Neelamperoor Padayani

. Neelamperoor Padayani in south Kerala, one of the rich endowments in cultural and artistic expression that India has, is a colourful and participatory celebration of life and faith. The most striking aspect of Neelamperoor Padayani is its participatory character. It is a mind boggling to see one whole village living in a State that is getting urbanized at a frenetic pace get together to celebrate a festival. Every child and adult in every family in Neelamperoor is part of the Padayani festivities, something amazing considering the kind of divisions that otherwise exist in modern political societies. The activities begin at a slow rhythm and move to a grand finale which is a cathartic experience for the entire village. Its links with nature is so close that It is as though every plant and every twig in the village is being nurtured for the Neelamperoor Padayani. The artistic constructions that make Neelamperoor Padayani a colourful experience are all made using leaves, twigs and colours made from the locality.
As a part of my official work I was there to document the whole process of padayani rituals and performance. It was amaszing to see how a villagers were using temple permisses for variety of performances,.its a flow of movements and rhythm, one ritual to another...entries and exsit...

Thuruthu (Islet)

53 minutes/Mini DV
Siby Jose Chalissery
Thuruthu examines the alienation of a lower middle
class woman in rural Kerala, who lives in a fiercely
patriarchal society and is stranded at the crossroads of
tradition and modernity.Moving between fact and
fantasy, reality and dream, present and past, the film
examines how Jessy's hopes of escape to a verdant
and idyllic islet (Thuruthu) are predestined to end in
disaster.

Problematising The Body-A Solo Performance

BEAUTY PARLOUR - Problematising The Body
C. S. Venkiteswaran



Beauty Parlour, a play by K S Sreenath, directed by Sreenath and Sajitha, was performed at Thiruvananthapuram as part of the Theatre Festival during the Surya Festival 2001 "Beauty parlour' , according to the playwright (K S Sreenath), was inspired by a newspaper item about a woman who turned violent in a beauty parlour, wounded herself, and ran out naked into the city streets; she was arrested by the police later, but she refused to talk to anyone; and no one came in search of her. The play is a solo performance by M Sajitha (who also co-directs the play along with Sreenath), which is rendered as the monologue of the beautician from whose parlour Anita runs out. As it unfolds the play delves into the life, struggles and conflicts of both the characters - the narrator (the beautician) and her customer (Anita), both turning out to be victims.
The central question the play addresses is woman's relation to her body - the perpetual dissatisfaction with one's body that impairs her relation to her self; the obsessive concerns about its appearance and 'beauty'; the yearning to achieve and maintain its elusive perfection -its youth, smoothness, freshness and desirability…When one's appearance determines one's self-image, identity and self, its despairing elusiveness becomes one's destiny. Never available to oneself, but always naked to the gaze, look and glance of the other, and from which one has no escape, the obsession with appearance is the most tragic of one's relation to oneself. The mannequin on the stage represents the dream that the culture imposes upon woman, that ideal of perpetual youth hood, firmness, shapeliness, and alluring glow. As the play progresses, it is dismembered limb by limb. And in the end, the parts of the mannequin lie strewn around the stage. In the process, the play dissects the ideal of beauty and appearance, that chimera Anita was in pursuit. So, the dismemberment of the mannequin is accompanied by the putting together of the bits and pieces of Anita's life - a life that was defined by and destined to be the object of male gaze, always subject to preening and pruning to satisfy male desire. The characters - the beautician herself and Anita - come to life in the brilliant performance of Sajitha. The tragedy of their lives unfolds before us in the words of the beautician, who, trying to drive her guilt away, compulsively reminisces about her erstwhile customer. The play employs an acting method that brings to mind pakarnnattam of our classical arts like koodiyattam - a technique that perfectly suits the theme of the play which is about woman's relation to her body and her self. In pakarnnattam the actress effortlessly assumes and transforms herself into different selves through bodily movements and abhinaya. In real life, her body is a prison for Anita, something which is forced to shapes and postures, and is beyond her control. This dialectic between form and content, that is founded upon the conflict between body and appearance, self and image, desire and desirability, the look and its target, what one is and what one wants to be, lends 'Beauty Parlour' a dramatic tension that is contemporary and political. The production of the play was also minimalist in essence. Using minimum facilities and entirely depending upon the magic of acting and the innovative use of stage properties, the play is also sparing in its use of light and music."Beauty Parlour", in its passionate search for a new language that is capable of expressing the conflicts of our times marks a qualitative shift in the history of Malayalam theatre. Breaking away from both streams of 'experimental' theatre in Kerala - one obsessed with form and the other with the 'message' - Sreenath's play gives statement to the churning process that the contemporary theatre activists are finding themselves in.venkitesh@eth.net

