A tale of two directors

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The Natrang Pratishthan organised an interaction with two leading women directors, Dr Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry and B. Jayashree, at the Sahitya Akademi over two days, as part of their ongoing programme “Meet the Director”. While Neelam’s talk was a detailed description and analysis of the process of creativity particularly within The Company players in Chandigarh, B. Jayashree, who is currently a member of the Rajya Sabha, went back to her early days with her grandfather Gubbi Veeranna’s professional company in Karnataka to talk more about her life as a performer.
Neelam, an NSD Alumnus, has done pioneering work with the traditional female impersonators, the naqqals of Punjab. After doing masters in history of art, she joined the NSD where she worked with Ebrahim Alkazi and later during her four years she spent in Bhopal at Bharat Bhawan, with B.V. Karanth, the greatO theatre musician. She was one of the first Indians to perform in the prestigious Avignon Festival in France. She has also taken her group, The Company, to Perth, Australia and the Edinburgh arts festival.
Theatre for Neelam is Maya, or Leela. It is the power of transformation of an actor into a character from the real to the imaginary. Performance is an illusion, but sometimes that illusion can be more truthful and real than our everyday experience. Theatre events are always improvisational and experimental therefore any semiotics of theatre is on shaky and slippery ground particularly given the subjectivity with which they are viewed
Neelam selects the text according to her “state of mind, I look for myself in the characters.” Neelam creates her own world with the actors and becomes part of their journey. The text is merely a starting point. The relationships that are created with the objects, with space, with the body and the many intangible things that go into making a performance alive are more important. “I am willing to sacrifice the text if a gesture explains the meaning better.” On her working process with the actors, Neelam said her attempt was to place the actors in outlandish situations that would dissolve the blocks in an actor the blocks of stereotyped acting, of clichés. For instance, playing a death scene in the kitchen or a rape scene on a trolley, situations that may not figure in the work space but the choices by the actors will be an important moments for a performance.
“If I have to formulate a theory, it would be to believe in what you and your actors are doing. It is essential that an actor to feels like a child, learning, seeing, experiencing everything afresh. It is not only becoming a child but entering your childhood. The most significant aspects of how an actor grows and evolves are part of the unrecorded history of the actors- their stories, their testimonies, their struggles to reach the spirit of their character.”
On the naqqal performers: Neelam discovered a group of naqqals or imitators as the word implies in Persian, in rural Punjab. The naqqals are basically story tellers dancers and singers without a developed theatre techniques aesthetics or styles. The work with urban actors and the naqqals led to some interesting encounters. This combination of the folk with the urban has become “her metaphor”. “By putting such a company together, I have tried to produce a somewhat precarious, somewhat unstable, meeting of folk tradition and the modern and a meeting between the female impersonator and the urban actor.”
On language: Neelam’s early encounter with Punjabi and its image of being uncultured forced her to think about the language when she started the company 27 years ago. Neelam believes that agriculture is culture to plant a seed and see a plant grow into a tree is akin to the joy a painter feels on completing a painting. B.V.Karanth’s words “whatever work you do must be with the language of the state with local people and regional images. You must nationalise the regional and regionalise the national” detonated within Neelam. Being a Punjabi, doing theatre in Punjabi was natural despite opposition. Even today, after so many years of doing theatre, people still ask Neelam why she is not doing English theatre.
Objects on stage: Neelam’s theatre is marked by the maximum of objects on stage a production can contain, often on the extra side. She believes that the actor must make contact with objects as in actuality. Like writing a letter must be done in real time. Belief in the action and belief in the physicality of the action will make truth in the action and will lead to the truth in emotion.
