I have been reflecting with a lot of care on Kahani's trip to Benares. Jaime says that we're the stories we tell ourselves. My mom told me, “You think you will remember, but you won't. So you have to write it down.” And I know that with dreams, but even waking, the thing that sticks beyond the drying of the dew is whatever we tell other people. So I've been writing and thinking and telling with a lot of care.
I will never forget that first ride in the sumo from the airport to Nirman. An airport doesn't count, so really it was our first breath of India. I had expected my stomach to be all wrought and wrung with excitement and happiness, but I felt neither pleasant nor unpleasant — just wide-eyed. For once — though if I had thought about it then, I probably would have lost my balance — I was in that state they talk about which is beyond thought or judgment. I didn't register what I saw as good or bad, only “wow.” I thought, okay, here we are. We went past buildings and people and cows, trees with stripes painted on them and folks on motorcycles and little kids and someone hefting a bundle on their shoulder and old men and schoolgirls in their matching salwar kameezes. There was Hindi everywhere, written and spoken. Chip vendors, garbage, autos. Everyone was just doing their thing, and there we were, doing our thing, which was to get to Nirman. When it started raining, I wasn't at all surprised, though Anthony said they had been needing a good rain. That's what it felt like to me — inward and outward monsoons.
Now, a few people have alluded to culture shock, and I have got to say, I think that's pretty impossible. I think you need to be immersed in a place for months in order to experience culture shock, or culture. When folks start in with a kind of 'you must know so much about Indian culture' thing, there are a hundred separate responses which go off in my head like popcorn in many directions. But I will tell you this. As student-performers and guests in that city, we learned a lot. It was the blink of an eye, but what a sweet blink it was! I told someone about that thing in ecology whereby dry ground, desert ground, cannot take in rains all at once, as you would think it could. Flooding happens. If the soil is moist, though, it soaks up the downpour like a sponge. I felt a lot in Benares, and wonder how it can have been so intense — and conclude it's because of a lifetime of reading, hearing, thinking, and dreaming about India which all became most recently wrapped up in this great and juicy theatre project.
Ed asks us what was different doing the show in the States and in India. You know, I think people had different ways in to the work, different barriers to and different ease with all their different ways of resonating with the story. At K, people may have known more about the project because they saw it take shape, whether up close or peripherally in the community. They also may have had a more fixed idea of the show as “Indian.” For some people, the questions in the show provoked an itch to pursue definite answers and concretely situated feminist morals of the story, goals which have their time and place but which we found ourselves smoothing out, redirecting and opening up during the talkbacks. Or at least, that was what I found myself doing. A subjective show about subjectivity is an invitation into the postmodern opalescence of questions turned back upon themselves, that's what I found; that dynamic was more apparent when we performed Kahani at Kalamazoo College than when we took it to Benares.
But when we took it to Benares, we were thinking about other things. The concern the ensemble had had at K with making the show technically snappy — with 'having our shit together' for each other, for our techie collaborators, and for the audience — was replaced with a desire to work with it in its fullest flexibility, the trait we had been working on, the one which allowed us to take the work to different venues with little rehearsal time and our hearts in our hands. We might have listened more in India because our ears were already pricked to new sounds. And I think in India people's first response to the work was often of relating the family onstage to their own — 'You walk just like my dada!' or 'I was so sad when dadi died,' or 'My own mai jokes just like that.' There may have been an artificial wall of national and cultural identity that folks erected in the States which was less a barrier in India.
We did, however, deal with a language barrier in Benares, and I have got to say, that made it so interesting. I won't say I love language barriers, but I pretty much love language barriers. It's not that they're good or easy; but I think it's so interesting what gets through them. What is it about the work that transcends words? That was something we were always wondering. Mai is a novel in Hindi was then translated into English and adapted by us in a crazy spiraling process for the stage. When Nita Kumar, who had translated it, saw the show, she told us that there were things she was unable to translate which worked their way back into the story gesturally, physically. To all of us that was highest praise. I am always looking for where and why that happens. What about art transcends its medium? What about speech is more than words? What is it in a glance that can bridge the gap? So with all of this in mind, our bodies became very important. (And oh by the way we were SWEATY. Let me tell you, it's a whole different show when you're as soaked as we were in Benares.)
In Benares, there was a certain aesthetic thing that took place that was even bigger than our bodies, maybe, or smaller. All of a sudden, the fabric and the bricks and the props made sense. It was like they had come home. All the colors and textures fit a little better than they had fit on the stage of Balch. And the props that we replaced — I keep telling about how I saw at least five people sweeping with grass brooms just like mine. The Raja Ghat performance was so effulgent, so sweet and apt and luminous in that 200-year old building, in that courtyard, that it would have been worth taking us there just for that, in my opinion.
It's really important the way you fold the past into the present. It's of utter urgency that you not tear its delicate paper or its insect wings, that you catch the tune and hum it to yourself a few times, so as not to forget. You have to do two things at once, not kill it with stifling nor let it change unrecognizably, so that you can access it one day and know that around the corner from that memory is the thing that made the memory, the instant when the you of the past could have turned to the you of now and said, with glinting eye, “This is what it feels like.” This is the way the chai tastes. This is the way the air feels. This is what is going on in my heart, while I behold all of these things as stunned as if I just woke up.
