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...

Drift - Close to kill (IS-1)

Been drifting for a while…

Here's the general 29 day route – a lot of places only in transit
Bangalore - Delhi - Rishikesh - Shivpuri – Devpriyag - Pauri - Shivpuri – Rishikesh - Dehradun - Delhi – Mumbai – Ratnagiri – Malvan – Savanthwadi – Mapusa – Panjim – Maragao – Karwar – Ankola – Gokarna – Hubli - Bangalore

I'm pretty tired. Will let the multimedia do the talking.
I have to finish Into Stone ...


Delhi show of Creeper went well.
This was one of the profiles we used for the show. It's really old - ancient even. Quite a sight.
Don't want to get on the wrong side of this piece of equipment!
Belting Mughalai food at Karims was great.
And if I'm in Delhi, what's to stop me from hopping onto a bus at ISBT and heading for the mountains!!!


Ganga Base Camp - Alpine Star, Shivpuri. Awesome place. Highly recommend it for any enthusiastic white water rafting junkies. It got pretty cold. Played a lot of volleyball. Sat around the fire a lot. Met Jackie - the stupidest dog on the planet. He stole my shoe and hid it somewhere. Udit's brother called me a Sufi. A group of tekkies from Noida were at the camp singing and dancing the whole night. On the way back I did a bit of Kayaking. And one run on the raft. Managed a half-roll with the kayak. The river is a small universe... The current is really strong. I jumped into the Ganga from the raft, right into the rapids before the camp. I was laughing. I am an idiot.

Linked up with Udit and hopped a Commander to Pauri.
Saw this at the bus stop.
Pretty unsettling. Creeper still on my mind I guess. :-)


Lot of clouds at Pauri!!! But you get a 180 degree view of the Himalayas from here. Drank lots of coffee. Wrote a quickie children's play at Udit's computer institute. Kept troubling Seema Ma'am for a computer. Signal returned to my phone - but the LCD nearly froze.


Beyond... beyond beyond... Higher than anything...
Far above the nowhere ladder, over the sun...
Breathe breathe breathe ... Everything is full of infinite detail...


Plucked some oranges. Rained heavily.
Roads unsafe, so parked here. Won't make it to Bombay in time for Thespo.


Hit Dehradun. Wandered around the Forest Research Institute.
Um... I guess this sign means well... But I think we've lost something in translation.

And speaking of strange signage...

Hehehe...

Managed to catch this snap at FRI...

I think I might be shooting a bit better.

Evening in Dehradun. Drank Rhododendron juice at a fair.

It's heaven!

Um... Er... Went shopping???

Landed in Mumbai - from 3 degrees to 30 degrees.

Went at Into Stone with a vengeance.

Drove Q mad by sitting in front of the laptop for four straight days.

"What will you give the boatman?"

Took a private bus to Ratnagiri and then an ST bus to Malvan.

My poor back. The mighty Sindhudurg fort.

Stone stone stone...

Gokarna. The site of the aerial battle between Jatayu and Ravan.

Um... A rather short battle I suppose.

My dramatisation:

Muahahahah! - Bachaaon bachaao - Hic... Hic... I'll save you! - WhackSmashBash - Mayday! Mayday! May_ Splat. - Muahahahah! - I've been winged! Pani pani pani pani...

And so on...

The place where Jatayu was chillin before he decided to take on Shiva's number one devotee.
Bad move, old vulture man. Awesome chimney route here. Wanted to free climb it - but good sense prevailed. Must come back and do it with belay.

I asked a local what these were and he conveniently replied - "Devaru" ... SO... I'm interpreting it in my own way. And declaring that this stone contains the wing, bone and liver of Jatayu.

Man I need some sleep.

Happy new year all!

Creeper in Delhi

Starring Abhishek Majumdar and Mallika Prasad
Written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham

Wednesday 5th December (7:00pm) at
LTG [Little Theatre Group] Auditorium
Copernicus Marg, near Connaught Place
New Delhi 110 001
(Metro Station: Mandi House)

"I am the sutradhar!!! I am pulling this string!!!"

"I can still hear him in my head.
The change of scene did me some good.
But ten minutes after I got back to Bangalore...

I'm back to where I was.

I'm growing too old, too quickly."

Creeper Production Notes (IFS-8)

Starring Abhishek Majumdar and Mallika Prasad

Saturday 24th November 2007 (7:30pm)
and Sunday 25th November 2007 (3:30pm and 7:30pm)
at Ranga Shankara, 8th Cross, 2nd Phase, JP Nagar, Bangalore - 78
Tickets: Rs 100/- available at the venue
- Contains explicit language
- Not suitable for persons below the age of 18
- Late entry not permitted
- Call or sms: 9845602265 for tele-bookings

And now that we have the PR out of the way, a few thoughts on the process. This production of Creeper is driven by a couple of central ideas. The most visual element, is the use of a painting by Edvard Munch to inform the rehearsal process.

