Here are some of the performances I’ve been involved in:
Shady Fellows
The world is full of shadows. But when we choose to notice them, what do we see?
Merging shadow play and live performance, Shady Fellows examines our shifting relationships to the literal and figurative shadows that populate our world. It was inspired by Eduardo Galeano’s Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone.
Shady Fellows is a devised performance by Perch, and was created at Yatra Arts Foundation by Abhaydev Praful, Anishaa Tavag, Anushka Meenakshi, Iswar Lalitha, Joshua Sailo, Kali Srinivasan, and directed by Vijay Ravikumar. Music by Abhaydev Praful, costumes by Kaveri, and poster by Parvathy.
Life Cycle of a Trivial Loop
What is the shape of the space we move through?
Some movement seems to contain a seed of stillness. And stillness sometimes contains a germ of movement. Through this ebb and flow of stillness and motion, can we understand the shape of the space our body negotiates?
Life Cycle of a Trivial Loop is a math-dance collaboration with Joshua Sailo that came out of exploring how we can use the intuition stored in the human body to understand the shape of space.
We worked together over zoom for one week in August 2020, after which we held a virtual sharing of a 20 minute work-in-progress performed by Joshua, followed by a demonstration and discussion of some of the math that went into our exploration.
Mondays are Best for Flying out of Windows
‘Mondays are Best for Flying out of Windows’ is a devised peformance involving puppetry and physical theater,
inspired by the stories of Daniil Kharms (1905-1942), an early Soviet era absurdist
poet, writer and dramatist. Kharms was often incarcerated by the Soviet
regime for his unconventional and rebellious ways. His adult literature
was not published during his lifetime and he was confined to writing for
children. He is said to have starved to an anonymous death in the
psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital after his arrest in 1942.
‘Mondays are Best for Flying out of Windows’ was created by Perch Collective, specially commissioned for the Serendipity Arts Festival and premiered in Panjim, Goa in December 2018. It was created and performed by Iswar Lalitha, Rency Philip, Sachin Gurjale, Vijay Ravikumar and Vinod Ravindran, along with Anushka Meenakshi and director Rajiv Krishnan, with music composed and played by Abhaydev Praful.
Lentils and Stones
Click here for the main page for ‘Lentils and Stones’.
In 2018, supported by a grant from Perch Collective, I wrote and directed ‘Lentils and Stones’, a performance with puppetry and dance. It is partly inspired by the poem ‘Woman cleaning Lentils’ by the Armenian poet Zahrad, and also by my time living with my grandmother in Chennai.
Listening to her stories over the years, it has been striking how many come from her early childhood, and how vividly she recounts and draws sustenance from them.
On the other hand, her childhood came to an abrupt end at age twelve when she was married, and much of the life that followed is remembered in a very different way, often in relation to the domestic work she was engaged in. A constant sense of overwhelming duty is part of the fabric of her reality, and though it often feels like a source of oppression, it sometimes transforms into a source of pride. And in a world of rapid social, political, and environmental change, her memory of that work provides a conflicted sense of comfort.
Zahrad’s poem ‘Woman Cleaning Lentils’ follows the thoughts of an old woman as she sorts stones from lentils. But the poem leaves much to the reader’s imagination, and in its abstraction, it also gives space for puppetry to become a powerful medium of storytelling.
In ‘Lentils and Stones’ puppetry and poetry together create a scaffolding for the exploration of memory. The piece grew out of many hours spent listening to my grandmother, noticing the past worlds we carry within ourselves with their uneasy relations to the present. And the tussle between the past and present over who gets to have a final word.
Maradhyana
Click here for the main page for ‘Maradhyana’.
In 2017 and 2018 I worked on masks and art for Madhushree Basu’s play ‘Maradhyana’, originally created for Gender Bender 2017.
Maradhyana is a dance-drama based on a sub-story within the Ramayana, centered around the character of the ‘Demoness’ Thadaka, who was killed by Rama.
In particular the piece is inspired by the Malayalam poet Vayalar Ramavarma’s poem ‘Thadaka’, which depicts the same woman as a valiant Dravidian princess. The princess feels amorous at Rama and attempts to befriend him, but without forgetting the welfare of her own kingdom and their land rights. While Rama tends to reciprocate positively toward her romantic as well as political proposals, his guardian sage Vishwamitra intervenes and intimidates Rama into killing Thadaka.
Puppet Parlor Chicago
From 2001 to 2003 I worked on and off at The Puppet Parlor, a tiny marionette theater in Chicago run by Ralph and Lou: two old puppeteers hailing from older vaudeville families. They had built more than 2000 wooden marionettes by hand, all stored in that cramped basement on Montrose Avenue, many dating back to the 1960’s when the theater had actually known some financial sucess.
Over the next few years I received training from these men, repainted and repaired dozens of old puppets, worked as a puppeteer during shows (including their adults-only midnight burlesque show), and watched audience after confused audience wonder what relic of the past they’d mistakenly stumbled into. The theater itself slipped further and further into debt, until tragically the entire building burned down in a freak accident in 2004.
Many years later I came to learn that thousands of the old marionettes were found abandoned in a run-down apartment in Chicago. It was thought to be the world’s largest collection of marionettes made by a single person! There was a campaign to rescue the marionettes, but I’m not sure what finally became of it.
In retrospect, I feel the saddest part was how there was no longer an audience for their stories or their art form, a fact that I don’t think Ralph or Lou ever managed to accept.