Hayavadana

Hannah Baird, Will Leach & Laura Jane Watling in  Hayavadana.  Photo: Natasha K. Stone

For the last few weeks, I've been working at East 15 Acting School (not in East 15 these days, but Southend, of all places).  They have a fantastic BA course in World Performance, which moves away from the Stanislavski-based conventions of drama schools, to take in a much broader range of forms and styles, with a particular emphasis on Asian theatre.  In previous years, Kristine Landon-Smith, David Tse and Janet Steele have been among the directors asked to direct the final-year shows - so I was very honoured to be approached this time.  As much as anything, it's a wonderful space for me to experiment with texts and styles that interest me for the company.  Girish Karnad's Hayavadana is a play that has fascinated me for some time, so it was wonderful to work on it with such an enthusiastic and appropriately trained group of people.

Here's what I wrote about it for the programme:

Hayavadana: the Hybrid Horse

“Mixture is how newness comes into the world”

(Salman Rushdie)

It’s self-evident that Hayavadana is a play about hybridity: a man has a horse’s head; friends find themselves sharing bodies, heads and a wife; the elephant-headed god presides.  What is perhaps less immediately obvious is that the play is itself a hybrid.  The main plot gives the appearance of being an Indian folk tale, but is in fact a European story, written in 1957 by Thomas Mann, The Transposed Heads.  The sub-plot of Hayavadana himself is Shakespearean: there’s a clear nod to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the man with an equine head; and Girish Karnad has acknowledged that the idea of a second plot “to tell the same story twice” was directly inspired by Shakespearean models.

The hybridity of the play lies in the fact that these European models are presented through a form derived from the Indian folk theatre, and particularly the Yakshagana of Girish’s native Karnathaka – a form filled with dance, music, narration, ornate costumes and make-up.  The play makes a case for the Indianess of Indian theatre – as Girish put it in a (hitherto unpublished) interview with me: “I felt it had to be held out as an agenda, as a manifesto, to say ‘I’m now going back to folk theatre’ and using folk theatre conventions to show that one could do something sensitive, intelligent, acceptable to an educated, intelligent audience in terms of that form.”  The play touched a nerve when it was first seen in 1971: India was slowly finding her feet after the process of decolonization, and there was a need simultaneously to relate Indian culture to the influences of an ever more internationally connected way of being, and to reassert the value of traditional forms that had been dismissed as primitive or shallow under colonialism.

Hayavadana’s hybridity finds a way of addressing a contemporary Indian audience that straddles the colliding worlds of the post-colonial.  Bringing it to Britain is an experiment in doing the same thing.  For us, this production has been about addressing the hybrid, intercultural nature of our own contemporary condition; embracing the complexity of a society shaped by multiple cultural influences; looking at what the encounter between Europe and Asia can say to our own post-colonial space; exploring how a quest for completeness can reflect our own national conversation.  We have done this against a background of scaremongering about immigration, and electoral gains for the radical right both in Britain and across Europe.  This is theatre that feels very immediate, very pertinent, very necessary.

And so it has been a deep joy for me to work with students from East 15’s World Performance course – because these young actors are capable of making the theatre our society needs.  It is not going to be enough for the actor of tomorrow to deliver naturalistic western text and psychological realism: indeed, I would say that to restrict our theatre to these approaches would be a betrayal of the international audience we now address that amounts to cultural imperialism.  The actor of tomorrow needs to embrace the glories of non-Western forms – Yakshagana, Jingju, Bunraku, Bharatanatyam – and to generate new energies through their collision with our own, more textual traditions.  These young actors are eager to learn from the Other – and in so doing, they show us the potential of tomorrow’s theatre to bring people together and regenerate our divided world.

