African Days

Guardians of the Deep set to rock WSSD
Seven actors, representing seven fishing nations, will highlight the fate of the ocean in a play staged specially for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg later this month. The play, Guardians of the Deep, was workshopped by the actors who come from fishing communities in countries such as Egypt, India, Brazil and Kenya. It takes the audience to the fishing communities with all its problems including drug use and domestic violence because of decline in the fishing resource. Sajitha Madathil from India lives with her husband in Kerela, in the south of India. She tells the story of the disappearance of the small fisherman because of the big fishing trawlers. She says the main issue in the story is the fishing trawlers. John Martin, a British director, says he hopes to put a human face to the issues that will be debated at the summit. He says:"I'd like the to go away and remember the face of Jody Abrahams."It is through the hands and feet, the music and the voices of this troupe that the message of small communities around the world will be heard in Johannesburg.

Matsyaganddhi-Calicut Performance

Making waves: ‘Matsyagandhi’ is about the travails of the fishing community.



Of marginalised lives

P.K. AJITH KUMAR

‘Matsyagandhi,’ a one-woman play scripted and directed by Sajitha, was staged in Kozhikode.
Carrying a lamp in her hands, she steps down from the stage. Her face, framed by her long, thick tresses, looks radiant. As she walks into the midst of the spectators inside a packed Town Hall in Kozhikode, and into darkness, she is applauded loudly.
It was a memorable homecoming for M. Sajitha who staged ‘Matsyagandhi,’ a one-woman play she has scripted and directed. She couldn’t have hoped for a better venue than her own hometown for the play’s premier in Kerala.
Fishing community
‘Matsyagandhi’ is about the fishing community; it is about how globalisation has impacted their lives. It is also about how they are marginalised by society and how they are often looked down upon because they smell of fish. The entire play is narrated by a fisherwoman who smells of fish (‘Matsyagandhi’). The play was first staged in South Africa, during the Earth Summit in 2002.
“It was also staged in three South African cities – Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria,” says Sajitha, who is working with the Sangeet Natak Akademi. She moved to Thiruvananthapuram from New Delhi recently.
“The play was well received in Delhi, even by the non-Malayali audience, when it was staged a couple of months ago. Theatre is very much alive in Delhi, unlike in Kerala,” she says.
‘Matsyagandhi,’ she says, is not just a play, but a documentation of the lives of fisherwomen as well. “The script is based on my conversations with them. I knew my play had reached out to them when I found a woman weeping at the end of my performance – the play wasn’t complete then and it wasn’t a proper staging as such – on the beach in Veli, Thiruvanthapuram. She was the sister of a fisherwoman who had been raped."
Sajitha says though she has used the bare minimum of props, she has worked hard on the background score.
“Umesh Sudhakar has composed the music and we recorded the real sound of the sea, not any synthetic sound.” And it has worked. Sajitha manages to capture the audience’s attention for about 45 minutes with her performance and the sound and the music.
She became interested in acting when she began to perform in the stage plays produced by Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad. “I found that I loved acting, though in my student days I was more into classical dances. Then I realised that the Parishad’s plays were not the kind of plays that I really wanted to act in. I went to Rabindra Bharati University in Kolkata to learn acting academically.”
Given an option, she would have loved to devote all her time to theatre. “But you can’t make a living out of theatre, so you are forced to work, and that’s the case with all those involved in theatre in Kerala,” she says. Sajitha has acted in plays for different troupes. “Since I am not attached to any particular company, I do get interesting assignments from different troupes. I enjoyed acting as ‘Mother Courage’ in the Brecht play put on by Abhinaya, Thiruvananthapuram. I also acted in Om Cheri’s ‘Pralayam.’”
Sajitha is currently working on the script of a play based on a Malayali woman living in Delhi.
“It would most probably be another one-actor play, but I have to use a few other voices. So I might as well bring them on to the stage; I have not decided on that,” she says.

"The Deluge"

An engrossing Malayalam play staged here brought to life the Biblical tale of Noah's Ark, but with a twist .

"Pralayam" (The Deluge) was staged at the National School of Drama as part of a theatre festival by Jansanskriti, a socio-cultural organization active in the capital. It deftly uses the deluge to create a context for exposing the implicit violence, injustice and corruption in present-day society. The play, penned by noted writer Omchery N.N. Pillai, was first produced in Delhi 30 years ago. Yet its relevance has only increased with time as was observed by former president K.R. Narayanan, the chief guest at the performance.

The impact of a heavenly revelation to an antediluvian Noah that the world would end in seven days forms its theme.

In the play, a decrepit Noah who cannot even draw a cross by himself is asked to make an ark for saving 1,000 good people, including himself. He succeeds in building an ark in seven days.

Apart from Noah, there are two other main characters - Mrs. Noah, a worldly wise, avaricious and power hungry woman, and Miss Mary, a clear headed, sceptical young secretary of Noah who is more concerned with human beings than god.

Mrs. Noah manages to get in touch with the richest, most powerful people of the world who want to corner most of the seats on the ark. Returning home after building the ark, Noah is thoroughly disheartened. He goes back to the ark just before countdown to make a big leak at the bottom to ensure that all the occupants perish in the sea.

Samkutty Pattomkary, a versatile young theatre personality from Kerala, presented a riveting performance. K.P. Anil Kumar as Noah, M. Sajitha as Mrs Noah and S. Sreekala as Miss Mary rendered outstanding performances.

Unlike in the original play, where Christ appears only as an apparition, in this production he appeared several times bearing a man-sized cross. In the hands of Mrs Noah, the cross becomes a weapon, which is used to kill Miss Mary, the voice of reason. In the original play, Miss Mary is shot.

Earthquakes, hurricanes, torrential rainstorms and tsunami add to the frenzy.

A dummy television with a transparent screen is among the innovations used by Samkutty to bring alive the drama created by the media, which has come to dominate life and influence opinions, sometimes adversely, in the present times.

"The Deluge" highlights the increasing spread of corruption, crime and fear psychosis with the spread of satellite communication. It deals with fundamental questions of injustice, inequality and oppression effectively with a penchant for irony, humour and sarcasm.
The characters have deeper symbolic value, which gives the play a sense of timelessness.

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