Mother Courage

A tale of survival amidst ruin

C. Gouridasan Nair

Abhinaya will stage `Mother Courage and Her Children' today.

The ruinous visage of war is a familiar image in the present times. Pictures of wailing women, blood-spattered homes and dead bodies on desolate pavements are too familiar to be forgotten easily these days. Wars, big and small, also have their beneficiaries, people who are driven by greed and profit-motive. A situation captured in all its complexity by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht in his play `Mother Courage and Her Children.'

Brecht's play would go once again on stage at the Gorky Bhavan in Thiruvananthapuram on May 20.

Being produced by Abhinaya, the most active amateur theatre group in Thiruvananthapuram, under a scheme of the Department of Culture, Union Ministry of Human Resources Development, the play is being directed by a young alumnus of the National School of Drama, S. Thaninleima, from Manipur.

The cast is from Abhinaya, with the sole exception of M. Sajitha, herself a well-known actress, theatre director and researcher, currently based in New Delhi. Sajitha is doing the lead role of Mother Courage, a woman trapped in a system driven by greed and self-interest, who survives the war at the cost of her children. The cast also includes Sreenivasan, Jaimon, Siby Jose, Murugan, Nidhi, Vishnupriya, Siji, Kannanunni and Manu.

The Hindu-20th May 2005

Matsyaganddhi

The play Matsyaganddhi a solo performance of SajithaM , directed and scripted by her is going to be presented at Calicut Town Hall on 8th June. All are Welcome!

Duration-50min

Language-Malayalam

Music- Umesh Sudhakar

Light-Sreekanth

On Stage-Sajitha

Why This Play

The play Matsyaganddhi relates directly to thesustainability in fishing community and the role ofthis life sustaining industry in small costal communities around the world. The script of this playdeveloped through the interaction with fishingcommunity at Kerala costal area. It narrates how theimpact of globalization became a strong reason forloosing their deep knowledge on sea and crushedlivelihood of fisher folks. Matsyaganddhi reveals the pic ture of a marginalized society changing their selfunder the compulsion of the mainstream. Apart fromcaste related anomalies they had to face occupationrelated discrimination. The question of fish stinking is specter for the mainstream society whose obsessionwith a fragrant body odor keeps the fisherwomen always as a problematic one. The mainstream culturalartifacts like cinema, novel and other popular artform has represented fisherwomen as sex starred womanseeking always the attention of the visible man, thisimage of women as vulnerable to corrupt the moral andethical codes of mainstream Malayalee society.Interestingly the text developed around the issue offish stink and it became a theme image of the text.The solo play was scripted on the occasion of the Earth Summit, Johannesburg in South Africa.

Synopsis of Matsyagandi

Matsyaganddhi, literally 'the one who smells of fish'is a play that looks at the life and times of thefishing community in the context of globalization. Narrated in the form of a monologue by a fish-vending woman, the play brings to life various issues relating to the ecology and economy of fishing. It looks at the community life of the fisher folk from inside – a life that is being increasingly marginalized and livelihood made more and more impossible by the spread of the disastrous technology and oppressive economic and social relations. Weaving several contemporary incidents and insights into the narrative, the play throws up several dualities that map her and her folks' marginality - between fish-stink and upper class concerns about body odor,sea water and fresh water, low life on the streets versus safe compartmentalized life of the high, the lives of women versus men etc.

In the end, she realizes that the malaise runs much deeper and wider. She mourns "Look, this stench does not come from my basket. It's the stench of the sea decaying. It's the stench of the little fishes being slaughtered by the trawler nets. It's the stench of the decaying dreams of Matsyaganddhis.