Thespo

Prithvi Theatre was the confluence of artistry during the Thespo Festival from 13th to 18th December 2011. This year, as Thespo enters adolescence, there was a lot to look forward with a grand line up of plays, theatre workshops and band performances.
The venue was buzzing with activity and animation, some chatting away at the Prithvi Café, others darting back and forth across the venue. The Thespo team, consisting mainly of under-25 young men and women has done a great job in organizing this grand festival.
4 plays were handpicked out of a whopping 95 from seven cities across India. These plays plunder relevant and current social issues such as cancer, homosexuality, suicide, pregnancy, inter caste marriage and politics, seemingly grim topics with steady, unwavering smiles.
The Marathi plays were thoroughly enjoyable, harmonizing the serious with the comical, often involving making a decision that ends up being life altering.
‘Patient’ is a young man’s struggle against cancer during the 1970’s, a time when medical science hadn’t made much progress. The performance was ensconced with subtle yet powerful theatrics. As the young lead struggles to cope with the disease. A powerful performance and a powerful play.
December 15th saw the performance of ‘Ek Don Adich’ directed by Aniket Patil. Everybod’s got problems. Especially the young man who struggles to commit suicide at Koparkhairane platform in the dead of the night. Having missed his train to his heavenly abode through a series of interruptions, his frustration and anger is our source of mirth.
A blind man stumbles onto the platform, and consequently opens up his eyes to reason, resonating the play’s anthem ‘Any two incidents are co-related to each other’.
A deliberative play that scrutinizes chance vs. fate, coincidences vs. scripted destiny and slants a bit towards existentialist aspects, it’s definitely worth a watch.
‘Janhit Mein Jaari’ directed by Abhishek Dave and Chinmay R Kulkarni is a not mundane by any angle. It touches upon a miasma of social issues such as inter caste marriage, pregnancy, safe sex, politics and women’s rights which plays up the humour throughout the story.
21 year old Dilip discovers that his girlfriend 19 year old Mandakini, is pregnant. Dilip’s father in law, Patil, is a man with a political background advocates inter-caste marriages in the village. We observe how Dilip scrambles to save himself from this dire situation and how Patil tries to exploit Dilip for political profits. A charming little ditty, with a colorful cast of characters, it’s simultaneously enjoyable and very educational. The intermittent song and dance routines give a charming rustic feel to the play. The performances from all the actors was filled with gusto and…
The Thespo 13 Awards Night saw ‘Patient’ walk away with the awards for Outstanding Play, Production Design and Director. ‘Ek Don Adich’ grabbed the ‘New Writing’ award. ‘Patient’ and ‘Janhit Mein Jaari’ both tied for the ‘Outstanding Actor in a Supporting Role’ with Siddharth Mahashabde and Ashish Nasalapure receiving the awards respectively.

For Prithvi Theatre Notes, January 2012:
http://www.prithvitheatre.org/uploads/pdfs/PTNotes%20January%202012_1325153219.pdf

Film Reviews: 'Last Year in Marienbad' and 'Muriel'

