Janak

A participatory play charting the life-story of an Indian woman from pre-birth to post-death.
Integrating different modes of action and narration to create a first-person perspective into her essential character defining moments across her lifetime.

Script →

1h 30mins

1 actor

Upper Gulbenkian Gallery,
Royal College of Art

Playmaking

Janak was devised from an interview of a woman from the slums of New Delhi published in Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar’s book Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality. The interview is an account of her relationship with her husband in her own words at age 50, which we elaborated into a presentation of her life with the help of Sudhir Kakar’s other writings about the Indian lifecycle.

The playmaking process was a speculative study of her character; tracing life-long emotional threads underneath the life-situations briefly described in the interview and then elaborating them into scenes. It was a cyclic process of improvising on parts of the material, reflecting on tempos and shapes it revealed and then condensing them into the script; taking us from unit to the whole and back to units in rehearsal every day as we made sense of her life-time and life-space.

Week I - III

Elements

Direction
Playing with opposites

Aging forms of face, posture, screams, speech, reaction, fluidity from infanthood to childhood

Intensities & mundanities through a dialogue between Indian Bharatnayam dance and naturalistic improv

Childhood speech & wordless screams of infanthood

Design
Sense of shape & movement

Inside/outside core dichotomy of space; trust/mistrust

Spiral movement through cycle of life-space x life-stage

Drapes as dynamic symbols for counterplayers, objects, places, doors

Week III - VI

Fragments

Direction
Improvising with narrative

Tracing her daily routine across her life-time as the play’s backbone

Aging responses of care & violence towards her mother, father, husband, siblings, children interrupting her daily routine

Speech as response, expression, narration, thinking

Progressively interacting with audience members to create gradual “discovery” of the world; as a young girl she crawls up to and listens to someone's beating heart in terror, in a slightly older scene she talks to a female audience member as her sister, in a later scene she offers someone something to drink and then dances with him, in the final scene she gives the same female audience member a roti, holds her face, and gazes into her eyes for a while.

Read Script →

Design
Sense of aesthetic

Spectacle & dramalessness the basic pulsation of the composition

Terror in the play's cruelty towards the character & the threatening air that you might be called upon to participate at any time

Confusion in the use of screams/Hindi words and in the speeding up of narrative-time as she grows older

Ugliness To justify the suffocation & squalor of the slums being brought to this gorgeous gallery space, we had to present the world in a brutally minimised, “alienated” atmosphere of gestures and objects with discordant shapes and colours, drawing out the ugly in all of their forms

Week VII - X

Production

Direction
Condensation

Once we had a “maximum” version of all the material for the play, we selected, eliminated and compressed it by showing the play to small audiences and iterating based on feedback. Each scene was a participatory experiment of some sort, some worked and some didn’t. The play that finally remained was a minimal version of the whole, building on only what emerged as truly compelling, edited by the sense of time & tempo and the overall "moving" stage picture.

Design
Development

Light crude white naked bulb in center of room like in a slum

Colour baths from projectors fill the room to create atmosphere

Imagery Recurring ambiguous figures appear on projectors in few scenes to represent counterplayers

Sound recording & editing dialogues

Costumes & props spotlighting Indianness

Reflection

The play started out as a research effort exploring Indian bharatnayam dance forms in dialogue with naturalistic portrayals of essential life-experiences of infanthood, love, lovelessness, childbirth, aging of a character through a life-cycle and death. The aesthetic challenge of presenting 1 woman’s life-time through the repeating cycles of life-spaces – and creating the reality of a woman living in a slum in India honestly – became the core efforts at the heart of the process. It was an interesting experiment with narrative as well as form, playing with strong contrasts of modes of action and narration and leaning heavily into direct encounter with the audience. The composition of time as it sped up and slowed down over her life-time became a very useful narrative device. The play ended with an extended moment of silence intended to prevent the audience from the release of applause and the different kinds of experiences people had during this opened me up to the categories of the interest, intimacy, insight and integration that participatory theatre can create.