Manipuri theatre : A true calling

Usham Rojio *

"A True Calling" - Chongtham Jayanta :: Pix Courtesy - nsdtheatrefest.com

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - Oscar Wilde

An attempt to answer one riddle, we first have to unfold many others. In this case, the riddling starts with me, as an audience of the theatre festival watching the plays last month at 15th Bharat Rang Mahotsav, National School of Drama, New Delhi, particularly the Manipuri plays that were performed in the festival. The festival witnessed three plays from Manipur – 9 Days Newspaper by Joy Meisnam, Eigi Khongthang Lepkhiroi by Dr. S. Thaninleima and A Far Cry by Deepak Ningthouja.

Deepak Ningthouja's A Far Cry is one play better than the other two. But the music was too loud and the script was not telling. The other two plays were too loud. Confusion of forms, political incorrectness and sheer pride, insularity of thoughts and lack of professionalism were some of the features that many of us witnessed. It doesn't necessarily mean that Manipuri artistes are not talented but a good leader with certain sensibilities is necessary to streamline ideas and bring out a telling production.

9 Days Newspaper was marked by political incorrectness, an ethnic centric and communal in tone whereas Eigi Khongthang Lepkhiroi was marked by "appeasement" strategy to her gurus in NSD like our Ministers do to the Centre and so somewhere the voice get lost. Such plays unfold many riddles and the politics involved in the theatre fraternity. Theatre has become a mere spectacular exercises and extravaganza fattening themselves on corporate bounty and so it has caught up in the snarl of contradictions conforming only to the need of the state politics and corporate demands.

Many were not happy to witness the quality of Manipuri theatre deteriorating both in terms of form and content in 15th Bharat Rang Mahotsav festival. The directors displayed no senses of music with their loud, explicit and off-tune music. Today, it is true that the actors lack training and practice and it is hard to find actors for theatre as Heisnam Kanhailal mentioned in one of the discussion in one DDK Imphal programme with L. Kishworjit sometime in November last year. But it is not only actors but it is also hard to find good and committed young playwrights and directors with "required sensibilities" today.

Having said this, the problem is the politics behind the selection of such plays for the festival. As far as my knowledge is concerned, there must to be a local representative in selecting the play. Is it that these plays are the best or is there a favouritism involved in selecting the plays as one can see the NSD alumni got into the festival whether their plays make senses or not.

But a Taiwan based Manipuri Director and actor, Chongtham Jayanta, also an NSD alumnus brought a play worth watching. The play "A True Calling" (in Manipuri and Chinese) is based on a story of the same name by Indian author Vijay Dan Detha, inspired by a Rajasthani folktale. The Hindi title "Rijak ki Maryada," after an oral version that by tradition has no formal title.

The simple yet riveting story about a professional bhand [A clownish character who does impersonations and other antics for a living, one of that rare breed that devotes themselves to impersonations] who is so realistic in the guise of a dayan (witch) that the king who, in spite of being forewarned about the consequences, challenges him to don the guise, and runs for his life while a drunken brother-in-law is killed by the witch. The king, in order to eliminate him, finally asks the bhand to take the guise of sati or (in the play) a woman who immolates herself. But Jayanta has not use the word "sati" in his play, may be because in Meitei and Chinese there are no tradition of Sati.

Chongtham Jayanta's story telling through performance stands at a juncture where the ever-dynamic collective consciousness preserved in oral cultures of folktales is represented through the privileged retelling by performance skill and where the sheer choice of medium tends to freeze the inherent fluidity and flexibility of the tale. As Detha's story are inimitable insofar as they epitomize the confluence of the age-old oral world of folklore and the relatively modern genre of short story in which the interiority is as much a concern as the world of action; in which there is no moral compulsion of privileging good over evil; and most important, which is meant for readers, not listeners, Jayanta transmute it for listeners and viewers. Jayanta's success in bridging the two and metamorphosing in the ingeniously perceptive form, like a true storyteller who always meddles with these "travelling metaphors" and ingrain new meanings in them to appeal to his audiences. Jayanta also revamps them with contemporary themes to appeal to the modern mind.

Without compromising their archetypal motifs, psychic underpinnings, and context-sensitive performativity, Jayanta metamorphoses them into captivating stories, which have a spellbinding impact on the minds of the modern audiences. Mighty kings, rich business-men and feudal lords turn out to be cowards and ordinary bhand wise. In this theatrical ambience of wisdom, where worldly ways are ridiculed and human frailties and strengths are carefully delineated, Jayanta injected his own ideological preferences for social justice. Notwithstanding their apparent simplicity, the play unfolds the complexities of human life in its myriad forms. The stagecraft itself was suggestive of the complexities of human life existence. As Jayanta puts in a simple language yet loaded with existential philosophy, "the cage-like setting in the play is because we the human beings seem to be trapped in the cage but there may be ways to escape. The ladders are the symbols for that but no one use these ladders."

The performance was embedded with a vast array of cultural codes, aspirations, and ethical preferences of Meitei and Chinese. Without any string of cultural authorship attached, they also represent a panorama of human aspirations and desires as well as anger and resistance against prevalent norms. The staging of a written text inevitably involves a process of individualization and privileging of certain perspectives, however Jayanta has been able to catch the nerves of audiences through his performance.

Staging a text is part of the pedigree of re-telling not of an original but in the sense of having no precedents. The actor's voice, visual or aural space and the actor's body on stage become loci of the re-interpretation and explode into a new expression in the sensory perception of the spectators. It also becomes continuous and synchronous with real life events as they are lived out on the stage. Such journeys towards new synchronicities happen across genres, periods and cultures. We need to think of the performance text as yet one more performance of a story in a tradition necessarily various and multiple: each version a creative "telling in turn."

Ingeniously, Jayanta make the story alive and well, and has able to create a new set of criteria whose goal isn't so much to assess ownership as liveliness, eloquence, even emotional, political, or moral relevance. He became the author of the performance text itself, but he is not the exclusive writer just as he is not the sole creator of the performance.

Chongtham Jayanta certainly deserves adulation for his professionalism and his engagement with the dynamics as a director and also as an actor, passing on the verbally transmitted, travelling tales to us by translating them into the equally forceful and dynamic performative story where the performativity and narrative voice retains the flexibility of the oral storytellers; where the spectators are continuously prodded to partake of the wisdom carried in the story, or to face the same dilemma of choices that the characters are faced with; where the currency of hope always wins over the occasional disruption of the absurd; and where the seething psychoanalytic penetration into the established discourses results in an astute diagnosis of culture and society. Chongtham Jayanta's professionalism and quality of theatre is a true calling for young contemporary Manipuri Theatre practitioners and artistes.