Alain Resnais is one of the elements of the Rive Gauche or Left Bank which is associated with the French New Wave. The topography of his films is lined with habitual themes like memory, forgetfulness, nostalgia, illusion and a pre-occupation with the past.
His unconventional mode of filmmaking can be seen as simultaneously ingenious and irritating. The subject matter, on more than one occasion, never fails to baffle, perplex, confound and bewilder. He clearly isn’t a stickler for rules, with unpredictability in terms of story and editing being his strong suit. Two of his films, ‘Last Year in Marienbad’ and ‘Muriel or The Time of Return’ were both screened at Prithvi Theatre.
In a magisterial resort chateau at an undisclosed location, a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) and a woman (Delphine Seyrig) meet. The man is convinced that he’s met a woman the previous year, fallen in love with her and made plans to run away with her. The woman claims that they’ve never met and that she doesn’t remember any of it. A third man (Sacha Pitoëff), presumably the woman’s husband, is also makes his presence felt
So really, is he telling the truth? Or is she simply denying the affair? And is any of it real at all? Amidst a hazy storyline, we’re not given any concrete evidence to work with, all the while wondering along with the protagonists, what is real and what isn’t.
The man’s voiceover narration is in past tense as the scene unfurls before us in the present. Scenes leap from the present to the supposed past and back, staccato-like yet not without a lyrical quality. It’s successful in suggesting the disconnection and abstraction that pervade the people and the drowsy atmosphere in the film.
The camera work of Sacha Vierney is lustrous as it swimmingly sweeps down in black and white, with long tracking shots.
Majority of the film is blanketed by the plangent expanse of organs, the kind of dramatic music that works very well with a horror movie.
Having aged over forty years, the film that was once heralded as stupefying is now bordering on unfathomable and frustrating. And is this film simply a study in style and mastering the fine art of being ambiguous or a rendition of art way ahead of its time that’s simply aged?
‘Muriel or the Time of Return’ revisits the theme of war, after his Resnais’ first film, ‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour’.
We’re introduced to Helene (Delphine Seyrig), a middle-aged widow and antique saleswoman and her step- son Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée) who live in the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Helene runs into her old love Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien). As Helene is haunted by past experience with Alphonse and Bernard is haunted by his experiences from the war in Algiers, where he had partaken in the event of torturing and killing a girl.
Unlike his previous two cinematic operas, cinematography by Sacha Vierney foregoes black and white for colour which somehow doesn’t have the same effect as Resnais hoped it would. The film conducts itself in a linear manner, but is just as complex and not as bewildering as Marienbad.
Architecture is manipulated to make the presence of passing time known. Time is a stentorian presence that conjoins Marienbad and Muriel. In the former, there doesn’t seem to be a well-defined sense of time or place, whereas in the latter it is the opposite. However in Muriel, a personal love story between two people is juxtaposed against the effects of the repugnancy of war. It seems to inquire how a person can finally seek closure and move on from the past. The film also helped shed light on the Algerian War of Independence.
Dealing with recurring themes and motifs, you can say that he makes the same film over and over again. In a world where movies are told in a linear narrative, and have some amount of predictability, Resnais’ films may seem slightly corroded and weary to watch, yet undoubtedly each one has its subtle nuances, tones and artistic execution that make them memorable.

For Prithvi Theatre Notes, December 2011 :
http://www.prithvitheatre.org/uploads/pdfs/PTNotes_December_201_1322204635.pdf

Heaps of Talent

It was with abundant ebullience that Imogen Heap took the stage at Blue Frog on 24th November.
She’s a very British and more electronically inclined Bjork who still manages to create an identity very much her own. Armed with a gossamer voice, three microphones including two on her wrists, a percussionist, a cellist and a battalion of instruments, she’s clearly the conductor and musician of her own orchestra, a one woman band of sorts. Certain elements in certain parts of her songs seem to recall the ethereal feel of Sigur Ros. Her usual delightful and quirky self, she infuses her set with loads of humor and charm. Known for her use of technology and innovative stagecraft, Heap's performance is a good example of live looping, a practice thats becoming increasingly frequent in music these days.
The stage definitely had a one-of-a-kind set up with Immi, the transparent piano, sitting bang in the centre of things.
Ashwin Srinivasan, the flutist, performed the opening set. It was definitely interesting but I quickly got impatient with his six song set. It would have been a lot more exciting if he was backed by a full fledged band. Rather, his flute proved a potent and subtle counterpoint on many of Heap’s songs.
The landscape of Heap's music is furnished with mellifluent and slightly odd ornamentations. For instance, her opening number ‘Walk’ sees her waving a washing machine tube in the air, creating a thunderous sound.
As she struck up the opening riff from the second song, the tweeful and upbeat ‘Goodnight and Go’, which happens to be one of my favorites, the crowd went hysterical. On starting the song, she began singing the second verse, laughed it off and started the song again, something that added to the song’s charm.
Ensuing songs included ‘Speeding Cars’, ‘Between Sheets’, ‘Canvas’ and ‘The Moment I Said It’ which were all good, emotionally charged sonic endeavors, especially ‘Between Sheets’ , a love song.
What’s special about her set is that instead of ploughing through song after song, a practice that can get increasingly noisy and claustrophobic, she outlined incidents that inspired songs, kept up a continuous dialogue with the audience including dividing the audience three ways for a three part harmony spot on ‘Just For Now’.
She proceeded to us about the origins of her song ‘First Train Home’. About three wine glasses were brought out after that, from which the emanating sounds were briskly recorded and looped along with the drums and the array mbira, and served as the plinth for her song, ‘First Train Home’.
A rare performance of ‘Breathe In’, her song with Frou Frou was lovely.
Her studio output may sound great but watching her mix, layer, loop, and oscillate her way through different instruments and vocal punctuations, sets her apart from other musicians.
She then debuted her Magical Music Gloves, a pair of black gloves with lights, which when moved a certain way, immediately recorded, looped and added effects, without her flitting from one end of the stage to another, an incredibly ‘hands-on’ approach to music leaving us ordinary mortals in awe. ‘Let Go’, another Frou Frou hit, was next on the list.
This was followed by a lovely rendition of ‘Tidal’, a song that starts out nonchalantly and progressively builds up and ends with her playing guitar on her keytar.
The penultimate piece was the goosebump-evoking, minimilistic ‘Hide and Seek’ consisted of her voice being vocoded to create harmonies.
The set’s denouement featured ‘Minds Without Fear’ a collaboration with Vishal-Shekhar on vocals and Karsh Kale on tabla, inspired by Rabindranath Tagore’s poem, a song whose composition was documented on the show ‘The Dewarists’.
Indian musical talent is still evolving, especially with the birth of shows like Coke Studio and The Dewarists doing their bit to inspire. However, after watching Imogen Heap’s theatrical performance, Indian urban musicians have still got a long way to go.

