Learning From A Fool
MALAYALAM MEDIUM
2
THE TIMES OF INDIA, KERALA SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2017
Art, Culture And The Postmodern Vernacular
KATHAKALI RANGOLSAVAM
IFFT 2017
BHARATHAM FESTIVAL
R
SNEAK PEEK
enowned mohiniyattam dancer Neena Prasad to perform at 6pm on February 11
K
alamandalam Soman and team to present the story Nizhalkoothu at 5.30pm today
Venue | Vadakkunnathan Temple, Thrissur
GOWRI CULTURAL FEST
CARNATIC CONCERT
B
y vocalist S K Mahathi, accompanied by Aryadutta on violin and Narayan Prakash on mridangam, at 5pm today
T
Venue | Neeranjali Hall, Thrissur
he seven-day International Film Festival of Thrissur, organized by Thrissur Chalachitra Kendram, started on Friday
Venue | Thrissur
Venue | Changampuzha Park, Ernakulam
P
erformance by Manipuri exponent Sinam Basu Singh at 6.30pm on Friday
Venue | Rappadi auditorium, Palakkad
REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE
Unlike his friend Sartre, or the estranged heroes of his own novels, Albert Camus wanted the best of both worlds — political and personal. Has it diminished his stature as a writer revered by a generation of Malayalis or has it, because he refused to take himself too seriously, turned him into a postmodern icon?
FATHER FIGURE
PARISIAN PRIVILEGE ‘If you speak, you die. If you do not speak, you die. So, speak and die’ — an Arab-centric retelling of The Stranger asks whether Camus ever lived up to this credo An excerpt from The Meursault Investigation:
M
A Kochi exhibition shows the archetypal outsider in his ‘home grown’ avatar [email protected]
H
enri Cartier-Bresson made existentialism look cool with his 1947 iconic image of Albert Camus, chin framed by trench coat flaps and a Gauloises dangling precariously from the lips. For Kerala, where he inspired a generation of writers, Camus continues to be the poster boy of the catch-all philosophical label that he desperately tried to shrug off. But now, an exhibition, Life of Albert Camus through photographs put together by Albert Camus Estate, France, and Kochi Books at their newly-opened Gallery Cafe on Princess Street, Fort Kochi, gives an intimate picture of Camus, the man and father. The photographs from the collection managed by Catherine
Camus and Jean Camus, his twin children, exude familial warmth and affection. In most of them Camus looks dapper, tailored for the doting father image, gazing intently at little Catherine and Jean with fatherly pride. The only sign that betrays authorial solitude and narcissistic selfawareness is perhaps the unlighted cigarette. There are also images of him as a wide-eyed toddler, school boy and young footballer. The one in which he and brother Lucien are dressed in the uniform of war orphans sheds light on a seminal event that shaped him – the First World War which claimed his father. The ‘scandalous’ among the lot is that of the man, with looks good enough to launch an acting career, cavorting on beach in the company of women after the failure
of his first marriage. The way in which the exhibition, which is on till March 31, materialized in this nondescript bookstore tucked away in a touristy street lined with curio shops and chic cafes is emblematic of the evolution of Fort Kochi. In July 2012, Vimalkumar, who owns the place, received a surprise gift – a book with drawings and photographs of Camus – from Catherine Camus. He remembered that some months ago two visiting French tourists Virginie Zurfluh and Jean-Francois Savornin, neighbours of Catherine, walked into his store and photographed a display of books featuring Camus. “We continued to correspond and in February, 2015, she sent me a book on her father that she edited,” said Vimalkumar. The gallery is dedicated to the memory of Tabitha Kate Dean, a British citizen, a friend of Vimalkumar and bibliophile who died on Christmas day in Fort Kochi.
Breaking Into Song
TOI
TOI
P
Poet K Satchidanandan at the Poetry Carnival held in Pattambi
singing poems and made poetry popular. Kavya Keli and Cholkazcha had good following in Kerala,” he adds. Departing from the hackneyed kaviyarangu, which is largely a one-sided affair, the carnival had sessions like poetry installation, performance and visual presentation of poems. Theatre activist M G Sasi, for instance, presented the theatre version of K G Sankara Pillai’s poem Sarvaiya. “The poem is just two pages, but the play is an hour-and-a-half long. The protagonist is Dheera Bai, the woman in the life of Sarvaiya, who is the central character in KGS’s poem. I think the poem is a powerful statement on the dalit protest raging in India,” Sasi explains.
