VORTEX: The TIP Lisbon Roadshow as an exploration of hope and the aftermath of fear.
A recounting by Suresh Nampuri
Theatre is the answer to the once and forever question that spontaneously flickers into existence when two warm bodies sense each other’s presence – What am I to you and what are you to me when you are you and I am me. It is the ultimate act of both transgression and acceptance, for in theatre, each of us finds something in ourselves through the other, and in doing so, senses what it means to be living, anew. It is where life is lived at its most concentrated, in stories that fill out empty spaces with sheer imagination, and at the end, once the curtain has fallen, transform our experience of the phrase ‘I, human’.
The JÁ TIP roadshow in Oct. 2024 was based on the theme of Hidden Stories, the ones we hide from ourselves and those closest to us, both at a personal, as well as societal level. The stories, we have forgotten to voice or dare not, lest their echoes haunt in the dark, but they are always present, simmering, seething and fulminating, coruscating quicksilver running through our veins, till in time, every moment that has meaning becomes tinged with the subterranean textures of these unrealised truths till one day, we become these stories, living out our every moment in their shadow, a symbiotic pact of meaning making forged between a human and their shadow. This is ultimately, at a very archetypal level, an artist’s journey in theatre as they walk the hallowed roads from performer to character during the creation of a play, embodying gradually the secrets and longings, the bruises and grunts of the character, till their very presence seethes with truths waiting to be revealed in the limelight and linger long after the curtains have fallen.
And so we had two tales from the shadowlands for the roadshow, NIGHTFALL, a freewheeling homage to Isaac Asimov’s creations, set on the flat discworld of Lagaash whose 7 suns never set together leaving a planet that doesnt know night, or almost. For, once in 10000 years, they do, plunging the world into apocalyptic terror and madness. The play tracks events on the fast unraveling planet 7 days before this event, running through fear, denial, rage and eventually acceptance as night comes into the realm of the living, and the personal and the cosmic intertwine in the last great twilight before the long dark.
DEATH AND THE MAIDEN is an adaptation of the Ariel Dorfman classic set in a fledgling democracry newly liberated from a fascist regime offers a tight-lens glimpse of how the unresolved traumas of previous fascist dictatorship poison the living present of both the brutalisers and brutalised.
Both these together represented two extremes of theatre- a classic Dorfman production of the shadows cast by the past and a topical current one shot through with the anticipations of the future, and together they highlighted post the past as driver of perception and the future as a receipient of imagination- and at the centre, one human making a free choice.
