Maraa in collaboration with Anish Victor threw open an intimate poetic evening, “Come Unreserved” at Jamun last Friday to mark the launch of a crowd funding campaign for their project “UR/Unreserved”. The project involves a group of performer-facilitators who would be traversing the length and breadth of the country in trains for over 30 days in August sharing and collecting stories of people from different geographies and cultures. The evening, however, was a call to take a dip in the experience of this upcoming performative journey. Creatively curated and gently facilitated, the performers-facilitators guide the audience into a collective participatory process by using songs, personal stories, movement and poetry.
By connecting the audience members to each other and to the performers, “Come Unreserved” subverts the dominant idea of performance as a staged event. It gives us a completely new perspective by drawing our attention to the journey one makes in arriving at a performance. It prompts us to ask ourselves, what if performances were about sharing processes rather showing end products? As one goes through the evening, one might find a curious letter close-by beckoning to be picked up and read or a performer who might just make the audience close their eyes and take them through an imaginary trip to a railway station, or the performer might be a part of the audience who surprisingly breaks into a folk song. Hence it is not a performance that one just watches or hears but a performance that can be experienced by becoming a part of it. Much like how the audience comes into the space as strangers and leaves the space with a sense of familiarity, during the train journey the train would become the travelling stage and the travellers on board would become the performers and participants.
The historic mass migration of the North East Indians from Bangalore in 2012 is a point of trigger for this project. As people we travel, migrate from place to place for different reasons but by engaging the audience in the theatrical journey, “Come Unreserved” explored how often these instances of travel are deeply rooted in the individual and the collective sense of identity.
While people travel, their stories of loss and conflict remain unvoiced and unheard. Therefore, UR/Unreserved is an attempt to dig out these stories, not to voice it on behalf of others but to be observant of how listening to the stories shifts oneself. One of the performers for the evening, Parmita Mukherjee, shared the story of Punyakoti, where the cow who is a caught as a prey pleads the tiger to let go of her for that day because her calves would be waiting to be fed. She promises to return once she feeds her calves. Keeping her promise, when she returns to the tiger, the tiger refuses to kill her in disbelief. When we look by at the story, we often tend to discuss the innocence of the cow but we overlook the transformation the tiger goes through. This project is about paying attention to that transformation within oneself, to recognize the power of listening to the other’s story.
The future plan is to act on these shifts as artists, build performances based on these encounters and share them in public spaces.
In times where there is a mounting pressure to conform to singular narrative of the collective past, this theatre based project becomes very relevant and is a much needed attempt.