YOU ARE OUR SOUNDING BOARD
COLONIAL HANGOVER? Despite being born in Algeria, Camus did not support the struggle for Algerian independence against France
[email protected]
Prashanth.MP @timesgroup.com
Canon and classifications became irrelevant in the continuous flux where everything changes position by the minute. “Carnivalisation of culture was a deregulatory word a decade ago. But now we are slowly realising its disruptive powers. In Poetry Carnival there was no categorization of genres. Budding poets brushed shoulders with tall figures in Malayalam poetry without any inhibitions,” says Santhosh Hrishikesh, one of the organizers of the Carnival. “Our effort has been to shift the poem from page to the stage. Studying poetry as an academic exercise is not completely abandoned. But the accent is on the celebration of poetry among the multitudes. We had the tradition of bards who roam around
FRENCH CONNECTION: The writer's daughter Catherine Camus started corresponding with the owner of Kochi Books, a store she came to know about through her neighbours
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daud is published by Random House.
Learning From A Fool
The Poetry Carnival has sought to shift the focus from page to stage
oetry cannot be pedantic nor can it remain aloof from the multitudes in this age of fastchanging communication technologies. Bringing poetry down from the high pedestal it once occupied and integrating it with lives of millions, who are in one way or the other attached to the art form, is a daunting task. This was one of the declared objectives of the Poetry Carnival recently held in Pattambi. “Poetry is not black lines on white paper; it is an attitude. It is a way we look at life or it is life itself. For me it means liberating poetry from ideological obstinacies,” says Rafeeq Ahamed, lyricist and poet. “Poetry was not isolated from the people. Ottamthullal was performed in the midst of a crowd. Social media has transformed the sensibility of Malayalis and again we are going back to the people.” Ahamed feels that modernism in Malayalam was insensitive to marginalized sections of society. “How many women poets did we have in the heyday of modernism? But now expressions of all marginalized peoples are increasingly getting noticed,” he points out.
ama's still alive today. She doesn't say anything now, but there are many tales she could tell. Unlike me: I've rehashed this story in my head so often, I almost can't remember it anymore. I mean, it goes back more than half a century. It happened, and everyone talked about it. People still do, but they mention only one dead man, they feel no compunction about doing that, even though there were two of them, two dead men. Yes, two. Why does the other one get left out? Well, the original guy was such a good storyteller, he managed to make people forget his crime, whereas the other one was a poor illiterate created by God only, it seems, to take a bullet and return to dust—an anonymous person who didn't even have the time to be given a name. I'll tell you this up front: the other dead man, the murder victim, was my brother.
There's nothing left of him. There's only me, left to speak in his place, sitting in this bar, waiting for condolences no one's ever going to offer me. Laugh if you want, but this is more or less my mission: I peddle offstage silence, trying to sell my story while the theatre empties out. As a matter of fact, that's the reason why I've learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish his sentences for him. The murderer has become famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language.
Rajat Kapoor’s comic take throws fresh light on one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies
“D
on’t worry, the show hasn’t begun yet,” says a clown lugging a suitcase and wearing a black coat, oversized shoes and a hat as the audience enter the stage through several doors. Even as the audience settle down in their seats, the clown continues the casual chitchat with them. This set the tone for Nothing Like Lear over the next 80 minutes as it was staged at JT Performing Arts Center in Kochi recently. Written and directed by Rajat Kapoor, Nothing Like Lear is a comic take on one of Shakespeare’s most tragic plays, but carefully designed as to not lose the essence of the original. Morose moments are mixed with the hilarious monologue of a fool, played ably by Bollywood actor Vinay Pathak. The meandering monologue and gibberish of the fool is tur ned to good effect with brilliant use of light that puts the spotlight on the solo performer. During light-hearted moments when the fool cracks up the audience –at one point shedding his pants and doing a jig, on another occasion animatedly conveying the inexpressible jealousy of a father when his daughter starts dating, or of a brother when the parents favour his sibling -– the stage is
