Where Nature is the
play social is being questioned, especially after the pandemic, says Abhilash Pillai, the festival director, and director of SOD. “There were talks about why dinosaurs and certain animals and plants have gone extinct, and, maybe, something must have gone wrong. Also, with the growing number of viruses in this world, at any moment, we humans can disappear.”
Under one roof
In this atmosphere, words and performances became one. A performance just appeared out of nowhere when Maya Rao, the participating pedagogue and practitioner, and Elikem met at the Ramanujam Studio Theatre the next day. Both just started moving together from the chairs they were sitting on and the two performers started conversing with their bodies. There were workshops on breathwork, acting, performance making using physicality, and the art of costume making by not increasing carbon footprint.
Writer and philosopher Sundar Sarukkai, Sara Matchett, Associate Professor at Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance studies at University of Cape Town, South Africa, theatre director Neelam Mansingh, and Jane Collins, Professor at Wimbledon College of Arts, initiated us into new realms of thoughts. These included the paradigm shift in seeing nature and culture as binaries.
In this thoughtprovoking atmosphere that pushed contemporary performance practices, we also travelled back in time by watching traditional art forms such as Thirayattam and Padayani — they were not squeezed into a proscenium. Instead, they were given a natural openair setting. We spent chilly nights watching the glow from the firesticks used by the padayani performers and the mornings were spent in Kerala Kalamandalam seeing how the traditional arts school functioned. Sixyearold percussion students, with sleep in their eyes, practiced hitting wooden sticks hard on the stones to get their rhythm. Some of the overseas artistes found the ecologically sensitive setting and traditional architecture as moving as the art forms.
Befriending a tree
In the midst of all this, we also got to date trees. As part of the Winter Production camp, the students had developed a ‘Y Not App’ under the supervision of theatre professional Vishnupad Barve, the concept director. Like a dating app, one has to swipe right on a tree in the campus.
This writer’s multibranched magnificent date for the evening was Haal, a gorgeous banyan that has witnessed many generations of the school. Upon reaching the spot, I could see a blanket placed on a stone and on top of it a greeting card with a leaf stuck on it reading “It’s a connection we treasure”. I took a while to warm up to Haal. But after 15 minutes, I could not leave the spot. My legs were on the branches, urging me to climb and explore Haal. The festival truly did attempt to make humans encounter Nature both outside and within.