Our Voice by Natya Vriksha Collective

WISCOMP (Women In Security, COnflict Management and Peace) celebrated 25 years with a multi-logue performance on women, war and peace. The presentation Our Voice was specially choreographed for this milestone by Geeta Chandran and presented by the Natya Vriksha Collective at IIC Delhi in October 2024. The concept appeared most relevant in these times, when on one hand, Russia and Ukraine are at war and on the other, Iran and Israel. The images of what innocent citizens are going through in these war-riddled areas are disturbing. The use of nukes by any one of these warring nations will tip the world towards a world war. In modern times, when one has relatives all over the world, and global citizens are more connected than ever, the very thought of war becomes a burden on the soul.

Our Voice

Geeta Chandran

Her Voice, presented 25 years back by Geeta Chandran, was a narrative of Draupadi as she laments the futility of a Kurukshetra war, though she was at the core of it. She had lost all her sons to war. Our Voice is focused on women searching for justice and agency in a world that hems them in with violence and war. The key inspiration was Lakshmi Kannan's poem 'Unquiet Waters', which I am quoting here.

'I take the shape of the receptacle that holds me
I take the contours of the earthen pitcher
tall, squat or lean
I take the form of the bottle
or the glass on the table
I even take on the colours of the utensils in which I dwell.

If you can but break the pitcher, just once
and set me free
I would flow into the stream, gurgling
I'll catch the sun in a jewelled glitter.'

Our Voice

The woman here is compared to water, wherein the two are trapped in situations which are not in their control. The water is colourless, formless. Whatever container you put it in, it will take on that shape and colour. But it does not lose its fluidity. The moment it is free to flow, it continues on its journey to the ocean. 

Our Voice

The dancers wore black or black-blue sarees with a magenta border, no jewellery and barely any make-up. Sometimes, travel in Delhi can really upset you, especially if you know you will be missing out on a performance you have been waiting for. In the first section, they depicted in a group how women fall into the trap of doing certain things and then become captive to that habit. 

Our Voice

When I entered, the dancers were braiding each other's hair. In the next piece Geeta Chandran was standing with her back to the audience, showing the water filling receptacles. The play of blue light on her created the effect of water, water that is shapeless and colourless. The shape is that of the container and the colour of the liquid is clear. With the group, Geeta depicted women shunning advances and running, hiding, scared as the animal-like men chase them. The group of dancers form a circle and capture Geeta Chandran in the middle. She desperately tries to escape but then surrenders as she is jostled around. As with the water, which though fluid, cannot escape from its vessel, so a woman, captive in desperate situations, cannot escape. She is forced shut as she surrenders.

Our Voice

The women going around their household chores tend to become like puppets. The act of the puppets was put up by Madhura Bhrushundi, Sowmya Narayanan, R. Amruthasruthi and Yadavi Shakdher Menon. The aalaap and the jatis in the background score created the aura of fear and repression. Women were shown to run amok, hide and crawl backwards to protect themselves just as flowing waters are stoppered and misused. The sound was of gurgling waters, with blue lights rotating in the silence and the darkness. The voiceover by Geeta Chandran said that the water waits for the pitcher to break to be set free to join its mother, the gurgling river. A ghatam was placed in the centre and each dancer wound a cloth around it. As they twisted the cloth, they lifted the ghatam higher and they went around in a circle with it in the centre. The ghatam has a deep relation with the rural women.

Our Voice

The sounds of war sirens were disturbing and the dancers lined up as troops. The jatis for marching were recited by dancers on stage as well as a few sitting in the audience, who suddenly arose and began reciting to join those on stage recitation. The marauding troops march on, killing innocent children and women. White sheets were used to show armies marching on. The women are defiled and killed, which was shown by the feet of dancers kicking, moving, fighting, resisting and then surrendering. 

Our Voice

The survivors collect their remaining belongings in the sheets and trudge on to find succour. The sheets were then used as shrouds for the dead, whom they mourn for. They search for their husbands, sons and brothers. The wailing women were a moving sight. To fathom the grief of these families is difficult. The cries of hungry jackals and hooting owls made the impact even greater. 

