One couldn’t help empathising with the almost childlike glee emanating from the audience, as the stage of the Tata Theatre rotated at the beginning of Astad Deboo’s performance at the NCPA on Tuesday. There lies a pedestrian thrill in spying on the guards who are nonchalantly perched backstage, unaware that they are a part of the changing stage scenery, albeit momentarily. Or watching Akash Khurana pause in his step, uncertain whether he should exit to the right or left, as he waits for the stage to show some sign of life. These were moments from the premiere of Deboo’s new work, Interpreting Tagore.
In the sesquicentenary of his birth, Rabindranath Tagore’s literary works are increasingly the focus of artistic endeavours. Deboo’s dalliance with Tagore began in 1995, when he presented a solo work based on three of Tagore’s poems, which have also made their way into this new piece. Back then, he chose the poems over Tagore’s plays, since they seemed easier to realise, given the constraints of working alone. Interpreting Tagore reworks the three old solos and brings them into the fold of a larger four-part group work.
Eight young performers accompanied him on his poetic journey – street children from the Salaam Baalak Trust, New Delhi, whom he has mentored over the last few years. They also seem to play an active role in shaping the work; two of them assisted Deboo while two others created the masks and puppets used in the course of the work.
The four poems Deboo picked were recited by Khurana. In the first piece, Surrender, the rotating stage creaks into place, bringing with it four hazy forms clad in white. Lying on their backs, Deboo and three other dancers point their feet up at the air. The three dancers navigate their lower bodies through the motions of the yogic postures sarvangasana and halasana, gradually somersaulting to arrange themselves, very briefly, into a seated position. Deboo juxtaposes this with very economic movement, slowly rising from the floor, as he follows the train of an idea he explores with constantly moving fingers.
The third piece, where two groups of four boys each depict a clash of civilisations, has some lively play-acting of real-life scenes, like a scene from a courtesan’s kotha, with the patron chewing paan and egging on the dancer, juxtaposed by a self-absorbed world where the technology is the fragile link between two human beings.
The expansive movements of the other performers, inspired by martial art forms like Thang Ta fill space and act as a foil to Deboo’s more restrained movements; yet, sometimes, one can’t help feeling that their actions are only incidental to his presence and performance.
Semi-autobiographical in nature, the pieces in Interpreting Tagore contain strong echoes of patterns that characterise what one could call Deboo’s very own movement idiom. Like the backward bend he often segues into, revealing his face with the placid smile, or the workings of his hands, as the fingers are blurred in cataclysmic vibrations. Speed, or rather how it is negotiated, constantly informs his work.
Then there is theatricality; in Your Grace, an ode to the goddess, the terrifying Kali masks Deboo wears and wields are suddenly dwarfed by giant Kali puppets that simultaneously descend onto the stage after staging a dramatic walk through the aisles. Their floating red garments caress stray knees, even as the theatre ushers are the only ones running around unmoved, trying to stop the audience from capturing this moment on phone cameras.
The music is an amalgamation of various strains of inspiration. Some of the music for Walking Tall, Deboo’s adaptation of Ekla Cholo Re, comes from Italian composer Frederico Senesie. Surrender, which was newly created for this work, is performed to vocal accompaniment by Amelia Coni.
The dramatic element is also manifested in the last piece, a solo by Deboo, which ends with a long round of very contained whirling, reminiscent of the Sufi dervishes, but slow enough for one to watch the expression on his face and the metamorphosing shapes of his moving fingers. What takes away from the beauty of his fingers is the audience’s tendency to be itchy-fingered, bursting into frantic, unmitigated applause every time the lights change in colour.