A travelling theatre space aim to explore new frameworks for performance
Martin John Chalissery. (Photo: DC)
Bengaluru: There’s more to a bus than standing on foot-boards, unwritten rules of offering up your seat to anyone with a clinging baby or graying hair or travelling sickness. Imagine it as something more than a slow, lumbering object on six wheels. “It is a travelling theatre space and we aim to explore new frameworks for performance and cultivate new audiences,” say Bengaluru-based musician and sound designer Saji Kadampattil and Martin John Chalissery as they prepare to turn a bus into a medium for social-political commentary at the India Foundation for the Arts today.
Martin recollects that he was nothing but playful until he met popular South American theatre personality, Elias Cohen. “It’s then that I discovered contemporary theatre and was provoked to think about social issues from a moral point of view,” he says. After a stint in South Africa for over seven years as an actor and theatre trainer, he collaborated with Bolivian and Chilean artists for the International Kerala Festival.
“I later became interested in creating a performance based on research into the history and evolution of bus transport in Kerala and the lives of people connected to it,” says the IFA grantee who after creating Tsunami Express with Cohen, started work on Odichodichu, Oru Bus Nadakam with Saji.
“We wanted to become the Oorali or whistleblower of our times,” says Saji about his band that is now collaborating with Martin on showcasing socio-political commentary through the bus performances.
An avid reader and a fan of Catch 22, he stumbled onto the poetry of eminent Malayalam poet, Kadamanitta Ramakrishnan Nair. “I found that the inherent folk flavour in the verses seamlessly fitted with my own musical expression,” says the engineer who dabbled in “hippie” music since his early college band days of The Travelling Riverside Band. It’s only after he began his research into the ritual folk performance form, Padayani, towards creating new performance work that he got on board with Martin to becoming what he calls a ‘travelling bard’.
Like Martin, political satire appeals to Saji. “Perversion and violence isn’t something that’s far away from us and we needed to engage people’s personal reflection,” he says.
The abandoned bus has since been transformed into a performance space with one side and the rear walls opening out as platforms extending from the floor of the bus. The performance will also include a screening of Sachindev’s film, Carnival on Wheels. “We wanted to show people that they can participate in art and that art is a way to rebuild things be it the broken down bus or the democracy,” adds Martin.
( Source : dc correspondent )
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