My blog has once again, gone official! I will now be reporting monthly progress on a new project of mine, working title - Bust. The project has been enabled by an art grant from Robert Bosch India. (RBEI)
The idea for the play hit me quite by accident. As good ideas often tend to. I was doing a duck-walk-frog-jump-run-till-you-drop Sunday workout in Cubbon Park with my crazy climbing friends at Mars Adventures. While I was wondering whether my hamstrings would explode, I happened to chance upon a statue that was set amidst a bunch of colourful flowers. I was amazed at the beautiful sight. Endorphins tend to make everything really wonderful… I also realised that I had no clue whose statue it was. Which set me thinking - Who's statue is that? This line of thinking led me to the next observation - I think my hamstrings just exploded...
Later in the day... one thing connected to another and an idea took shape.
Bust takes the audience on a journey into the city of Bangalore through the eyes of eminent historical persons who were a major influence on the city. The sutradhars of the play are actually characters drawn from the city's history. This enables a polyvocal clash of cultures, timelines and narratives, conflating past and the present against a contemporary urban backdrop.
Which seems to be a pet theme, come to think of it. I suppose this is a continuation of the tricks I was turning in Creeper. I think that the polyvocal approach facilitates risk taking. It also liberates you from dull things like consistency of voice and sanctity of authorial meaning, instead, throwing you into the exciting terrain of shifting language. It might be exciting to create a text - as Barthes puts it - that is "a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture." So while Barthes announced the death of the author in 1968, we can get on with the business of playmaking in the year 2009 minus many burdens, posthumously or otherwise.
The fun thing about a lot of my projects, is that they tend to be inherently polyvocal. The text serves as the springboard for writer-director-actor dynamics. Meaning is created through this negotiation and eventually, it also the audience that supplies a live meaning in performance. This is what makes the theatrical experience so live, so immediate.
At the moment however, it's time to put on my research hat, saturate myself in all the available material and then sniff out the way forward. I've got a few leads already, so I'm off to do a pile of interviews and start snooping around… Here we go! Damn excited!