What I love about the Vampire is the delicious ambiguity that energizes the image. Munch's painting has a strong emotional charge that supercedes the immediate need for biography and context, presenting us with an abstracted symbol, leaving our own imagination to do the rest.

This image also fits perfectly within another idea that I've been working with, right from the start of this process - the idea of Vikram and Betal as a single entity. With this production, the character of Vikram and Betal are reduced to a set of behaviors that alternately manifest in the narrator and the sutradhar, weaving between the two.

The Betal idea is explored as one of ravenous hunger, of a desire to feed on something-anything. Rarely is the Betal able to consume actual food, instead devouring memories, emotion, images – launching itself into repetitive activities that loop endlessly. The Vikram idea is viewed as being under the compulsion to physically feed, but never to find solace in the consumption of actual food. The Vikram is under siege by the Betal, having to constantly acknowledge it, often as a person suffering some kind of mental illness.

Of course, the behaviors keep dancing around interchangeably in the two acts – almost as if the two story-tellers in the play are the battleground on which Vikram and Betal have chosen to slug it out. The two characters inhabit a mindscape that is in constant flux, swinging into extreme tangential behavior and then looping into repetitive cyclic thought.

I also hope that this time the second half of the play will register better. Once the play itself swings into repetitive cycles – the meaning as such, begins to transmit itself through juxtaposition. You no longer have the comfort of saying - where is this story going? – but might have to ask – what is going on right now? The comfort of a linear tracking narrative is supplanted with the edgy spinning narrative and you are suddenly thrown into a Munch painting where questions like - who is this character? – lead to dead ends, and again the question - what is going on right now? – opens up a world of meaning…

And I think this is great question to ask not just at an individual level – but at the level of a city. What is going on right now, in a city that suffers a severe identity crisis, that is in such flux that its character might be described only in relation to another thing – a city in dialogue.

I do hope to see you at the show this weekend. And for those of you in Delhi, we travel there on the 5th of December for the Independent Fellowship final presentations. I'm off now, to break a leg, or both if possible.

A happy ending (IFS - 7)

Well sometimes you spend hours and hours looking for something and it is right under your nose. After driving myself up the wall trying to find a point of entry into the playtext, scribbling endlessly on scraps of paper and staring vacantly at the monitor – I realized that this was pretty much what I needed by way of a point of entry.

With all the inward looking on this text – I thought it only natural to write the play as a meta-narrative – with two writers engaged in the process of writing.

The text scrambled into existence fairly quickly and is being speedily eased into performance. I don't want to say too much at this point – since I'm in rehearsal and am discovering the text anew. Also, I really think a play should speak for itself!

What I will say is that I've managed a satisfying positioning of the Vikram and Betal idea that is immediate and relevant. I view these two characters as a single parasitic entity – one cannot exist without the other. This formlessness manifests dramatically as an inability to say for certain who is who, within the course of the play. Additionally the duo find themselves rooted in contemporary Bangalore – a city reeling under a period of rapid growth and development - a 'cosmopolitan city' that is clearly split down the middle – with a cultural rift that is steadily widening.

I've used a very simple linguistic approach to the play – that of counterpoint and contrast – positioning differing 'linguistic genres' to create tension and dramatic movement. The language of nostalgia slams into the lingo of online pornography – the description of an exorcism ritual, slams into the voice of the cyber stalker – orkut meets Amar Chitra Katha – a cold rational voice is set off against the obsessive-compulsive online addict.

I think what really crystallized this play for me was an incident on October 2nd. I was on my way to rehearsal and was caught up in traffic. I was on my Kinetic and realized the jam was caused by a fight that had broken out on Castle Street, diagonally opposite Brigade Towers and Globe Stores. A couple of guys were slugging it out – and the visual was immediately recognizable – a local South gang versus two Northy guys on two-wheelers. It was a pretty dumb fight – punches, scuffles, some filmi kicks and a helmet being swung into someones head. A cop was standing right opposite, very deliberately turning his back and suddenly very diligently directing traffic. And I really wasn't amused by this circus – with Kannada and Hindi expletives being flung at each other. And I took the typical apathetic middle class route – got past the jam and got the hell out of there and on my way.

I'm not an expert. I'm not one to pass quick judgment, but I think this incident pretty accurately describes what Bangalore is going through right now. And I think the text responds to this situation dialogically – placing a nostalgic 80s Bangalore voice against a rabid 21st century Bangalore voice.

