Presented by The Lost Post Initiative & the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan
''i am not here'', directed by Bangalore-based writer and theatre practitioner
Deepika Arwind, premiered at the Ranga Shankara Festival 2018.
With this piece, Deepika continues an experiment she began with her last work
No Rest in the Kingdom about gender and performance and the intersection of the two in the female performer’s body. The development of the script and the production was greatly facilitated by the German dramaturge
Theresa Schlesinger.
i am not here is designed as an 8-step guide in how to censor women’s writing.
In parts dark, funny and brutal, the dance-theatre production looks at the subtle, almost-invisible and insidious ways in which women’s writing has often been flicked to the fringes. Women sit uncomfortably just out of the history of literature, while their male counterparts are accorded the status of geniuses, rebels and folk-heroes.
i am not here plays out in a boxing ring. Two women performers (Ronita Mookerji and Sharanya Ramprakash) enter the boxing ring, and present this guide for you; they are affected by their own performance on stage, often at unease with what they must to do to ‘show’ you this guide.
Their bodies constantly transform: they play men, women and creatures.
A frying pan becomes a metaphor for a chalkboard on which they write and dance their way to 'freedom'; a traditional dance class reveals the impossible ways in which women's bodies are written about, a chick-lit writer reads a review about herself in public …
Photo: Priyanshi Vasani © The Lost Post Initiative
Abundant with movement and haunting music (by Pallavi MD and Nikhil Nagraj), the play i am not here seeks new form, and heightens and complicates an important relationship in the theatre: the one between the audience and performer.
With Virginia Woolf’s Shakespeare’s Sister (from A Room of One’s Own) and Joana Russ’ How to Suppress Women’s Writing, on whose shoulders the play stands.
Credits:
Director: Deepika Arwind
Devised and Performed by: Ronita Mookerji and Sharanya Ramprakash
Vocals: Pallavi MD
Dramaturge: Theresa Schlesinger
Sound Design: Nikhil Nagaraj
Light Design: Pritham Kumar
Set: J Dinesh
Producer: Veena Appiah
Production Assistant: Akash Narendran
Poster: Afrah Shafiq
Rehearsal Photography: Priyanshi Vasani
Space Support: Shoonya Centre for Art and Somatic Practices
i am not here is supported by the
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan.
*Friday at 7.30 p.m. & Saturday at 3.30 p.m. & 7.30 p.m.*
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