Email your feedback to [email protected]
TWIST IN THE TALE: Actor Vinay Pathak plays the protagonist in the play Nothing Like Lear, staged at JT Performing Arts Center in Kochi recently
uniformly lit up. On the other hand, when he plunges into anguished speeches, a single beam of light focuses on the fool’s face, plunging the rest of the theatre into pitch darkness. At the heart of the play is the mystifying bond between the fool and his daughter, revealing to us the father in Lear and Lear in every father – a man who spends his life and fortune for his daughter’s sake who in the end shuts the door on him. The fool flips between the narrator and actor roles, speaking heavily-accented French to the audience at one moment and enunciating lines of pure anguish in the next on the pretext of how his brother – the
‘real actor’ — would have done it.. This technique of ‘unreliable narrator’ allows sorrow and humour to see-saw seamlessly. “You know, while we wanted to do these plays with clowns, I was very particular that I did not want to lose the essence of the original play. I mean, eventually one has to find the emotional connect with Shakespeare's Lear whatever route one might take. Lear and Hamlet are two of his greatest tragedies. And I thought it is kind of nice to have this movement from the very comic to the very tragic, and the play constantly moves from one extreme emotion to the other. In this
way, I feel the tragedy is even more enhanced – more visible as it were against the light of the comic backdrop,” Rajat explains. Tragically, Kochi’s response to the celebrated theatre fest, that includes performances at 11 major cities in the country in a month’s time, was lukewarm. In most other cities, tickets for the show was almost sold out much before the date of the play, but not in Kochi. “We have been to this city with Hamlet before, though it was six or seven years back; and I remember the response then was not as lukewarm as this. Having said that, I must admit though the theatre was only 40% full, the quality of the audience and their attention was very high. The response was great, so we never really missed the large numbers,” Rajat adds. The director says that the lukewarm response points to the miles theatre has to cover what with the hold movies has on the masses. The Shakespeare Comedy Theatre Festival is just one small step towards the same, he says. “No one thing can change a historical trend. But many small things, done continuously can make a difference. Cinema was the most popular art of the 20th century, and it continues to be so. Though people say that the popularity of cinema is under threat what with smart phones, and internet giving rise to new forms of consumption, it’s only when you look back you are able to figure out the changes. Amidst all of this, theatre still remains a unique experience where the audience comes to share something which is living, which happens only in that moment – and it is not there afterwards. That is the beauty of theatre. I was there and now it exists only as a part of your memory,” Rajat points out.
Read all Malayalam Medium stories online at Roots & Wings: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/roots-wings/roots-wings-malayalam/
2
THE TIMES OF INDIA, KERALA SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2017
Art, Culture And The Postmodern Vernacular
KATHAKALI RANGOLSAVAM
IFFT 2017
BHARATHAM FESTIVAL
R
SNEAK PEEK
enowned mohiniyattam dancer Neena Prasad to perform at 6pm on February 11
K
alamandalam Soman and team to present the story Nizhalkoothu at 5.30pm today
Venue | Vadakkunnathan Temple, Thrissur
GOWRI CULTURAL FEST
CARNATIC CONCERT
B
y vocalist S K Mahathi, accompanied by Aryadutta on violin and Narayan Prakash on mridangam, at 5pm today
T
Venue | Neeranjali Hall, Thrissur
he seven-day International Film Festival of Thrissur, organized by Thrissur Chalachitra Kendram, started on Friday
Venue | Thrissur
Venue | Changampuzha Park, Ernakulam
P
erformance by Manipuri exponent Sinam Basu Singh at 6.30pm on Friday
Venue | Rappadi auditorium, Palakkad
REBEL WITHOUT A PAUSE
Unlike his friend Sartre, or the estranged heroes of his own novels, Albert Camus wanted the best of both worlds — political and personal. Has it diminished his stature as a writer revered by a generation of Malayalis or has it, because he refused to take himself too seriously, turned him into a postmodern icon?
