“Our memory-Our madness-Our bedsheets: A weekend with Panero” Installation-performance by Parnab Mukherjee at Instituto Cervantes, 48, Hanuman Road, Connaught Place (CP) > 6:30pm on 18th & 19th April 2015

Time : 6:30 pm Add to Calendar 18-04-2015 18:30:00 19-04-2015 20:00:00 68 “Our memory-Our madness-Our bedsheets: A weekend with Panero” Installation-performance by Parnab Mukherjee Event Page : http://www.delhievents.com/2015/04/our-memory-our-madness-our-bedsheets.html Instituto Cervantes, 48, Hanuman Road, Connaught Place (CP), New Delhi - 110001 DD/MM/YYYY

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served Basis)

Venue : Instituto Cervantes, 48, Hanuman Road, Connaught Place (CP), New Delhi - 110001
Venue Info : Events | About | Map
Metro : Nearest Metro Station - 'Rajiv Chowk' (Yellow Line and Blue Line)
Area : Connaught Place (CP)

Event Description : “Our memory-Our madness-Our bedsheets: A weekend with Panero” Installation-performance by Parnab Mukherjee.

About the performance and the poet: How can life itself be a canvas of black humour? Look at Leopoldo Maria Panero. Ask him. Who is this Leopoldo? Looking at Panero’s life one can’t figure out what to remember what to forget. Not that he wants us to either remember not forget. He prefers us to be in the middle of the road zombie state. So what would I remember? What do I want to forget?

That he uses a pre-historic Olivetti with which 20 books have been churned out. That his drafts are usually laced with smouldering cigarette holes, indelible coffee stains and doodles. That Poems from Mondragon Mental Hospital (1987) is an anti-establishment classic. That his most frequent address is a psychiatric hospital outside Las Palmas in Spain’s Canary Islands, off the coast of West Africa (and this is only the latest in the asylum-hopping habit which dates back to 1986). That one of his current psychiatrists Segundo Manchado says that Panero can move out the hospital when ever he wants, but Panero stays put. Wakes up does this thing. The hospital to him is a multiple bedroom flat. In Mumbai (shall we say pan-India context) simply a BHK space.

Born in 1948 to a literary family, Panero’s father Leopoldo and elder brother Juan Luis were both notable poets. A child prodigy, Panero gave impromptu poetry performances at his family apartment on Calle Ibiza in Madrid. He emerged as a polyglot who knew and read Spanish, French, English and Italian.

Between Prufrock and penury, between Verlaine and cinema verité, Panero straddles a dark brooding genre of life and poetry...both entwined, both mixed up in a sense of hyper-activity dipped in a cocaine haze. Difficult to follow, but dazzling. The challenge of grappling with Panero is not only in de-ciphering a very private usage of language but also enjoying the flavour of garbled syntax, of impossible imageries, an intensely staccato meter and words. Yes, Panero is alive.

About the performer: A spoken word performer, independent media analyst, curator and a performance consultant by profession, Mr Parnab Mukherjee is one of the leading alternative theatre directors of the Indian sub-continent. A performance text writer and charismatic performer, he has diverse experience in non-proscenium, verbatim, site-specific and physical theatre. Currently, he is a roving editor with Five Issues: performance-publishing interface. He has earlier worked for a sports fortnightly, a chess tournament bulletin, The Asian Age, Kindle India and Sambad Pratidin. He is an acclaimed practitioner on Badal Sircar's theatre practice, Shakespeare-in-education and specialises in theatre-of-conflict and theatre-of-the-campus. He is considered as a leading light in alternative theatre in the country having directed more than 145 productions of performance texts including four international collaborations. He has devised, conceived, designed and directed/collaborated both experimental performances and workshops for a number of institutions, activist groups, support groups, schools, colleges, youth groups and social movements across the country. As a journalist and human rights activist, he has extensively worked on the dynamics of human rights and economic systems of the country. His writings have mirrored the aspirations of the fringe in the nation state especially as into the parameters of economic growth that fails to mirror the widening chasm between the haves, have-nots, have-beens and yet-to-be. As a journalist, he has critiqued to the national imagination of mixing up the rapidly increasing remoteness of the power centers with the grassroot notions of development, the constructed mainstream history with cultural amnesia. He has developed theatre advocacy tools developed for international agencies including UNoDC and UN Women have concentrated on this growing inter-connectivity between human trafficking, conflict. He has created a personal idiom of using spaces for theatre exploration. He has extensively worked on a range of human rights issues, which include specific theatre projects on antiuranium project struggles in Jadugoda and Turamdihi, Save Tenzin campaign, rehabilitation after industrial shutdowns, shelter issue of the de-notified tribes, a widely acclaimed cycle of plays against genocide, and a range of subjects on north-east India especially with different issues pertaining to Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958.

Some of the most memorable productions of the collective include Where is Imphal? (For Birla Academy of Art and Culture), Trilogy of Unrest (Hamletmachine, Necropolis, This room is not my room), River Series (used as a exploratory advocacy tool by Unifem, Undoc and Kripa Foundation), Only Curfew, Rehearsing Antigone, Raktakarabi-an urban sound opera, Buddha Files, Kasper-dipped and shredded, They Also Work, Dead-Talk series, Conversations with the dead, Crisis of Civilisation, Shakespeare shorts, Man to Man talk, Inviting Ibsen for a Dinner with Ibsen, Your path wrong path and And the Dead Tree Gives no Shelter.

Four of his major workshop modules: Freedomspeak, The Otherness of the Body, Conflict as a Text and The Elastic Body have been conducted with major theatre groups and campuses all over the country. He has written four books of performance texts. As a theatre soloist, he has extensively travelled with his repertoire and has performed in a range of cities including Bali, Surabaya, Tehran, Mashad, Chittagong, Biratnagar, Cardiff, Colombo, Negombo, Batticaloa, Dhaka, Copenhagen, London, Liverpool, Dili (East Timor), Ottowa, Manchester, Singapore, Bangkok, Patumthani, Montreal, New York and Vijlandi (Estonia). He has written five books on theatre. And have contributed to a range of publications including Dancing Earth-An anthology of poetry from North East India published by Penguin India, Tehelka, The Spectator-London, Montreal Serai, Imphal Free Press, Chandrabhaga-Cuttack and Hard News. He is presently touring with Tagore Now ! a piece commissioned for the Embassy of Sweden in India for the 100 years of Tagore's Nobel prize and Museum of Million Hamlets dedicated to the 450th birth commemoration of William Shakespeare

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