Jun 01 2022 to Jun 01 2022 6:30 p.m.

EVENT HAS ENDED

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Presented by Actors Ensemble India Forum

You must have heard of the Mailer Daemon? She faithfully replies to you, every time an email bounces. From the message fragments she often finds, she knows there’s a girl in the apartment who’s possibly losing her mind. Sandhya is trekking up in the mountains but can’t quite seem to find her freedom. And then there’s Mrs Raghuraman, who loses her head at a party.

Four characters intertwined by fate, their stories woven into a tapestry that can only reveal the unspoken, the partial, the incomplete…

Winner of the Infallibles Awards 2021 for the Best Show at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Hidden in Plain Sight v2.0 is the culmination of a nine-year journey. This is a story of four women in the city who are unmoored from society – who have “dropped off the grid” so to speak.

In the search for meaning making in this digital hybrid format, the aesthetics emerged from an exploration of being isolated, mental health, voyeurism and feelings of claustrophobia via a variety of lenses. The choice of dual/multiple frames of the same moment became an invitation to “drifting” or a “wandering” to allow the eye to be drawn to what feels right to the viewer in the moment. Hidden in Plain Sight nudges the limits of performance making, new writing and the actor’s craft, returning to first principles of why we do what we do, to meet the post-pandemic challenge.

This creative process is an inquiry into the actor’s craft – body, voice, presence and imagination – for creating text, performance and design – by placing the experience of the performer at the centre. The actor’s craft and bodily experience is normally in the service of the director’s vision or the exploration of a written text. This collaboration embodies a shared sense of authorship with a need to flatten the conventional hierarchies inherent in theatre making.

The text has a prism-like structure – where voice and sound move from ornamental concerns about delivery, to a central role in the production of dramatic meaning. The sound of the words, the turn of phrase, proper nouns, and even the mantra-like potential nascent in the utterance of a syllable, are released moment to moment to create a free-wheeling exploration of the four women characters at pivotal moments in their lives. Characters exhibit fractal self-similarity – as each woman who has dropped off the grid into liminality, rejected a conventional social position for an encounter with primal energy.

Embedded in the piece is the enigma of the Chhinnamasta – the decapitated Mother goddess from esoteric Hindu-Buddhist traditions informs this conception of primal energy and in an act of self-sacrifice, discovers regeneration and life. Some interpretations embody her as the essence of violent transformation. Other interpretations elaborate instantaneous activation of spiritual energy centres within the body. Words, through written symbols transmute in uttered sound – in effect, mantra! In the text, this restless search for “truthful sound” has prompted variations on the Zen Koans of Takuan Sōhō, an exploration of the dissolution of the body’s energy centres as given in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and even the incantatory language-codes of cyberspace.

The screening of the digital performance will be followed by a discussion and Q&A session.
Credits:

Written by Ram Ganesh Kamatham & Mallika Prasad Sinha
Cameras & Editing – Vishnu Nambiar
Sets – Prasanna Sagara
Make-up – Aditi Raman
Backstage – Disha Rao
Music – Aman Anand
Directed, designed and performed by Mallika Prasad Sinha
Supported by Bren Centre for Arts