Arrival in China

A very exciting time for the company. After many, many months of planning, we are gathering in Shanghai to start work Re-Orientations, the third, and most ambitious, part of The Orientations Trilogy. I arrived yesterday, and have spent most of today working with actors from the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, looking for the last few people to complete the devising company. It's quite a complex job: I'd forgotten just how difficult it is to work through a translator. Metaphor and energy - the stock-in-trade of direction, become diffuse and elusive. Many of the Chinese actors I saw today were very young: I wondered whether they really had the level of experience needed to devise. Towards the end of the day, a more mature, very intelligent and very charming lady came in to the room. She has performed in lots of modern work, including Pinter's The Lover, which is the right sort of territory, but I think she may have been scared by the idea of devising, and definitely (no surprise here) by the idea of playing somebody in a lesbian relationship. The central tension of this whole project has always been and will always be that these Asian cultures, that are so rich in their responses to the complexity of human sexuality, are also the ones which are most prudish today. Still - this is the theatre where Nick Yu planned to stage Angels in America, so we can't be on completely impossible ground!

Today, the rest of the company assembled from around the world! Nancy, Tony and Tori - all old hands from Dis-Orientations - arrived from England, along with Sarah Swingler, who is new to the project. Radhakrishna, who started all of this with me in 2003 (!) on Orientations arrives from Bangalore, and Mahesh Dattani, my mentor and guru in Asia and gender and author of Bravely Fought the Queen, from Mumbai. Mia and Mikhael are here from Teater Eksem in Gothenborg, and so are Denise and Micha from a fleur de peau in Paris. We all go out to dinner in the restaurant next to the Yue Opera, where Ruihong took me a year or so ago. Sadly, Ruihong has been in hospital, and so is not well enough to join us. I'm hoping I can get in touch with her soon, and see if she might be able to come in and work with us a bit. It did feel very much as if she was our missing centre tonight. But still - what an incredible group of people to have gathered around the Border Crossings table.

And, I have to say, Penny Mayes has done an incredible job of organising this!

The Audience is Different

I had coffee at the National Gallery with Yvette Vaughan-Jones from Visiting Arts. Before this organisation was re-structured, they had funded us a couple of times in the past; but now the Arts Council has clawed back the grants they used to offer into its own remit. Yvette, as a result, is changing what Visiting Arts is all about, and making its remit more specific. Some of this is to do with training and the facilitation of exchange on a managerial level (a bit like the British Council’s Connections Through Culture Programme), and some of it is much closer to a form of commissioning. I was very intrigued by her ideas for a web-based project around mapping, which would deal with small localities and yet be global.

We talked a lot about the specificity of performance: the fact that it exists only in the particular time and place. To Yvette’s mind, this is how performance can and should justify its existence in the 21^st century (because it’s doing something at a community level which film and TV can never do), but also suggests that some of the old structures won’t work any more – indeed, that they are “colonial”. And she challenges me about the idea of touring The Orientations Trilogy.

This has been much on my mind recently: partly because it looks as if it will happen in Shanghai this autumn, and partly because I’m also marking lots of essays about different audience responses to various pieces of work, including Bravely Fought the Queen and Robert’s Seven Streams of the River Ota. In each case, the students quite rightly point out how the same show can mean totally different things to different audiences: how a play about westernised Indians is a different play when presented in Leicester, London or Mumbai; how a Quebecois response to Japan is very different in Japan, and London, and Montreal.

The more I think about it, the more I think that the Trilogy has to remain fluid, and shift according to where we are. Thinking about Dis-Orientations, the most obvious point is Song’s narration in the second half. In China, it would seem right to let Song speak for herself, in Chinese, as the main narrative voice. She does not require the translation / mediation which we used in London. And maybe the comic scene about language learning should not be about a Chinese person learning English, but an English person learning Chinese. Maybe it should be Alex, not Song, who is the victim of the oldest joke in the book……

I phone Radhakrishna to check whether he’s up for the workshop this autumn. “I am in my village” he says. In the background, I can hear the bells and the tabla of a Yakshagana performance, in its traditional context. Now, how on earth will that read in Shanghai?