Our Voice

The dancers then draped the shrouds on their heads to show the widows and other women who have lost the men of their families. Geeta Chandran recited verses from 'Gandhari's Lament', addressing Krishna as the lotus-eyed one. In the entire episode of the Mahabharata, Gandhari was the one who lost all the members of her family, except for her blind husband. After losing 100 sons to war, she knew there was nothing more devastating for humans than war.

Our Voice

Geeta Chandran depicted lifting the shrouds of the dead and recognizing her folks. The poetry says: the daughters of my house, widowed of their lords, brooding over the dead bodies of their lords, their locks unbound, brooding over their dead bodies. Here lie the ornaments and armour of the heroes. Mothers without their sons, and women without their husbands.

Our Voice

The next sound was that of school bells chiming, children playing in school. A child recited a poem. Geeta Chandran wiped her tears and moved with a smile to welcome a child waiting for her mother. The child is fed and put to sleep. In nritta, the water is shown flowing with the sounds of the waves. 

Our Voice

Blocks of red and orange colour were stacked to make a structure with a hollow centre. The pot of clay was dropped into it, where it broke into pieces. The water that is freed, flows out to join its mother, the river, to flow into the ocean. The birds soar into the sky. The nritta that they performed together had rhythmic footwork, which was forceful, and hastas expansive. The notes of freedom were ringing, hope being the thaap of their feet.

Our Voice

The production was very effective, the message loud and clear that war impacts children and women the most. And today, in these times, when man claims to have become totally civilized, wars still continue. It will take a nuke to start the next world war. Only a dancer like Geeta Chandran could have done and interpreted the research that has gone into this production. The Natya Vriksha Collective presented her choreography very effectively. They worked within their Bharatanatyam vocabulary and expressions to give a message that was larger than life. 

Our Voice

Costuming, props and very effective lighting made the theme of water a visual treat. The use of jatis and bols as background score and the sound effects were very impactful. And of course, the dancers and their guru were flawless. They left a mark on the minds of the audience. A very interesting observation by Rajiv Mehrotra in the audience after the performance was that women as water also have the ability to rise as steam, form clouds and rain back as pure water. Many eminent artists and art enthusiasts gave their opinion on the performance in a session after the presentation.

After the event, I spoke to Geeta Chandran about the production. And this is what she had to say:

‘Her Voice’ used puppets and was about Draupadi who, at the end of the war, says ‘let go, let go’ – that war is not the answer to anything, it’s only brought loss to me, I’ve gained nothing from this revenge. She has seen the cost of the war.

With ‘Our Voice’, water is the metaphor throughout. I start with a piece introducing the qualities of water – how it can be Chanchal (lively/naughty), ferocious, very gentle, navigate crevices. This abstract piece in the beginning was about the qualities of water and how similar it is to women, who have all these qualities and more. 

Then I move to these mundane activities of grinding, pounding, bringing water from long distances (that women perform). After the abstract section on the fluidity of water, the second piece showed how women are burdened by these activities, how they start doing them with great enthusiasm but later, they become a drag on them. These are the stereotypical roles that have been played down the centuries, throughout history. We’ve seen our mothers and grandmothers and their mothers being told that – just the way the braid is braided and you’re supposed to do it a certain way and that is the convention – you just follow. The braiding was a symbol for many things – for handholding, camaraderie, for defining tradition and also for not being able to defy it. But the flow goes on in a stereotypical way. 

After that, I did Lakshmi Kannan’s poem “Unquiet Waters”, which is basically about how this particular flow of water is curtailed and put into containers of various kinds. It is stoppered and the flow is not there anymore, you are just bottled and caged – the spirit of women is caged in a similar way. And then we move on to show that whole thing of patriarchy, of fear, being like a puppet in the hands of men, being trapped in a situation, being marginalized, not being able to speak, being asked to shut up, being tossed around, domestic violence – a 15-20 minute section on the trapped spirit of women.

