the set consisted of a sixty feet backdrop of a painting from one of the caves of Ajanta. It gave the space a new dimension. The actors seemed to be directly coming out of a cave in this production.
HAYAVADANA with the Tamasha actors was also screened. A Hindi film 'Raosaheb' starring Anupam Kher, based on her play BARRISTER had Mehta playing an important character in the film. Similarly, she also played the lead in Elkuchwar's WADA CHIREBANDI.
After the lec-dem, Mehta moved out of the auditorium where she planned to conduct exercises. The entire foyer was dark and Mehta asked the participants to lie down on the floor. In the dark room, music was played. The participants had to react to the music and come up with a certain form by the end of it. The next step in the exercise was to attain a particular form from nothing. Music kept on playing and the participants would rise from nothing to attain a physical shape through a process that best suited their instincts. The third step in this was direct. The participants were to be a bud and then had to bloom into a flower with the music. The dark auditorium assured the participants that no one was looking and hence they could go to any extent experimenting with their bodies. Other exercises involving words and phrases and even no talk followed. After each exercise, discussions ensued and a host of interpretations heaped up. Even some observers stepped in while Mehta finished the session with a one-liner: ''Everyone has to convey, rather share!'
*Asmit Pathare is a young theatre enthusiast. His theatre experience dates back to his college days in Sangli. He has actively participated and assisted in various theatre productions in Mumbai. He writes poetry too and has his own blog