In this context, Neelam spoke with passion about the workshop she did with Lisa Ray for GIta Mehta’ film Water, where Lisa was to play a widow. By making Lisa hitherto used to living in Toronto and Mumbai, live in a village in Punjab where she had to deal with cow dung, a water pump, wash clothes in the river, milking the cow exposed her to another rhythm of life and relationships. “My workshop was based on the premise that if an actor experiences, the physical world of the character she is portraying then a new set of principles can be inscribed on the body. That means changed actor material and circumstances can alter inner reality.”
Neelam’s sense of colour and shape is very sensuous. She uses inanimate objects in unusual constructs with the actor to draw hidden meaning from her performance text. Her use of water, grain, cooking mediums is also unusual. This Neelam credits to her enhanced tactile sense. She speaks of her experience in the Gurdwra and the dhobi ghats on the medical college campus in Amritsar. And one understands the huge paraats, (brass plates) Neelam uses in her productions filled with water, flowers, wheat grain. To her goes the credit of doing an entire play on cooking food: Kitchen Katha had actors cooking real food in real time as part of the play.
B. Jayashree’s informal talk was studded with practical demonstrations in her rich voice. Though this Kannada speaking actress apologised profusely for not knowing the language, her talk in Hindi was very eloquent as she spoke about her grandfather Gubbi Veeranna, his life in theatre and her role in his life.
She came to study at the NSD and found herself without any roles. Jayashree’s first appearance as the prostitute in Danton’S Death directed by E.Alkazi was, as I recall, a sterling performance and she spoke Hindi as well as she does now.
Jayashree was but four years old when she played the role of the Radha. She recalls the deep pits dug all around the performing space where the actor would miraculously disappear.’ Jayashree uses the word fantastic or “adbhut” to describe the work of the company. In Kaliya Mardhan, Krishna played by Jayashree, she describes how she would come running from the wings and plunge into water. In the next scene, a snake with a large hood is standing there and “I would come down swimming and stand victoriously on top of the hood of the Kaliya.” All this was done by an intricate pulling of straps tied to both Jayashree and the snake. “The straps were like those worn by parachute jumpers. I think it was all miraculous.”
There were three trolleys, one travelling from the left of the stage, one from the right side and one travelling down the centre. Ten men pulled these trolleys carrying actors and scenery. One would leave and another would take its place. “It was like fade in and fade out. How could an illiterate man (Gubbi) think up all these intricate methods of creating illusion is again fantastic my first speaking role was in Dhruv Darshan as young Dhruv. I had a few lines to learn. There was no written script, we just sat in the wings and learnt our lines listening to the actor whose part we were supposed to be playing next,” she said. “At rehearsal, my grandfather would explain where the stress has to be laid. For example, how many ways a word can be said I learnt from him.”
The music for which the Gubbi Veeranna Company was famous was also learnt by ear. Every actor had to sing this was a precondition of employment. Actors would be corrected for being out of tune till he became perfect; music was also used as a tool for caricaturing the British.

Before independence, the plays were all censored. A British officer would come with a translator who would brief him about the play and if there was anything subversive, it would be banned. So Gubbi Veeranna began using music to typify the villains in a play like Raven or Swaroopnakha would suddenly break off from Natya Sangeet and start singing an English tune. Jayashree’s demonstration was superb and brought the house down for its wit and her singing power. Music was also picked up by the ear like the dialogues.
The competition was healthy and there was no question of trying to pull a rival down once again we had the joy of listening to Jayashree sing the dialogue between Rama and Hanuman where Hanuman gets the applause instead of Rama. Thus proving a point about musical challenges and positive competition.
Jayashree has directed a number of plays and she has also acted in all of them. In the latest play Sadarame, which is part of her effort to restage plays from the Gubbi Veeranna Company, particularly to recreate the music, Jayashree skillfully plays the thief, Kalla, the happy go lucky fellow with a taste for wine, who has just been released from jail. B. Jayashree’s inventive genius is at display in her jugalbandi with the percussionist (table player) as she makes him match his rhythm to her dialogues.
Rajya Sabha member Jayashree is looking for land to start her institute where she can continue the work with the family tradition and its modernisation.

From kavita nagpal