I also hope that the play explores the futility of both positions – of retrogressive xenophobia and the other of glowing 'development propaganda'. The futility of saying – "Who are all these people screwing up my city?" – and "Welcome to Bangalore the world class global hub."

There's loads more – a mixture of two distinct dramaturgical styles that takes the technique of counterpoint up to the level of a formal experiment, the use of metaphor and symbolism – but I'll leave all this for the actual play to do, for poetry is that which escapes the paraphrase.

I do invite all of you in Bangalore to come see the show.

It's alive!!! - Creeper - a new play

Well guess what!
It's here - raw, corrosive and ready to bite - I am happy to announce:

Creeper

written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham
Saturday 13th October 2007 (7:30pm) and
Sunday 14th October 2007 (3:30pm and 7:30pm)
at Ranga Shankara, 8th Cross, 2nd Phase, JP Nagar, Bangalore - 78
Tickets: Rs 100/- available at the venue
Contains explicit language - Not suitable for persons below the age of 18 - Late entry not permitted

Synopsis
This is a story about two people in this city.
She is writing an essay and trying to understand an ancient demon.
He is online all the time, exploring dark corners of the Internet.
She is the expert narrator, he is a mischievous sutradhar. These two story-tellers have amazing stories to share. Problem is they don't agree on how to tell the story!

Creeper is a modern re-imagination of the tale of Vikram and Betal. The play slams this ancient cycle of folk-tales into a contemporary urban setting – creating a shadowy world that is immediately recognizable, yet bizarre and entertaining.

Darkly funny yet poignant, the play freewheels between the old and the new – creating a landscape that happily contains – pornography, literary theory, orkut, Chandamaama comics, exorcism, blogging, a B-grade television serial, Bram Stoker, Silk Smitha, foul language, Kurt Cobain, a big tree with a Barbie doll nailed onto it and a magical box with something inside.

Currently in its experimental avatar, Creeper will open in a bare bones production in less than two weeks. Do come and see it... And please don't bring the kids!

Creeper - a new play

Creeper

written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham
Saturday 13th October 2007 (7:30pm) and
Sunday 14th October 2007 (3:30pm and 7:30pm)
at Ranga Shankara, 8th Cross, 2nd Phase, JP Nagar, Bangalore - 78
Tickets: Rs 100/- available at the venue

Contains explicit language - Not suitable for persons below the age of 18 - Late entry not permitted

Call or sms: 9845602265 for tele-bookings

Stone, sights and sphincter (IFS – 6)

'Ars Poetica'
The goose that laid the golden egg
Died looking up its crotch
To find out how its sphincter worked.
Would you lay well? Don’t watch.
X.J. Kennedy

With this theme in mind for the month, I offer up a fix of some random photographs, and a few extracts from Into Stone.

I suspect that the Vikram and Betal text is in dire danger of being stillborn. I think my sphincter probing might have hit a critical internal organ. I'm still tinkering with it, but might switch mediums to fully realize the scope of the idea. Decision pending...

And now onto the tour...

A view of Edinburgh castle from inside a graveyard. There's stone everywhere and this stone is in possession of some really amazing 'memories'. One of the things I'll have to do is recreate this characteristic 'atmosphere'. There were dozens of memorials and each of them had a story to tell. I liked the spooky idea of the stone doing two very different things in the same picture – one structure is built to keep everyone out, the other is created to keep something inside.

A doorway of a castle in Nottingham. A mad mixture of stone is used here. You can even see the colour changes and how the door is constantly being reinforced with different kinds of stone at different points in time.
Metaphor: the stone structure as an artifact of 'cultural memory' is composed of different and conflicting accounts of the actions it has witnessed – the space is a site of continual historical dialogue.

A closer look at the patterns shows the differing 'contours' of the stone. When writing the scenes set in different time periods, I was tinkering with the idea of the 'contours of speech patterns'. Modern speech being jagged and cutting, the older scenes use sinuous or extended patterns. You might get a sense of this in the extracts.

Extracts from Into Stone

The present
Uttara: So what about you. Married?
Young man: Nah! Still free. Single. (pause) Mildly eligible.
Uttara: Mildly?
Young man: I have my dark secrets.
Uttara: Tempting.
Young man: All coming together. This place, meeting you.

Mythological Past
Old man: I saw him in the stone.
Satya: You saw him?
Old man: I make no claims. I just… I saw a sense of him… a thing… I don't know how to explain. Sight… For a moment.
Satya: You felt his form.
Old man: Yes. Yes that's it.
Satya: And you saw it dormant within the stone, waiting to be coaxed out.
Old man: Yes.
Satya: (pause) You never saw him then.
Old man: I didn’t?
Satya: How can you see the un-manifest? (pause) You saw what you did because you stopped seeing yourself as separate from the universe. You stop seeing the self, you see the infinite.
Old man: You have been chewing too much betel nut!

