By Kathakali Jana
If the nature of performances is to shake up reality and raise a mirror to it, Bhangar Gora on the evening of December 29, 2023, inside a residential apartment in the dense Bagha Jatin neighbourhood of South Kolkata, did that and much more.
An audience of 20-odd people was crammed into the flat, its intimate settings and the inherent challenges of a restrictive space intensifying the discomfort contained within the theme of the collaborative intervention and its passionate execution. But such settings are capable of inviting a level of engagement and association that far makes up for the inconveniences of lack of space. This particular piece, Bhangar Gora, with its anti-war politics, gained a visceral power from the blurring of borders between performer and audience. Everybody in the room was vulnerable, charged, emotionally unsettled, confused and lost. This added great urgency to the experience by allowing the space to transcend the predicaments of physical closeness. In fact, that proximity served to append another layer of intensity to the immersive experience.
Performances often seek out spaces. In this case, though, it was the venue of B-CAF that demanded a performance before it altered itself into another space with different dimensions. A residential flat owned by the Founder Director of B-CAF, Reena Dewan, had been commissioned to transform into an arts space. But a wall needed to be broken down to open up the space. When a sledgehammer was swung through the wall a few times and the rubble was scattered on the floor, however, it threw up powerful meanings and metaphors. At a time of the horrific Israeli genocide in Gaza, not to speak of Ukraine, Congo, Sudan and the many other parts of the world where leaders continue to seek their objectives militarily, it provoked compelling, broken and non-linear imageries of chaos, war, devastation, displacement and loss. Reena invited five artists to respond to the impulse and create a collaborative piece.
The ensemble work that emerged was a multidisciplinary performance piece weaving together various art forms – dance, music, mime, poetry, visual arts, letters, moving prose and spoken word – creating a compelling narrative of turbulence, transformation, resilience and the limitless human potential that emerges from utter hopelessness and destruction.
The performance progressed organically with the five artists, Archee Roy, Manidipa Singha, Sangram Mukhopadhyay, Pritha Chattopadhyay and Monami Nandy, as each of them individually and collectively tried to make sense of the chaos and unrest and ask questions about their role in all of it through performance. The atmosphere in the room was so dense with collective anguish that one might have sliced it with a sharp knife.
The evening opened with Archee Roy – who identifies herself as a queer visual artist – painting her ‘desher bari’, her village home, on a length of wet white markin cloth. “In the quiet moments between strokes of my brush, I find solace in the memories that dance on the canvas of my mind. My struggle to weave sentences transforms into a seamless dance of colours and patterns. As I dip my brush in nostalgia, I revisit the echoes of my desher bari, my beloved Gram,” went her text, articulated by Reena Dewan who took up the role of sutradhar – narrator, adding a narrative layer to the work. The hut, the tree and the idyllic scene she painted around it reconnected her to her past, to her mother who painted alpona every evening on the floor of her home, to the visual poetry of her younger years. But the cloth slowly absorbed her brush strokes, the black ink spreading into the blurred, indistinct, distorted lines of her lost childhood, until they became thick unrecognisably smudged patterns of unrequited hopes and vanished dreams.
When Manidipa Singha took over from Archee, her quest was for an understanding of the world as she sat in front of the damaged wall. To her, it looked like a shadow of her broken, conflicted homeland, Coochbehar, and connected her to her identity as a Rajbongshi. Her performance attempted to link her own personal history with that of the rest of the world. The perfect home for her nestles amidst her earliest memories of folk music. As she sat in front of the wall, reciting, singing, talking to her audience and strumming her guitar, she looked for an answer to a fundamental question, which, in her own words, is, “how do I create work when I am destroyed deep within?” Her hauntingly evocative song, Ghum jai ma aaj, written in response to Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s 1980 poem ‘Lullaby for a Palestinian Child’, brought home the anguish of an unsettled, disintegrating world. Within disorder, she sought and found a semblance of harmony. She asked her audience for sound impulses, however shrill, sharp or abrasive, and attempted to respond with music, inviting the audience to be contributors to the narrative, symbolizing the collective role in shaping new beginnings.
