Forgetfullness

Just some random pics from the travels...

The women of Maitree dairy in Rajasthan...

Cotton farmers in Warangal

and ... Bollgard II Cotton - GMO

Into Stone - draft 4

It wouldn't let me sleep.

So I did what any writer suffering the birthing pangs of a particularly difficult play would do... Fish the play out of the garbage bin, down a few frappes, pop a few red bulls and camp in front of the comp.

And it worked. I passed out for a few days after... But I think I've made my next breakthrough on the play, and draft four emerges!

The challenge has always been on the second half of the play and for the first time I felt a degree of coherence in the madness. I also realised that I was cramping the play by forcing all the action into three performers. After the reading in Bombay, I felt the need to "open out" the play and let it breathe a bit. Which seems to have payed off. Now enough back-patting... I have some stuff to think about...

One of the things that often frustrates me whenever I watch a play is the appallingly slow pace of most plays. Maybe this is a subjective thing, or maybe it's because as a playwright I find it difficult to watch a play without probing into it's construction as I'm watching it. I often find the best plays immerse me in their world so totally, that I am not allowed the time to pick at the seams. Conversely, other plays plod along and I find my attention wandering to the set, the lights, the time and where we're going for dinner.

The beauty of the theatre is the ability to create stage images. Unlike cinematic images, these images are live, charged and electric! They don't have the precision and range of the cinematic image (ECU, ELS) but what they do posses is live energy. I've seen over 50 plays in the last few months and it's really got me thinking about my own craft.

I think our ability to assimilate information is high. Our brains don't come apart at smash cuts, jump cuts, split screens, quick intercuts etc. We process information, and we process it fast! I find myself throwing out mountains of expositiory material in favour of lean, pointed action. And I think it's gotten to the point where the play moves along at a somewhat blistering pace. And I think one of the things that I have been trying to do is to combine the electricity of the live image, with a certain pace...
(Or maybe this is just my own version of "hearing the notes that aren't played" ...)

Anyway, I'm a firm believer in "leaving out" things. The trick is trying to figure out what to leave out. And the trickiest part is discovering something in the text and then burying it again! The beauty of this is that it still stays with the play... giving it a certain density, a certain crackle... that I really love.

Hmm... talking craft into the echoes of cyber space again.

Anyone out there?

Oh crap!

Man I have completely NOT lived up to my promise of posting once a month! Ugh!Anyway... quick recap. Lots of travelling - B'bay, Pune, Panjim, Bangalore, Calcutta, Delhi...

Nothing fantastically new to report at the moment. Seen lots of plays and reading like crazy. Also been drinking way too much coffee!

Wrote this really funny short play. Had fun writing comedy after so long. Trying to find my writing rhythm again. And in the process I've rediscovered my freestyle rhythm. I'm good with the three stroke-breathe rhythm, but I'm tiring easily. Need to work on stamina. Picked up some really nice climbing gear. So now I'm fully equipped for a serious climb - the only thing is I have to "actually" climb!

Creeper at the MetroPlus Theatre Fest in Chennai

Creeper creeps to Chennai, we perform on August 9th, 7.30 p.m at Sir Mutha Venkata Subba Rao Concert Hall, Harrington Road.

More details at:
http://www.thehindu.com/mp/2008/07/21/stories/2008072150650100.htm

Into Stoned

Well the reading was a disaster. Thanks so much to everyone who showed up and gave their time to make it happen! And special thanks to Q for hosting it!

I think the problem with the play is that it is just doing too many things at the same time. And I seem to be unable to balance the play out at this point in my evolution. I'm unable to let each story fully realise itself and have ended up squashing the entire action into a 90 minute format. I've also come to realise how vulnerable a play really is...

A play is an organic entity, capable of dropping dead on your hands if you don't treat it right. This brings up my "dead" play tally to "three" and I'm not at all keen on pushing that number up.

Annoyed and unhappy.
Bleargh!

June was a flop

I sadly report that nothing happened in June.
Many things were planned, but nothing actually happened.
So I'm sorry to say, that there is nothing worth writing about...

In other related news my bi-monthly "I'm sick of this city!" flu came on big time and as a consequence this update comes to you from rainy Mumbai!