 
Then the poem goes on to breaking the pitcher, what happens when the pitcher is broken and the water is allowed to flow, how it finds crevices and how the water then flows over streams, gurgling, unbound… That’s when the vessel is lifted, but just as they are doing that, there is a war – and the war is for water.
The next millennium is going to be all about water wars. I brought that in – how water becomes the contention, where the war is about water, what war does to women and to everybody else – the disaster, the catastrophe, the loss, the dehumanization, the migration, losing your space, your identity. 

I was told that there is a village where WISCOMP works where there are only widows, there are no men; they have lost everybody either to war or to military brutality. That stuck in my mind and I did a whole section on women who are widowed. I took it to “Gandhari’s Lament”, in which Gandhari laments about her whole house being just women – what are we fighting the war for? Whom are we going to rule over?
We move on – wallowing in your misery doesn’t help, because there are children. You need to be there for them. Life doesn’t stop; children must be tended to and looked after. After the children’s section, the narrative carries on about building hope, consolidation, holding hands, creating a new structure all over again, rebuilding. In this, women show camaraderie and are there for each other. We showed that rebuilding through a small structure made out of blocks, and then the final breaking of the pot which marks the freedom of women from a lot of things, how happiness prevails, and then hope and the solidarity of women – they stand for each other, and it ends on a happy note.

We had to create a storyline; there was no story. Last time we had Draupadi, but this time we created this entire thing from zero. We had to write multiple scripts. It helped to have water as a metaphor because we could carry that through the production, so that we have some poetic way of saying what we had to say.’

The use of props

 
‘In the props, we used the shroud first to show marching armies, then migration, carrying loads, dead bodies, the wait and the sorrow, and then the white sari for widows. The blocks also depicted multiple things, because when this production came up, we wanted to do it differently, we didn’t want to do it (using traditional Bharatanatyam only). Anyway, the subject is not something Bharatanatyam would lend itself completely to. I wanted an abstract scape that would give us the scope to negotiate the nuances of war and women. So we needed different kinds of things. We used bowls for many things. We didn’t use much poetry except for the two English poems.’

Based on research, very real

 
‘For such productions, you need to read a lot and I read six books on women and war written by political science professors from Lady Shri Ram College (Delhi, Geeta Chandran’s alma mater and the college of which WISCOMP’s founder-director Meenakshi Gopinath was the principal for many years). It’s very hard to create a narrative from nothing. If you have a character, it’s easier to say what you want, but here there was no narrative, so it was a very big challenge. And it had to be serious – it had to have merit as a proscenium act. It was a tough thing to envisage and it took a lot (out of us). We couldn’t do two rehearsals back to back because emotionally, it would drain us so much. It would disturb us so much that it would exhaust us. It required a lot of energy and emotional strength. You enact something, and then you imagine what the person would have gone through – it just is mind-boggling, it leaves you numb. You can’t be removed from the production and do it just as a work.

For our dancers too, it was a great process of learning to imagine what would have happed to a girl who was raped or a girl put in a spot or asked not to speak. These (the dancers) are all girls coming from fairly liberated homes. We rewrote the script many times, added personal experiences and anecdotes, brought in a lot of the Natya Vriksha students to read it, give feedback – it was a democratic process through which we created this script. It will always be a work in progress – we will add things as we go along, delete things; we’ve kept the production such that it can always evolve.’

Our Voice

The dancers of the Natya Vriksha Collective performing were R. Amritha Shruthi, Sowmya Lakshmi Narayan, Madhura Bhrushundi, Mehak Chawla, Anindita Narayanan, Yadavi Shakdher Menon, Shubhashree Roy, Arundhati R. Panikar and Kamalini Mukherjee. The child's voice was recorded by Arshiya. The soundscape was by Prateek Biswas and lights by Tamizh Arasi.

Pics: Natya Vriksha Collective

Note: This article first appeared in Narthaki.com