French Essay for 'Des Mets et Des Mots'

This was the essay I'd sent for the essay competition organized by Alliance Francaise de Bombay last month, entitled "Des Mets et Des Mots". After having no internet access for almost a week, I finally checked my mail and was informed that I'd been one of the top three finalists for the entire competition. I didn't win yet it's most definitely a triumph considering the fact that I wrote and re-wrote it on the eve of my FC exam on 6th October. Yeah, I'll most probably flunk FC but all that hard work, back pain and blurred vision seems to have paid off.
Carpe diem! :)

LA REVOLUTION CULINAIRE

L'art de la cuisine est comme la création d'une peinture. Delicat et avec plein de couleurs. J'aime faire de cuire. Mais aussi j'aime beaucoup manger. Je crois un bon repas est une cacophonie des goûts qui danse avec harmonie. Un bon repas est une conversation contre le chef et le client. Je trouve le processus de cuisine très intéressant et très thérapeutique. J'ai l'habitude de regarder comment les chefs de cuisine comme Raymond Blanc démarche l'élaboration de la nourriture. Il est essentiel de faire cuire avec émotion, mais des compétences sont également nécessaire.
Le monde change a un rythme rapide et également la façon dont nous faisons cuire nos aliments. Soudain, tout le monde a commence d'examiner tous les aspects de la cuisine: les goûts, les textures la science et comment la qualité de vie a change par la qualité de nourriture. Stefan Gates, un écrivain, a visite les régions comme Afghanistan, Korea, Chernobyl, etc, et il a écrit de ses expériences avec les cuisines et la qualité de vie.
Bocuse d’Or, les jeux Olympiques culinaires est un concours de cuisine qui récompense le meilleur cuisinier.
Aujourd'hui il y a la gastronomie moléculaire. Essentiellement, elle est une moyen moderne et très créative de faire cuire. Les pionniers comme Nicholas Kurti, Pierre Gagnaire, Hervé This, Ferran Adria, Michel Roth, ils étudiaient la science de la processus de cuisson. Ils se sont détachent de les frontières de la cuisine.C'est un mélange de chimie, de physique et d'un amour pour la nourriture. Par example, Heston Blumenthal a prépare une glace avec liquid nitrogen. Ces moyens sont très difficile mais intéressant et diverse.
Mon aspect favori du bon repas est le dessert. Quand je visite un restaurant, je remarque toujours le dessert dans le menu. Le dessert est comme la fin de un opéra magnifique. J’adore chocolat. Je n’ oublirai pas l’ expérience de dessert a Shiro. C’etait incroyable! Trois types de gâteaux! J’aime faire du gâteau a l’orange avec chocolat et cupcakes au citron de temps en temps. Pas mal, non?
Je suis heureuse de voir qu' il y a plusieurs innovations dans l'art de la cuisson. Mais, la cuisine classique est aussi très importante. Elle est sans complication. La simplicité est belle.
Pour l'instant, la révolution continue.