FATHER FIGURE
PARISIAN PRIVILEGE ‘If you speak, you die. If you do not speak, you die. So, speak and die’ — an Arab-centric retelling of The Stranger asks whether Camus ever lived up to this credo An excerpt from The Meursault Investigation:
M
A Kochi exhibition shows the archetypal outsider in his ‘home grown’ avatar [email protected]
H
enri Cartier-Bresson made existentialism look cool with his 1947 iconic image of Albert Camus, chin framed by trench coat flaps and a Gauloises dangling precariously from the lips. For Kerala, where he inspired a generation of writers, Camus continues to be the poster boy of the catch-all philosophical label that he desperately tried to shrug off. But now, an exhibition, Life of Albert Camus through photographs put together by Albert Camus Estate, France, and Kochi Books at their newly-opened Gallery Cafe on Princess Street, Fort Kochi, gives an intimate picture of Camus, the man and father. The photographs from the collection managed by Catherine
Camus and Jean Camus, his twin children, exude familial warmth and affection. In most of them Camus looks dapper, tailored for the doting father image, gazing intently at little Catherine and Jean with fatherly pride. The only sign that betrays authorial solitude and narcissistic selfawareness is perhaps the unlighted cigarette. There are also images of him as a wide-eyed toddler, school boy and young footballer. The one in which he and brother Lucien are dressed in the uniform of war orphans sheds light on a seminal event that shaped him – the First World War which claimed his father. The ‘scandalous’ among the lot is that of the man, with looks good enough to launch an acting career, cavorting on beach in the company of women after the failure
of his first marriage. The way in which the exhibition, which is on till March 31, materialized in this nondescript bookstore tucked away in a touristy street lined with curio shops and chic cafes is emblematic of the evolution of Fort Kochi. In July 2012, Vimalkumar, who owns the place, received a surprise gift – a book with drawings and photographs of Camus – from Catherine Camus. He remembered that some months ago two visiting French tourists Virginie Zurfluh and Jean-Francois Savornin, neighbours of Catherine, walked into his store and photographed a display of books featuring Camus. “We continued to correspond and in February, 2015, she sent me a book on her father that she edited,” said Vimalkumar. The gallery is dedicated to the memory of Tabitha Kate Dean, a British citizen, a friend of Vimalkumar and bibliophile who died on Christmas day in Fort Kochi.
Breaking Into Song
TOI
TOI
P
Poet K Satchidanandan at the Poetry Carnival held in Pattambi
singing poems and made poetry popular. Kavya Keli and Cholkazcha had good following in Kerala,” he adds. Departing from the hackneyed kaviyarangu, which is largely a one-sided affair, the carnival had sessions like poetry installation, performance and visual presentation of poems. Theatre activist M G Sasi, for instance, presented the theatre version of K G Sankara Pillai’s poem Sarvaiya. “The poem is just two pages, but the play is an hour-and-a-half long. The protagonist is Dheera Bai, the woman in the life of Sarvaiya, who is the central character in KGS’s poem. I think the poem is a powerful statement on the dalit protest raging in India,” Sasi explains.
YOU ARE OUR SOUNDING BOARD
COLONIAL HANGOVER? Despite being born in Algeria, Camus did not support the struggle for Algerian independence against France
[email protected]
Prashanth.MP @timesgroup.com
Canon and classifications became irrelevant in the continuous flux where everything changes position by the minute. “Carnivalisation of culture was a deregulatory word a decade ago. But now we are slowly realising its disruptive powers. In Poetry Carnival there was no categorization of genres. Budding poets brushed shoulders with tall figures in Malayalam poetry without any inhibitions,” says Santhosh Hrishikesh, one of the organizers of the Carnival. “Our effort has been to shift the poem from page to the stage. Studying poetry as an academic exercise is not completely abandoned. But the accent is on the celebration of poetry among the multitudes. We had the tradition of bards who roam around
FRENCH CONNECTION: The writer's daughter Catherine Camus started corresponding with the owner of Kochi Books, a store she came to know about through her neighbours
The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Daud is published by Random House.
Learning From A Fool
The Poetry Carnival has sought to shift the focus from page to stage
oetry cannot be pedantic nor can it remain aloof from the multitudes in this age of fastchanging communication technologies. Bringing poetry down from the high pedestal it once occupied and integrating it with lives of millions, who are in one way or the other attached to the art form, is a daunting task. This was one of the declared objectives of the Poetry Carnival recently held in Pattambi. “Poetry is not black lines on white paper; it is an attitude. It is a way we look at life or it is life itself. For me it means liberating poetry from ideological obstinacies,” says Rafeeq Ahamed, lyricist and poet. “Poetry was not isolated from the people. Ottamthullal was performed in the midst of a crowd. Social media has transformed the sensibility of Malayalis and again we are going back to the people.” Ahamed feels that modernism in Malayalam was insensitive to marginalized sections of society. “How many women poets did we have in the heyday of modernism? But now expressions of all marginalized peoples are increasingly getting noticed,” he points out.
ama's still alive today. She doesn't say anything now, but there are many tales she could tell. Unlike me: I've rehashed this story in my head so often, I almost can't remember it anymore. I mean, it goes back more than half a century. It happened, and everyone talked about it. People still do, but they mention only one dead man, they feel no compunction about doing that, even though there were two of them, two dead men. Yes, two. Why does the other one get left out? Well, the original guy was such a good storyteller, he managed to make people forget his crime, whereas the other one was a poor illiterate created by God only, it seems, to take a bullet and return to dust—an anonymous person who didn't even have the time to be given a name. I'll tell you this up front: the other dead man, the murder victim, was my brother.