Moving on...
My B-grade horror film script is done. I had a chat with my actors about what I had in mind and the script meeting quickly turned into a lunge for ice cream after ice cream - since there was no alcohol nearby. Seems my scrpit was a bit too... er... what's the word... er... me? for the team and as a result I've temporarily shelved the project. Here is the concept teaser, badly photo-shopped by me.



The film might be considered a post-modern narrative that explores identity, gender, communal harmony, cliff-diving, 10m air pistol shooting techique, the other, the other one too, denial, Pashtun socicultural pornographic discourse, and involves a man unable to sleep, a psychotic clown who won't stop smoking (think Captain Spaulding's clingy ex-clownbitch-girlfriend) and the innards of a dead cow. This kind of specialised narrative style is other wise known as B-grade rubbish.

Sadly, this film won't take off for a while due to terminal artistic ineptness on the part of the director, who thought he could do a David Lynch. On a positive note, I did a screen test with the cow and it's innards performed superbly.
Interested producers please talk to my agent.

Aside: I really really need to CLIMB, but everything is bloody wet! Argh.

Ok, some good news. After screwing around with the Into Stone text endlessly, and ingesting at least 30 frappes, I've got a draft that reads decently. And I am now confident it can be read out loud without causing me to leap out the nearest window.
Reading is scheduled for 4:30pm on Tuesday the 8th of July at Qs. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it won't be a horrible unintelligible mess that will effectively signal the end of my pointless playwriting career. All the same, I am going to stay away from windows till after the reading is done. Nervous and scared, but who's to say how it will turn out.

Oh, I was in Rajasthan last month. That's where I took the picture of the tree. Pretty much changed my life, really got me thinking about lots of things. I think it helped me finish the play in some ways.

I'm pretty low now. I'm going to go and eat some Sancha ice cream.
Will do a serious update on how the reading went soon.

One year - and I've finally bloody pinned it!

Into Stone - Draft 2 is officially complete.

My head hurts, my eyes hurt, my heart hurts, my fingers hurt, my stomach hurts, my knees hurt... I'm exhausted.

I am so glad this play is over.
One year, I've bashed away and I feel like I've run a marathon and then walked up a mountain, and then down the other side, and then swum across a bay, and passed out on the beach... (pics later)

That's it - I quit.
From now on it's only sex comedies.

--------

Er... on second thought - scratch that last whimper/whine.

Well, to be honest the journey is not over yet. I think the text needs to be put aside for a while. Thanks so much to everyone who kept me going. :-)

In other news I've found an interim project that is worth pursuing, B-grade horror. I am going to make a sick and gory short film. Bring on the blood and low key lighting!

Hahahahaha!

The final Creeping

If you haven't seen this play so far (this is the 10th show!!! where have you been?) now is your chance!

A few quotes:

"… the characters appear to transform into two pieces broken from a single soul — the soul of the city." "…the cast is brilliant."
- Deccan Herald

"Two related observations strike the viewer immediately about Ram Ganesh Kamatham’s work, of which, I think, Creeper is his most mature statement to date. One, the freshness of the language, his finely tuned (and not simply caricaturing) ear for the English that Indians actually speak; and two, what might be called the startling 21st century 'now'ness of the worlds he asks us to live in. If such a strong emphasis on the contemporary might easily lead (and has led, in the work of others) to another desperately trendy mishmashed disaster of a play, Kamatham succeeds through a deft and even classical engagement with form, edgy humour, and a darkly political seriousness of purpose. It’s not for nothing that in Creeper, Kamatham riffs off an old Sanskrit tale of horror and morality; his is not the triumphant celebration of Indian arrival that you see so often in the local and foreign press. We might even achieve our dream of being a hyper-modern, powerful, rich and even 'first world' country, Kamatham seems to be telling us, but it might in the end turn out a nightmare."
-Vivek Narayanan

"Ram Ganesh Kamatham's Creeper is not only a bold play in the manner in which it produces theatrical meaning, it speaks with immediacy to all of us who have felt orphaned in our own city, who experience it as a story of aching loss and dispersal, rather than as a steel-chrome-glass narrative of rising and shining. Abhishek Majumdar and Mallika Prasad do more than live up to the script's demand for actors with immense stamina and range. They attack the first half of the text with astonishing panache, energy and comic timing, while also plumbing the emotional depths of the surprisingly different second half with poignancy and heartrending conviction. Not to be missed, particularly by anyone asking if theatre in English has a future in this country."
- Anmol Vellani

