THEATRE : VISIBLE MASS : a meghadutam scrapbook as part of Red Earth's Monsoon Festival 2 at The Attic - 19th August, 2007

  • Time : 3.30 pm, 6.00 pm, 8.00 pm
  • Duration : 1 hour app.
  • Devised and Directed by : Rehaan Engineer
  • Featuring Shanaya Rafaat & Karan Makhija
  • Light Design : Pushan Kripalani
  • Entry : Prior booking required.
  • Maximum number of seats per show: 30.
  • Booking slips can be collected from the festival information desk ( Travancore Palace, Kasturba Gandhi Marg )
  • For enquiries call Deepali Jain at 9868166782 (between 11 am to 6 pm).
  • Contribution : Rs. 200/-
  • Play Info : A video and live performance piece based on Kalidasa's Meghadutam.
  • The performance will constitute a deliberately idiosyncratic interrogation of the 121 stanzas of Kalidasa's sanskrit lyric monody of parted lovers.
  • Within the piece, the classic text's precise triangulation of "lover / messenger / absent beloved" will be renegotiated and mapped onto the loose triangle created by the male performer / the female performer / the technology.
  • Important subsidiary notions that generate the situational matrix of the original text without being explicitly addressed by it - notions of selfhood and absence, of desire and dependence, of the actual v/s imagined worlds - will be examined through the personal memories of the participants as well as refracted through a series of shorter secondary texts freely plundered from the work of the contemporary American poet Jorie Graham.
  • A parallel process of historical excavation and re-imagining focused around the famous trial of Martin Guerre in Toulouse in January 1559 might also enter the ambit of the final performance.
  • Rehaan Engineer : trained at the R.A.D.A. from 1997-2000. He currently works as a director and actor in Mumbai, largely with The Industrial Theatre Co. which he helped found in 2001.
  • Shanaya Rafat is a regular with the Industrial Theatre Co. acting in their productions of Judith, The Maids, Ursula, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Hayavadana, Manifestly False and Blackbird 13 among others. Her work with other theatre companies includes roles in Beyond Therapy, Reunion, Dark Pony and The Vagina Monologues. She is currently involved with Dash Arts' touring production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which she plays the role of Helena.
  • Karan Makhija has been associated with the theatre since his early teens. He is a founding member of the ITCO and likes working with other young theatre groups like QTP and Akvarious productions. He has dabbled in radio, studied film and makes corporate AVs. He also likes to videograph pieces like this one. He was particularly interested in this performance piece because of the use of video and sanskrit text, and the presence of Shanaya Rafaat.
  • Pushan Kripalani works in the theatre as director, lighting designer and occasional musician. He acts rarely and with extreme reluctance. He studied film and is a cinematographer who lives and works in Bombay.
  • Notes on writers :
  • Kalidasa, dramatist and epic and lyric poet, writer of Meghadutam, Shakuntala and Ritusamharam; probably lived and wrote at the close of the first millennium B.C., though a date later by much as five centuries has been assigned to him by some scholars.
  • Jorie Graham (b. 1950) is the author of eight collections of poetry including The Dream of the Unified Field, which won the Pultizer prize. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches at Harvard University.
THEATRE : VISIBLE MASS : a meghadutam scrapbook as part of Red Earth's Monsoon Festival 2 at The Attic - 19th August, 2007 THEATRE : VISIBLE MASS : a meghadutam scrapbook as part of Red Earth's Monsoon Festival 2 at The Attic - 19th August, 2007 Reviewed by rohit malik on Sunday, August 19, 2007 Rating: 5

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