There's nothing left of him. There's only me, left to speak in his place, sitting in this bar, waiting for condolences no one's ever going to offer me. Laugh if you want, but this is more or less my mission: I peddle offstage silence, trying to sell my story while the theatre empties out. As a matter of fact, that's the reason why I've learned to speak this language, and to write it too: so I can speak in the place of a dead man, so I can finish his sentences for him. The murderer has become famous, and his story's too well written for me to get any ideas about imitating him. He wrote in his own language. Therefore I'm going to do what was done in this country after Independence: I'm going to take the stones from the old houses the colonists left behind, remove them one by one, and build my own house, my own language.
Rajat Kapoor’s comic take throws fresh light on one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies
“D
on’t worry, the show hasn’t begun yet,” says a clown lugging a suitcase and wearing a black coat, oversized shoes and a hat as the audience enter the stage through several doors. Even as the audience settle down in their seats, the clown continues the casual chitchat with them. This set the tone for Nothing Like Lear over the next 80 minutes as it was staged at JT Performing Arts Center in Kochi recently. Written and directed by Rajat Kapoor, Nothing Like Lear is a comic take on one of Shakespeare’s most tragic plays, but carefully designed as to not lose the essence of the original. Morose moments are mixed with the hilarious monologue of a fool, played ably by Bollywood actor Vinay Pathak. The meandering monologue and gibberish of the fool is tur ned to good effect with brilliant use of light that puts the spotlight on the solo performer. During light-hearted moments when the fool cracks up the audience –at one point shedding his pants and doing a jig, on another occasion animatedly conveying the inexpressible jealousy of a father when his daughter starts dating, or of a brother when the parents favour his sibling -– the stage is
Email your feedback to [email protected]
TWIST IN THE TALE: Actor Vinay Pathak plays the protagonist in the play Nothing Like Lear, staged at JT Performing Arts Center in Kochi recently
uniformly lit up. On the other hand, when he plunges into anguished speeches, a single beam of light focuses on the fool’s face, plunging the rest of the theatre into pitch darkness. At the heart of the play is the mystifying bond between the fool and his daughter, revealing to us the father in Lear and Lear in every father – a man who spends his life and fortune for his daughter’s sake who in the end shuts the door on him. The fool flips between the narrator and actor roles, speaking heavily-accented French to the audience at one moment and enunciating lines of pure anguish in the next on the pretext of how his brother – the
‘real actor’ — would have done it.. This technique of ‘unreliable narrator’ allows sorrow and humour to see-saw seamlessly. “You know, while we wanted to do these plays with clowns, I was very particular that I did not want to lose the essence of the original play. I mean, eventually one has to find the emotional connect with Shakespeare's Lear whatever route one might take. Lear and Hamlet are two of his greatest tragedies. And I thought it is kind of nice to have this movement from the very comic to the very tragic, and the play constantly moves from one extreme emotion to the other. In this
way, I feel the tragedy is even more enhanced – more visible as it were against the light of the comic backdrop,” Rajat explains. Tragically, Kochi’s response to the celebrated theatre fest, that includes performances at 11 major cities in the country in a month’s time, was lukewarm. In most other cities, tickets for the show was almost sold out much before the date of the play, but not in Kochi. “We have been to this city with Hamlet before, though it was six or seven years back; and I remember the response then was not as lukewarm as this. Having said that, I must admit though the theatre was only 40% full, the quality of the audience and their attention was very high. The response was great, so we never really missed the large numbers,” Rajat adds. The director says that the lukewarm response points to the miles theatre has to cover what with the hold movies has on the masses. The Shakespeare Comedy Theatre Festival is just one small step towards the same, he says. “No one thing can change a historical trend. But many small things, done continuously can make a difference. Cinema was the most popular art of the 20th century, and it continues to be so. Though people say that the popularity of cinema is under threat what with smart phones, and internet giving rise to new forms of consumption, it’s only when you look back you are able to figure out the changes. Amidst all of this, theatre still remains a unique experience where the audience comes to share something which is living, which happens only in that moment – and it is not there afterwards. That is the beauty of theatre. I was there and now it exists only as a part of your memory,” Rajat points out.
Read all Malayalam Medium stories online at Roots & Wings: http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/roots-wings/roots-wings-malayalam/