Fiona Carey
I will never forget that first ride in the sumo from the airport to Nirman. An airport doesn't count, so really it was our first breath of India. I had expected my stomach to be all wrought and wrung with excitement and happiness, but I felt neither pleasant nor unpleasant — just wide-eyed. For once — though if I had thought about it then, I probably would have lost my balance — I was in that state they talk about which is beyond thought or judgment. I didn't register what I saw as good or bad, only “wow.” I thought, okay, here we are. We went past buildings and people and cows, trees with stripes painted on them and folks on motorcycles and little kids and someone hefting a bundle on their shoulder and old men and schoolgirls in their matching salwar kameezes. There was Hindi everywhere, written and spoken. Chip vendors, garbage, autos. Everyone was just doing their thing, and there we were, doing our thing, which was to get to Nirman. When it started raining, I wasn't at all surprised, though Anthony said they had been needing a good rain. That's what it felt like to me — inward and outward monsoons.
Now, a few people have alluded to culture shock, and I have got to say, I think that's pretty impossible. I think you need to be immersed in a place for months in order to experience culture shock, or culture. When folks start in with a kind of 'you must know so much about Indian culture' thing, there are a hundred separate responses which go off in my head like popcorn in many directions. But I will tell you this. As student-performers and guests in that city, we learned a lot. It was the blink of an eye, but what a sweet blink it was! I told someone about that thing in ecology whereby dry ground, desert ground, cannot take in rains all at once, as you would think it could. Flooding happens. If the soil is moist, though, it soaks up the downpour like a sponge. I felt a lot in Benares, and wonder how it can have been so intense — and conclude it's because of a lifetime of reading, hearing, thinking, and dreaming about India which all became most recently wrapped up in this great and juicy theatre project.
Ed asks us what was different doing the show in the States and in India. You know, I think people had different ways in to the work, different barriers to and different ease with all their different ways of resonating with the story. At K, people may have known more about the project because they saw it take shape, whether up close or peripherally in the community. They also may have had a more fixed idea of the show as “Indian.” For some people, the questions in the show provoked an itch to pursue definite answers and concretely situated feminist morals of the story, goals which have their time and place but which we found ourselves smoothing out, redirecting and opening up during the talkbacks. Or at least, that was what I found myself doing. A subjective show about subjectivity is an invitation into the postmodern opalescence of questions turned back upon themselves, that's what I found; that dynamic was more apparent when we performed Kahani at Kalamazoo College than when we took it to Benares.
But when we took it to Benares, we were thinking about other things. The concern the ensemble had had at K with making the show technically snappy — with 'having our shit together' for each other, for our techie collaborators, and for the audience — was replaced with a desire to work with it in its fullest flexibility, the trait we had been working on, the one which allowed us to take the work to different venues with little rehearsal time and our hearts in our hands. We might have listened more in India because our ears were already pricked to new sounds. And I think in India people's first response to the work was often of relating the family onstage to their own — 'You walk just like my dada!' or 'I was so sad when dadi died,' or 'My own mai jokes just like that.' There may have been an artificial wall of national and cultural identity that folks erected in the States which was less a barrier in India.
We did, however, deal with a language barrier in Benares, and I have got to say, that made it so interesting. I won't say I love language barriers, but I pretty much love language barriers. It's not that they're good or easy; but I think it's so interesting what gets through them. What is it about the work that transcends words? That was something we were always wondering. Mai is a novel in Hindi was then translated into English and adapted by us in a crazy spiraling process for the stage. When Nita Kumar, who had translated it, saw the show, she told us that there were things she was unable to translate which worked their way back into the story gesturally, physically. To all of us that was highest praise. I am always looking for where and why that happens. What about art transcends its medium? What about speech is more than words? What is it in a glance that can bridge the gap? So with all of this in mind, our bodies became very important. (And oh by the way we were SWEATY. Let me tell you, it's a whole different show when you're as soaked as we were in Benares.)
In Benares, there was a certain aesthetic thing that took place that was even bigger than our bodies, maybe, or smaller. All of a sudden, the fabric and the bricks and the props made sense. It was like they had come home. All the colors and textures fit a little better than they had fit on the stage of Balch. And the props that we replaced — I keep telling about how I saw at least five people sweeping with grass brooms just like mine. The Raja Ghat performance was so effulgent, so sweet and apt and luminous in that 200-year old building, in that courtyard, that it would have been worth taking us there just for that, in my opinion.
It's really important the way you fold the past into the present. It's of utter urgency that you not tear its delicate paper or its insect wings, that you catch the tune and hum it to yourself a few times, so as not to forget. You have to do two things at once, not kill it with stifling nor let it change unrecognizably, so that you can access it one day and know that around the corner from that memory is the thing that made the memory, the instant when the you of the past could have turned to the you of now and said, with glinting eye, “This is what it feels like.” This is the way the chai tastes. This is the way the air feels. This is what is going on in my heart, while I behold all of these things as stunned as if I just woke up.
Fiona Carey
No comments:
Post a Comment