Film Review: Midnight in Paris

You’ve got to give him credit. Woody Allen, the bespectacled septuagenarian conteur, has served up his latest, ‘Midnight in Paris’, an obeisance to art, literature, music and Paris. Allen gently plunders the human tendency of dissatisfaction with the present and yearning for the past, using la ville lumiere as a backdrop.
Hollywood hack screenwriter Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is in Paris with his insipid, annoying fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams), unhappy with the way his successful career has impeded him from penning a real serious novel and disappointed by the way that life is moving in contemporary times. On a midnight walk in one of the charming serpentine Parisian lanes, he finds himself in the ‘Golden Age’, an era suffused with incandescent golden light, where he rubs shoulders with F.Scott Fitzgerald and his mercurial wife Zelda, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali, Picasso and others. He’s living his dream (and mine too). His love for the art, literature and music is frequently a source of mockery by Inez and her incessantly critical friend, Paul who scorns,” Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present.”
His ecstasy at inhabiting an ebullient world in the past is juxtaposed with his increasing unhappiness with the present, as he falls in love with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), Picasso’s mistress whose got Modigliani and Braque on her resume too and who, we find, feels just as unhappy in her own time period.
The film’s frames are teeming with artistic legends, someone of them played by present day stalwarts as well, a sort of a who’s- who list of famous people. Adrien Brody inhabits the skin of a rhinoceros obsessed Salvador Dali with ease, Kathy Bates ‘s rendition of Gertrude Stein is perfect, Allison Pill as the spunky Zelda is delightful and Ernest Hemingway played by Corey Stoll is sombre and reflective.
Owen Wilson is like a blonder and younger Wood Allen, replete with Allen-esque inflections, mannerisms. It works. He’s immensely likeable and charming and his zealousness is infectious. Martin Sheen as the “pedantic” Mr-Know –It-All Paul is very enjoyable to watch. Marion Cotillard is alluring and enchanting.
Cinematographer Darius Khondji has masterfully differentiated between the two worlds, by giving the past a soft, rich gilded texture, and the present a clear, pristine quality. Production designer Anne Seibel and costume designer Sonia Grande have succeeded in bringing the past to life.
Unlike some of his previous work, which employs the use of a protagonist with an ‘I hate life’ sign on his forehead (usually with Allen himself playing this character), this film is surprisingly cheerful.
Allen’s writing aims at light chuckles rather than anything more substantial and cerebral that he is known for.
We always feel a sense of discontent every now and then at living in the present, often going “Oh, how I wish” while craving to go back to relive the time passages already past. Gil echoes this sentiment with “That's what the present is. It's a little unsatisfying because life is unsatisfying”.

A tender, period(s) piece and clearly one of Woody Allen’s better films, Midnight in Paris has all the weight of a feather and the enchantment of a wistful daydream.