With dancer-choreographer Sangram Mukhopadhyay, the context of the home shifted to that of the world. The larger horrors of war and wreckage, which had already begun to thicken the claustrophobic air in the room in Manidipa’s renditions, became hard to breathe in as Sangram asked questions about complacency and responsibility. “I am deeply disturbed by the fact that some of us have the luxury of doing what we wish to, while there are people in one part of the world who, for no fault of theirs, are being made to go through such horrendous times,” he said. His solo approached the site of the physical body as the last bastion of contestation where racial identity negates its right of existence and the body, after its negation, is unjustly desecrated for organ trafficking. “How do we build the body of a performer knowing these dichotomies? The dancer too needs to work on developing parts of the body through rigorous practice, mutilating the whole and focusing on parts.” His iteration was an enquiry into questions such as this. He also asks how artists place themselves in history at times of crisis. Is it only about displaying one’s woke-ness or do interventions like this have a greater significance than that? For him, his solo was a live documentation of one far-off body seemingly unaffected by the physicality of the war, even as the physical body of the performer figures out what to do with the impact of it. “When we are given the power to interact with an audience, as performers we feel that we have the licence to ‘create’ a reality. But while working on Bhangar Gora we decided that we should not allow any disconnect with our truth. There should be a continual reminder of the pain and agony,” said Sangram, his words articulating the artists’ inner urge to hold on to the physical reality of devastation, lest it is normalised.
Pritha Chattopadhyay’s intervention agonised over the personal conflict and struggle of an artist who wants to create something pristine and beautiful through the highly stylized form of Hindustani Classical music in an atmosphere of carnage. She urged the audience to read a letter written by a dead father to his son, projected on the wall behind her, as she sang stoically. “How can you create music when you can only hear houses crumbling, schools and hospitals being bombarded, people getting killed? How would you like to hear your own mellifluous songs against a backdrop of children crying for help? What does the letter tell you as you read it while listening to a traditional bandish elaborating on the pains of separation,” are some of the questions she asks. Sitting amidst rubble, with a soundscape of bombings and destruction in the backgound, and the deeply disturbing contents of Ghassan Kanafani’s letter in a visual representation, she attempted to subvert the hierarchy between an active performer and a passive audience. The profound irony of her embellished reiterations of the lover’s pangs in ‘Piharwa ko birmayo/Birhana ata bisrayo’ against the piercing landscape of a war zone created moments of appalling dissonance. Her stoicism stood out as an act of resistance.
“In the broken space at B-CAF, which to me was symbolic of our times as well as our lives, I felt the need to respond to the war in Gaza in my own way as an artist,” said dancer-choreographer Monami Nandy. She used the text of Iranian carpet weavers who work with great devotion, mangling their fingers in the rigour of their work, but singing songs at night. As an artist who is committed to her art practice, she connected with the track, Woven Sounds, a performance created by two Iranian musicians, Mehdi Aminian and Maryam Abtahi. Iran automatically came into her narrative and added an additional layer of powerful geographical associations. Monami’s gripping representation of the humanitarian nighmare of the refugee crisis – a woman with her possessions of a comb, a kajol and a hair tie at its centre – was replete with courage, conviction and extreme vulnerability. “I wanted to put myself at risk and see where it took me,” she said. In her work, displaced humanity came alive in the many textures of desperation, loss and dignity. And in the end when she cried tears of anguish, it was as though she cried for everybody in the room.
Bhangar Gora was about pure emotion and catharsis. It belonged to a body of artistic expressions that will, doubtless, one day speak more about such crises and responses than any history ever will. Art engages with lived horrors and possesses a restorative power that helps to imagine a better future by harnessing creativity as a force of renewal.