These Heads are Made for Walking
Dir: Maya
Krishna Rao
Maya
Krishna Rao’s theatre is like the titles she devises: spunky
and elliptical. The titles grab your attention, but that doesn’t
necessarily mean you comprehend their intent. Her theatre works
similarly. It mocks easy understanding, and yet you can’t
deny its seductive, intriguing appeal.
The Play
Heads are Meant for Walking Into, which showed last weekend at
the India Habitat Centre, is a non-linear, non-narrative, and
non-sentimental construct — in other words, its got none
of the hooks that make for laid-back viewing. The performance
moves laterally, through intersecting loads of music and percussion,
live and recorded video feeds, and amplified live speech. Its
verbal text is minimalist and beguilingly bland. Its performance
space juxtaposes fragmented units which are drawn to different
scales. The solo actor’s body hovers between being a ‘character’
and a ‘presenter’ without sharp delineation. Nothing
adds up in simple fashion, and yet this ‘cross-media theatre
production’, as the brochure blurb puts it, has a striking
integrity of its own.
There are moments when Surajit Sarkar’s video imagery,
Maya Rao’s evocative gesture and Ashim Ghosh’s soundscape
fuse memorably to tease polyphonic connections out of the shards
that mark our lives. The effect is not only electric but also,
for a production so technologically ‘constructed’,
deeply moving. For instance, when Maya gently wraps around herself
a cloth on which is screened the visual of naked Manipuri women
protesting against the Indian Army’s brutal excesses, the
act of ‘screening the body’ is offered with a richness
that would be otherwise impossible to produce.
However, all too often, the production tends to elude one’s
grasp, lingering just that much out of reach so that you can discern
its direction without quite being able to map its endpoints. Given
its tendency towards a fragmented abstraction, the act of spectating
is turned into a cerebralised activity where you feel compelled
to continually decode what you see. Despite being cautioned, as
a line in the play goes, ‘‘if you try and make the
pieces sit tight, you’ll never, never, never get your story
right,’’ in the Vismayah production it’s the
heads that have to do all the walking.
Perhaps Heads are Meant for Walking Into may appeal primarily
to a niche audience that wants more from its theatre than merely
an ‘evening out’. But, it is precious all the same
for the risk it knowingly takes in pushing at the cutting edge
of ‘live’ performance. Regardless of whether the show
comes off or not, one is grateful for the privilege.
About the Director
Maya Krishna Rao (born 1953) is a visiting faculty at the
National School of Drama, Delhi, where she teaches Acting. Maya
has trained in Kathakali from 1961, specializing in the male role,
and worked in Theatre-in Education Companies in the U.K. and India.
Presently, she acts, dances and directs herself. Her Company, Vismayah
(founded in 1993), creates new theatre by drawing upon Indian traditions
of dance, music, writing and other arts. Vismayah’s productions
include Khol Do, The Job, Rainmaker, Departures, The 4-Wheel-Drive-‘Come-to-me-Mr.
Sharma’-Body-Fat-Murdered-Show and A Deep Fried Jam. Besides
travelling widely in India, these shows have been to several dance
and theatre festivals abroad. Vismayah also works in the area of
education, conducting workshops for teachers and students. Its latest
enterprise, which toured Delhi schools in 2003, is a participatory
show for 10-year-olds titled Sciva and Jagli, based on the theme
of identity and difference.
