Friday, Dec 5, 2003  

LEE ALISON SIBLEY (USA)   
(Music / Solo)  

NISSAR ALLANA (New Delhi)   
“The Mahabharat Project”  
(Theatre / Group) 
  

Tagoreopera & JuxtaposeKarna     by Ranjith Bhaskar     Photos: Lalitha Venkat     December 6, 2003  Rabindranath Tagore is a dead poet.   That fact gives certain people a certain freedom to explore and destroy his work through the process of ‘discovering’ and ‘attempting’. I witnessed one such murder last evening. The ‘attempt’ this time was by an American woman who sang the songs of Tagore in Bengali; and, not satisfied with that ‘achievement’, sang a couple in English, based on her own child-like translation.
It is quite possible that Lee Sibley’s Rabindra Sangeet recital ranks highly among the worst performances seen at The Other Festival in all its 6 years. Her performance, in collaboration with US Public Affairs, was devoid of any substance or saving grace. She sat on a high stool, her hair golden in the backlit halo, smiled at the cameras, and generally behaved like a sugary diva.  From the handout: (Lee Alison Sibley has master’s degrees in education, music and acting. She has performed popular music, folk music with guitar and classical music in Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Nepal, United States, Jordan and now in India. She has given television and radio performances, has represented USA in concert tours around the world, has played lead roles in “Pippin”, “Three Penny Opera”, “Jack and the Beanstalk”, “Lend me a Tenor” and has directed several operas. She has been a teacher of voice and acting. She speaks Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Russian, Indonesian, Arabic and Nepali besides English. She is also a calligraphy expert, a cooking teacher and a trek leader.)  Isn’t that an impressive bio?   Isn’t checking out an unknown factor a pre-scheduling prerequisite? The organisers slipped up there, I suppose.  As a performer, Lee Sibley was shallow. She’s a passably good singer with a decent voice, but completely out of place in this genre. She looked, spoke and behaved like a 50s Nashville songstress caught in a time warp. The high key vocals were lilting enough, but sounded just that little bit hollow. The operatic vocal inflections and scale modulations, by themselves, were fine; but was an unneccesary touch to the rich and melodious form intrinsic to Rabindra Sangeet. In fact, this destroyed the performance altogether.  As far as experiments and fusions go, this ridiculous mix of Rabindra Sangeet and opera-style verbal delivery, could be termed, in the best traditions of failed-experiment-terminology, as a dud. A few other words that mean almost the same are: washout, turkey, misfire and flop.  It says in the handout that she has been singing Tagore songs at festivals and major venues in the last few years. Quite determined, I must say.  Lee Sibley is the wife of the US Consul General in Kolkata.

  

  

The second half of the double bill, the one that everyone was waiting for (especially after the previous fiasco), turned the evening around. Nissar Allana’s ‘The Mahabharata Project’, presented by Delhi-based Dramatic Art and Design Academy, was, by stages, intriguing, tense, soaring, and disarmingly soft.  From the handout: (‘The Mahabharata Project’ was specially conceived for the Prague Quadrennial PQO3 section “Design as Performance”.  The performance is based on sequences and texts from the Mahabharata of Vyasa, and Shivaji Samant’s Mrityunjaya that locates the character of Karna as the central protagonist and tells the story of the war from his perspective. The production situates Karna in an extended moment of memory. Before he can die he must witness and re-enact his own story. All action is located in Karna’s memory, desire, psyche…)
Karna, interestingly, was played simultaneously by 3 actors who portay the angry, sad, misunderstood warrior. Karna’s qualities of valour, loyalty and kindness were expressed through exaggerated mime and charged vocals. Karna is faced with an identity crisis. He wants to acknowledge his Pandava brothers, yet he is reluctant to do so as a result of his unflinching loyalty to Duryodhana, his friend. Through Karna’s memory, we see episodes from the Mahabharata, even as they are played out in his dying mind.  Allana’s treatment of the concept is what differentiates this production. In his own words, he “built up the production through a fragmentation of expressive elements”.   He designed lighting in such a way that the light beams accentuated the body in parts, lending a dramatic quality to the performance.   From the handout: (The language of performance is seen as non-linear expression and goes beyond the conventional text into an exploration of body language, image and sound. The thematic context is built up through a fragmentation of expressive elements, which intrinsically possess dramatic characteristics. These are juxtaposed in relation to one another to create the overall dramatic structure. Theatrical elements from a range of Indian theatre traditions like martial arts and folk theatre have been used in a contemporary idiom of performance.)  Rashid Ansari’s choreography was innovative, strong and balanced, and, with his serenely wild countenance, his didgeridoo, rain stick and his katana, lent a latent, quiet menace to the proceedings on stage. Of the three Karnas, Manish Chaudhari was by far the best and the most expressive. The sound, designed by Kabir Singh, was built up around the didgeridoo and provided a sinister, dark soundscape that suited the concept. The piece was directed by Zuleikha Chaudhari.  Nissar told me backstage that they originally use Profile lights for the narrow, strong-beam effect. Here, due to non-availability of these lights in large number, they had to rig up cardboard and tinfoil to replicate a similar, softer effect.   The only sour note, was the tendency, on the part of Nissar and Zuleikha, to explain the production in slightly confusing use of language. Gobbledygook, in parts. This is quite evident in the production handouts. Arty? Highbrow hype?  But I won’t let that come in the way of genuine appreciation. Because in its entirety, it was a fine and impressive production – by all definitions. Nissar certainly hit a winner here in Chennai.     Ranjith Bhaskar lives and works in Chennai and can be reached at ranjithbhaskar@yahoo.co.uk     LEE SIBLEY (USA), Solo Music    A US Public Affairs Collaboration   Photographs About Lee Sibley   NISSAR ALLANA (New Delhi)   “The Mahabharat Project,” Theatre   Photographs About the Project