Historical Past
Maraj: A holy man up in the mountains Missus – he teach me this game.
They used to play it with the bones o' the dead.
This the hand o' fate. And this the souls o' the people.
Is all up and down – one life thrown in the air, or dropped. It's religious.
Young lady: Oh. Should I be playing it then?
Maraj: Sure Missus – I just made up the whole thing.

This is a stone prison(literally!). A very strange kind of limestone is used here and it's as if the rock has melted, giving it a droopy and gloomy kind of feeling. It as if the rock is old and tired and melting away – very different from resilient red laterite.

This is a completely bizarre object! It's a piece torn from a Luftwaffe jacket, purportedly from a downed WW2 Pilot. I'm not kidding or making this up! Mentioned the Iron Cross in an earlier post – definitely something to write about at some point. Spooky feeling, holding this thing...

This is a painting by Piotr Mleczko on display at the Polish Cultural Centre, Hammersmith. I totally tripped out on it – because it does visually what I'm trying to do dramatically. It mixes time frames and iconography, cohesively. I love the idea of a self split across time – the Christ-like head carrying a spear (of destiny?) - the anachronistic construct of the soldier figure. You need to be a bit 'stoned' to do this.

And talk about ostranie!
Strangely, the rick has Maharashtra license plates. Hehe...

The 'familiar' when set in a new context becomes 'foregrounded' - and as a consequence strange and unnatural, allowing us to re-experience the ordinary.

I spent about ten minutes laughing at this! Surreal!

That's it for now.

I stop my rhetoric and get down to actually writing!

The Speech a.k.a. Huh? Wha? DUH!!!

I drank too much coffee one night.

So then I said to myself – what is the dialogic relationship between language as carrier of meaning and memory as a reconstruction of perceived meaning?

Then I said to myself – Get a life.
It's Saturday night and you're online, reading about post-modernism.
Your computer is too slow.
Your brain is too wobbly.
You need to free up some hard disk space.
You need to buy a few more RAM chips.
Haha, what a stupid pun.
Ok, for a start – free up some disk space.

Then I went rummaging among file structures long forgotten, folders long neglected…

I found 1.9GB of forgotten video.

Then I said to myself – Here is some 'found' material. It is 'found' in the sense that it has been lying forgotten for a few years. It is time to allow the 'other' to operate…

I said – Arranging this material is a process of re-visiting a set of events that occurred. No one can say for certain what really happened, least of all 'the eye' staggering around via the camera. So the 'edit' of the piece is about memory and the impossibility of capturing it objectively – the frame, the 'eye' - preclude any attempt at clinical documentation.

But what does it all mean? To ask – but what does this all mean, is to miss the point entirely.

Ha! Convenient.

It's not a documentary, it's not rehearsed. It's a docudrama of some perverse variety.

A polyvocal clash…

You are full of crap – I said.

I say – I have had too much coffee.

Then I said – People always object to all the foul language in my plays.

I say – I often use foul language as a means of conveying psychological violence. Yes, it's a self- defeating paradox. My characters curse to draw attention to the constructed psyche that resorts to cursing. I foreground swearing as a linguistic genre and rob it of the ability to hurt, hoping to draw attention to my characters – who are often hurting and hurting bad – the reasons for this hurt, constitute the 'meaning' of the piece.

Then I said – All right. That's a lot of rubbish. How can you possibly use language to carry 'meaning' if you're busy robbing it of meaning? What kind of writer collapses language? You might as well drill a hole in a boat and try to row it at the same time.

I said – Uhhh… Well… Ok. Let me just pause that paradox loop for a moment.
So if we're in cacophony, in polyvocal mayhem... does an attempt at structured communication polarize the communication? Or does it all sink into Ionesco like yak-yak-yak-blah-blah – much like the Orator who appears at the end of The Chairs?

In linguistic mayhem, how can 'meaning' operate?

So then I sat and edited this short.
And I deny all responsibility for it.
And I remain intrigued by the argument.
And it's brilliantly stupid stuff... Especially without the preamble!

And I have had way way to much coffee…



NSFW - Contains coarse language. Requires audio. Video quality is rubbish night shot.
ROTFL - Too funny man... Hehehehehe...
As a Nobel Laureate once wrote : "quaquaquaqua with a white beard quaqua outside of the time of the extent that from high of its divine apathia its divine athambia its divine aphasia"

Rehearsal - the Nonologue (IFS – 5)

I've just discovered that discussing work in progress is a very sensitive issue.