"The acting was spontaneous – Abhishek is exceptional in his frenetic, anxious intensity as the outsider in Bangalore and Mallika is spirited in her natural, refreshing nostalgia as an old Bangalorean."
- The Hindu

"Ceeper provides a fascinating insight into the way in which individuals living in highly industrialized cities begin to internalize ideas, relationships and through systems more commonly associated with technology and machines. The interplay between the characters' notions of mortality and the permanence of the virtual work is particularly sharp."
- Lyndsey Turner, International Associate, Royal Court Theatre

Thoughts after the seminar at Ninasam

The seminar at Ninasam was a real eye-opener.

It was everything a seminar should be - a place for sharing ideas, a place where the desire to shoot and choke someone to death is legitimate and a place where there is a lovely forum to slug, sludge and smash each other to pieces within a constructive framework.

Having said this - here are my (two bit) observations:

1. The defining moment for me was the address by P. Sainath - responded to by Shiv Visvanathan.
Of course it's easy to fall over and slobber over Sainath and the towering individual/superstar/icon that he is, but for me the gripping rejoinder by Shiv was what made the argument balanced. (I was reminded of the classic Brutus versus Mark Anthony - head versus heart clash - but that's just my cheesy brain making the arbitrary connection.)
I've been whining about icons, how there are no role models, how there are no more mighty heroes that we can look up to. Well I just met two pure blooded Titans at the seminar - Shiv and Sainath.
Individually they didn't make complete sense to me. Sainath hammered us with sentimentalism and emotional blackmail, slammed dismal facts in our face and generally made us all feel like myopic urban armchair intellectuals – even going so far as to prescribe the appropriate individual responses to his speech. Shiv reduced things to processes – speaking of the insidious transformation from victim to patient in the public forgetfulness of tragedy via the Bhopal disaster – literally giving emotion a tight logical-slap in the face. For me these two heroes emerged from this fusion – the clash of the Titans. Two individuals who were saying the same thing, asking the same questions (and holy crap those are tough questions): Who benefits? Who suffers? Who is excluded from this lovely thing we call progress? (Ironically neither of these Titans are theatre practitioners, which bothers me a great deal. But more on this later.)
These two individuals are asking such staggering questions that I feel it is almost imperative to react… When the great minds and thinkers of our times are asking us such hard questions, how in hell do I respond with my art? Can my art even begin to answer the scale of these questions? Can my theatre effectively respond to this towering duo - this journalist and sociologist?

2. Theatre practitioners are woolly headed wimps.
(I include myself in this happily irresponsible generalization.) If I am to receive this accurately: According to Makarand Sathe's interview of Vijay Tendulkar, Tendulkar says that it is innately natural for a man to want to hit a woman. Sathe goes onto qualify that he does not believe that to be true and elucidates this further in his play (which I missed) but is left-hooked by woman in audience (I don't know her name) who objects strongly to her body (woman's) being used as a battleground for aged men's' sexist agendas. Put this argument next to the magnitude of the Sainath-Shiv struggle and we suddenly want to innately hit all three of these people. I'm not junking their debate – I'm stating the absurdity of this argument, timed as it were, just after the Shiv-Sainath statements. My point is that while the non-theatre crowd is gripped in such compelling contemporary debate, I found the theatre crowd screwing around with abstractions, advancing the incredibly irritating liberal humanist agendas that we seem to have hard-wired into our court-jester skulls.

3. Theatre practitioners are woolly headed wimps.
Yes, this deserves additional qualification since this is something I am personally grappling with. There was a really funny agit-prop piece that I saw that was apparently written after the Gujarat disaster – Yeh Dil Mange More – if I remember correctly. It was so funny. The actions revolved around a bunch of goofball fundamentalists (abstractions of the VHP, Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and so on…) who were building the ideal Hindu Rashtriya who did many silly things – the funniest being repeatedly kick one character's bum (Bahubali! – thum gadhe ho!) whenever he messed up. I loved the performance, but I hated with a vengeance the black-and-white-intelligence that surrounded the piece. It was like resistance for dummies: Fundamentalist = BAD, MNC=Pepsi+Coke= EVIL, GUJARAT = tragedy = national shame.
With all their dramatic weaponry wielded, the best they managed was reductio ad absurdum.
I think what I am personally struggling with is this: is that all we can come up with? As artists – even at the agit-prop level, what dramaturgical engagement can you cite that is more comprehensive than expression of sentiment, what can you deliver that is more than just biting satire, what can you personally do, that takes your piece above textbook resistance and into incisive dramatic insight? I loved the piece that was performed, I was so very annoyed that the piece played absolutely safe and never once took any risks. Which brings back the question to self: How is my art effectively responding to Shiv and Sainath?

