Raising one’s voice is an act often considered synonymous with marking one’s protest at something. But when Y. Sadananda Singh wants to protest, he goes silent.
Like that time when he wanted to protest against the implementation of the draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act in his native Manipur, and the civilian deaths due to that, he channelled all his anger and sorrow into a mime - ‘Mirel Masingkha – The Will of Soul’.
It was his way of remembering the innocent lives that were lost and paying tributes to the likes of Irom Sharmila, who dedicated all their lives to fight for the cause of the victims.
“In Manipur, most of us are against the AFSPA. I had wanted to fight against it in my own way. ‘Agony’ is another mime of his based on the Ramayana story of Dasaratha who shot down an innocent youth, mistaking him to be an animal out to drink water from the stream, after listening to just the sound. With the AFSPA, they are shooting down our people without even seeing us. We have not yet faced any action from the government, although we have performed even in the heart of Delhi. Probably, the government thinks it is not very harmful because it is entertaining,” says Dr. Singh.
Back in his childhood days, he was fascinated by the traditional art forms of his State. He used to study Manipuri folk dance under a Guru in the 1970s. “It was from our guru that I first saw mime movements. He used to show us mime techniques of walking and climbing, which I was attracted to. Later, in the early 1980s, Niranjan Goswami organised a workshop in Imphal, from where my interest in miming grew. Over the past two decades, our Kanglei Mime Theatre Repertory has performed at most of the national mime festivals and international venues including in Greece, Macedonia, South Korea and Armenia,” he says.
At the ongoing first edition of the National Mime Festival organised by the Bharat Bhavan in the city, his group performed the mime ‘No budget’ to highlight the lack of funding for creative artistes.
“In our State, the government would gift lakhs of rupees to a sportsperson who wins a medal. But when a creative artiste wins an award at an international arena, there is no such acknowledgement. In the past two years, we have also not received the salary grant from the government. I provide funds to my artistes from the interest amount of my fixed deposit and from the meagre performance fees,” says Dr. Singh.