So many things remain in constant flux in the making of a text, that any 'left-brained' activity that tries to rationalize this process too much, can sabotage any hope of a meaningful creative journey. A text is vulnerable in its 'draft state' and is still in the process of being born – so I'm toeing the line here and reporting on some of my work.

Also I've just spent a huge twelve hour burst hammering away at Into Stone and thought I'd call a time-out and report progress.

I spent most of my four days of rehearsal at the residency engaging with the second act of my play – and specifically the collision of the three stories – in what is a potentially a scene of absolute theatrical mayhem.

For this to make any sense I'll just share some facts about the play…

The play takes place at night, and moves between three timelines:
- present - 2007
- mythological past – somewhere in Treta Yuga
- historical past – 1857

The action occurs at a stone fort by the sea, which is
- a beach resort in 2007
- a shrine in the Treta Yuga
- a colonial bastion in 1857

In ACT 2 the space is a prison that exists in all three timelines.

This is a summary of the essential structure of the piece – with regards to time and space.

The reason I've chosen these three specific timelines, comes from the investigation of the space itself (Fort Aguada) and is best summed up in a sentence that I discovered in conversation with my director Raz.

The investigation of a space must address the necessary confluence of its present, mythological and historical contexts.

Why? The space is as I mentioned earlier, polymorphic – so to explore all the possibilities and contradictions that it has to offer – I felt the narrative needed to represent the entire array of activities that might have taken place. The scale of the play needed to be able to devour the space it was investigating.

The play then exists in triple layer – three stories within the same physical space.
At this point everyone had a headache…

Why these contortions? Each timeline represents a 'voice' - a 'discourse' if you like - and I'm fascinated by the possibility of allowing these voices to mingle and collide – as it happened in real life for me.

On questioning the space - one minute you're being hit with a mythological explanation (this was once the site of a temple where Ramachandra stayed during his exile), next minute it’s the ground reality (it's just a touristy beach resort) – then it's legacy (yeah, but it was once a colonial military structure). This polyvocal clash of worlds is what has been keeping me engaged.

SO – if the place is constant, but mutates over time, what does this do to character?

In this play as space mutates over time so does character. All credit to my actors in rehearsal (Vincent, Abhin and Farzana) because after a day of grappling with this idea – it made a fair bit of sense.

Each actor plays three roles. A character in this plays consists of a primary self – one who owns that particular story and two secondary selves – one for each other story. In one secondary self, the attributes of the primary character are distorted by power – a negative version of the self. The other secondary self – is a weak and ineffectual version of the attributes of the primary character – a minor self.

Why? My notion of character in this play emphasises the importance of 'now' – the present. Going back and forth in time can easily diffuse the immediacy of the concerns. You might get the cyclic indolence that suggests the sentiment – "Aw the same stuff happens again and again, why bother!"

Cycles exist – but the human element remains as alive for every iteration of the cycle.
So we get the characters :

Uttara from the present
who is
- young lady in 1857
- Priestess in the Treta Yuga

Satya from the mythological past
who is
- young man in 2007
- Dom in 1857

Maraj from the historical past
who is
- old man in the Treta Yuga
- SK in 2007

So the play involves three stories and nine parts to be played by three actors.
This was when everyone had their second headache. (There was no third - you go numb now.)

Also, in the second half of the play – the stage space is a prison. This prison exists in all times. If I were sitting in this cell and I were to collapse time – could I see everyone who was ever in that cell? What if I was once there, in another timeline?

To take this hallucinatory concept onto stage, in the second half of the play the stories collide – characters begin to wobble, mutating between selves and the plot jumps across timelines.

Why? Juxtaposition.

If each self is a voice – then a question posed by one voice, is answered by another version of the self. If a self is threatened it retreats into its minor self, or attacks by turning into its powerful version. The prison - becomes a howling scream of nine voices – a roar of voices across time and space.

And we've christened it, the nonologue!

We spent the first two days of rehearsal getting our heads around the play. I wrote a bit of the lead up to the nonologue over a weekend and we spent the next two days of rehearsal putting that extract on its feet.

I was hoping to get through all the complexities of the piece through the rehearsal and this did happen. The actors physicalised the action and I needed much less brain-bandwidth to orchestrate dramatic movement. Now I'm working on the second draft and taking a shot at the crescendo of the play – the orchestration of nine voices – the nonologue.

Hopefully now that I've got all the homework done – it's just a matter of emotionally experiencing each moment and fleshing out each instant of the play. No easy task – but hell – looks a lot easier now.