4. What good is a liberal humanist agenda?
I've run into this debate on more than a few occasions and have managed to pin down a few thoughts. At the International Residency we all wrote down a list of verbs that (as writers) we wanted our plays to perform on the audience. We then ranked what were the most important verbs personally and as a group. It was a lovely exercise, some of the ones I remember were: entertain, educate, mesmerize, provoke, challenge, smash, brutalise. I think "entertain and educate" produce Broadway/West End Musicals and I think that "smash and brutalise" accounts for writers like Kane and Barker. I think I was hovering around the "provoke, mesmerise, challenge" area. What I'm getting at is "entertain and educate" can easily turn into "avoid confrontation and placate all parties…" in which case one might as well be writing episodes of Friends. I think I need to be working a lot harder to respond to these questions, and I mustn't give myself the luxury of "Let's keep it simple and funny." Of course I could give myself that luxury, but then I’d just be a woolly headed wimp.

5. There was no young urban voice in the seminar.
I had to keep pinching myself to convince myself that the year was not 1986, especially when some speakers were talking about IP, the impact of television on theatre and contemporary theatre practice with such outdated arguments that I really began to wonder how much of a yuppie urban techno-brat I am. I really respect my seniors in theatre, but I think I'd like to volunteer for the job of whacking some of them over the head with my plays to remind them of some of the problems of the 21st century! (And I pray that someone will be around to do the same for me.)
While some of them stand around squeezing tomatoes and ejaculating over King Lear, Mr. Sainath is asking me what I was doing when farmer suicides crossed the 400 mark in Vidharbha, while over 500 journalists were busy elsewhere covering the Lakme Fashion Week. And while Mr. Shiv is slapping me up with this brain busting observation: "The socio-drama of India lies in the eventless events – erasure, displacement, obsolescence and triage. Democracy needs to constrict them in new ways beyond the standard theatre right and left." – A senior theatre practitioner had this gem to offer: "Is TV a torchbearer of late capitalism parallel to the role of the novel in the 19th century?"

Well that's enough of a rant. I wish we had more time to attend more of the sessions, but anyway the show went down well. Creeper raised more than a few eyebrows I suspect. Time to take another whack at Into Stone…

Important note to self: I am not a woolly headed wimp.

Creeper creeps to Ninasam

Starring Abhishek Majumdar and Mallika Prasad

Written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham

Sunday 23rd March (7:30pm) at Nani Arena

Centre for Film and Drama, 5th Floor,

Sona Towers, 71, Millers Road, Bangalore

Wednesday 26th March at Ninasam, Heggodu
as part of the Not the Drama Seminar - Theatre Practice in India Today

by the Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai

"There is a box on stage."

"There is a light on the box."

"We do not know what is inside the box."

Creeper is a modern re-imagination of the tale of Vikram and Betal. The play slams this mythos into a contemporary urban setting with a racy text and powerhouse performances – creating a shadowy world that is immediately recognizable yet bizarre and entertaining.

Adrift - Maddeningly Close (IS-2)

January was rubbish. Not much work on the play.
Did a very small trip this month. Went to Ninasam in Heggodu and then went on/back to Gokarna over the weekend.
Had a blast scrambling on the rocks towards Half-Moon beach.
Came across another 'devaru' rock - Jatayu again.
Did a proper sit down research session on the historical thread of the play and pinned the year down to 1681 A.D. Reasons later.
Two playwrights have accused me of "thinking too much" when I was whining to them about the play for the hundredth time...
I've decided to switch off my brain on Into Stone - and let my heart loose...
Ahem - the last time I did that I wrote a 2 hour long love story...
I suspect the same will happen this time, but then again, if I'm not thinking about it... then I needn't worry about it at all. (Until playwrights accuse me of writing about the same emotional themes again!)
More later...