META festival sees performers and awardees shine
a lovely stage design.
Another play that was acclaimed was Chitrapata ( Kannada). It was directed by Manjunath I. Badiger who has been searching in each of his plays for the answer to the question ‘ is it possible to express poetic acting through a tradition of art forms?’ In Chitrapata, he succeeds immensely. The play has been inspired by a folk poem of Helavanakatta Giriyamma. It talks about Swaroopnakha, who comes to Sita in disguise after she returns to Ayodhya to tempt her. She asked Sita to draw a portrait of Ravan and then he comes to life and he tries rape Sita and he wants to live with her forever. She replies, the only way he can do that is by becoming her son. He agrees and they have a maternal scene on the stage. Then Ram come in and is in a rage when he sees Sita with Ravan, he calls Laxman to kill Ravan. Then Sita intercedes and Ram accepts the fact that he is her son and he goes back into the portrait after Sita caresses him.
This play was done beautifully by the company, Samasthi. The playwright H. S. Venkatesha Murthy has put on stage an imaginary episode that is different from the original Ramayan. Swaroopnakha appears as Koranvanji, a gypsy’s wife. It is Koranvanji who opens the eyes of Ravan in the picture, which Sita has left closed. It is only when he can see Sita that he gets excited.
The meeting with Ravan is the beginning of strife in the relationship between Ram and Sita. Eventually in the fight between Ram and Ravan, when Ravan is defeated and Sita begs for his life, which is given as motherhood wins and jeal- ousy and maliciousness fail. Saumya Jain in the role of Sita was awarded the Best Actor award in a female supporting role.
The Best Actress award was given to Sanyukta Wagh, for her brilliant performance of Gandhari in the play Rage And Beyond; Irawati’s Gandhari. Irawati Karve’s Yuganta is a text that was labelled as one of the first contemporary interpretation of the Mahabharata by a woman writer in the 1960s.
The play was in English and the music was provided by Hitesh Dhutia, a freelance guitarist and composer. He played in Rage And Beyond, his first collaboration with dance theatre and he was very good.
Sanyukta is a good kathak dancer and she danced the bols and tihais with great acumen. Her emotional pieces were also very well done with depth and nobility. She shared the first prize with another actor, Shweta S. of Chitrapata.
Dhau: The Wave got an award for Best Choreography. The dance with the fish and the shark was very well done as was the capture of the golden fish by Gunakar Dev Goswami, as the old man.
The Best Light and Stage Design award was bagged by Still And Still Moving, by the Tadpole Theatre Repertory, Delhi. Directed by Neel Chaudhari, the play is set in North Delhi and Gurgaon. It is a story of Partha, a reclusive writer in his 40s and Adit, a young college student.
Kaumudi the play is about a rite of passage during the ‘ moonlit timeless night’ where Krishna delivered a sermon to Arjun as the central trope. He explored the dynamics between an estranged father and son duo who play Eklavya’s ghost and Abhimanyu in a theatre in late 1960’ s Allahabad. The father, Satyasheel, who is a great actor and is almost lost his sight, is at his final three performances. His son, Paritosh, who grew up with the void of not having father by his side, has come to challenge not only his father but his school of thought. Paritosh was played by Sandip Shankar, who was awarded the Best Supporting Actor prize along with his coactor Shubhrajyoti Barat, who plays an employee of the theatre.