This Charming Band

Because a 23 song album takes long to download, I resorted to listening to the dulcet tunes of The Smiths, on YouTube. I don’t know anyone who listens to them nowadays which is rather unfortunate because they were colossal in England during the 80’s and still hold a sublime spot in musical history. This charming band from Manchester, England has unleashed 5 albums and 14 hit singles, has been recognized as ‘the most important band in the last 50 years’ by NME and has inspired a barrage of artists. Yet, it’s not just the hype surrounding them that makes them fascinating. They’re the melodious rebels, the ones who blatantly refuse to conform, calling themselves ‘The Smiths’ for the simple reason that their contemporaries chose convoluted ones like Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. They were known to traipse onto stage to the classical tune of ‘Montagues and Capulets’ and were famed for having ingeniously welded heart-felt, reflective, humorous, often depressing lyrics that elucidate the carnage of life, together with sprightly, upbeat tunes and buoyant instrumentations. I like the fact that the cover art for their singles and albums never featured pictures of them, yet displayed portraits of others including Elvis.
Lead singer Morrissey’s voice and powerful lyrics, the jangly accent of Johnny Marr’s guitar, Mike Joyce’s drumming and Andy Rourke’s bass, simply, conspire to inspire.
Their first single ‘Hand in Glove’ illuminates the working class of the North with lines like ‘Though we may be hidden by rags/We’ll have something they’ll never have’ against a backdrop of sturdy and evocative music.
‘Panic on the streets of London/Panic on the streets of Birmingham’, sings Morrissey cheerfully on ‘Panic’, a little ditty with the intent to revolutionize. The line ‘Burn down the disco/Hang the blessed DJ/ because the music that they constantly play/It says nothing to me about my life’ melodically chides the commercial hit-makers of that time.
‘This Charming Man’ makes it a point to employ lines like ‘Punctured bicycle/ On a hillside desolate/ Will nature make a man of me yet?’ or ’I would go out tonight/But I haven’t got a stitch to wear’, language that has been rendered obsolete by up and coming songwriters. Their 1983 performance of the song on ‘Top of the Pops’ features Morrissey dangerously wielding a bouquet of gladioli flowers like an AK-47. Cool, eh?
‘Good times for a change/See the luck I’ve had can make a good man turn bad’ opens the number ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’. One minute and fifty-two seconds is awfully short for this charming melody. The loveliness of the song lies with the lyrics and with Morrissey’s voice which gives the song a slightly aged and weighty quality, as though a weather beaten old man was musing on his experiences of life. Yet it’s the youth that relates more to this song, as each ‘please’ conveys that sense of urgency, yearning and strength.
‘Girlfriend in a Coma’ elicits some chuckles with its dark and ironical humour and ‘There is a Light That Never Goes Out’ talks about how ‘heavenly’ and pleasurable it would be to die by a double decker bus.
The Smiths were, and still are, essentially the people’s band, making a point to highlighting issues like heartbreak, loneliness, self-pity, the pain of adolescence and Thatcherism. Being someone who sees adolescence as a painful way to judge whether or not you belong to the human race, their music is helpful in translating certain thoughts that would’ve crossed your mind at some point in life.

Film Review: Hiroshima, Mon Amour

‘Hiroshima, Mon Amour’ is essentially a film of parallels: the desire to forget against the urge to remember, the pain of war against the ache of love, the personal war against the war waging outside, the dissimilarity and similarity of the past and the present, the joint pleasure and pain of love, the effects of the same war in two different parts of the world. This film formed an integral part of the French New Wave, moving away from the classical style of filmmaking.

Elle (Emmanuelle Riva), a French actress in Hiroshima for a film on peace, and Lui (Eiji Okada), a Japanese architect begin an explosive love affair that gets progressively contemplative as they examine the ripples created by the Hiroshima bombing and the resulting death and loss. Despite both of them being married, they embark on this affair where they start falling in love with each other.

Elle gradually reveals her painful past, when her first love was claimed by the World War, in France. As she feels the joy and pleasure of a new relationship, she continues to be haunted by her grisly experience and social ostracism in Nevers, France and is torn between the act of remembering and the inevitability of oblivion.

French director Alain Resnais and screenwriter Marguerite Duras have engineered a deliberative tale told through a tapestry of images, traipsing between the past and the present to convey the sense of loss and the shifting time passages in a beautiful and innovative way. A series of documentary and news reel footage establishes the roles of memory and oblivion. The film moves at a slow pace and could have been a little shorter, yet with the sheer artistic rendering and the sleek story-telling, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Cinematography by Sacha Vierney is immaculate in black and white with smooth camera movements, leading us back and forth into time. Editing is splendid as it harnesses the avant-garde style. The musical score by Georges Delerue and Giovanni Fusco is evocative.

The performances of both Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada are admirable, laced with subtlety, depth and just the right amount of emotion.




It’s interesting to note that their names are simply ‘Elle’ and ‘Lui’ which is French for ‘She’ and ‘Him’, since it exhibits something that is extremely personal and yet something that can happen to anyone at anytime.

“Why deny the obvious necessity of remembering?”, asks Elle. A statement like that is succinct in making its point, yet never provides any answers. The importance attached to reminiscences is a powerful but not overpowering presence in the film. We want to hold onto memories, no matter how tragic and painful, but alas, as life would have it, forgetting is inevitable. Tragedy is something that we all strive to forget yet it is imperative to remember too.

This film, despite being made in 1959, is very much relevant today, reminding us about the ghastly whirlpool that is war. We’re hard pressed to find a film like this nowadays, an artistic platter that can be both delectable and contemplative.