From Firefly Girls staged in Auroville.
“Will songs be sung even in instances of oppression,” requested revolutionary theatre persona Bertold Brecht in the course of the darkish instances of Nazi Germany. After which, maybe, foreseeing the way forward for the world, he himself replied: “Sure, solely songs of oppression can be sung.”
The interactive bodily play Firefly Girls, staged final week at Kripa auditorium, Auroville close to Puducherry, was a voice of inventive revolt towards State repression and draconian legal guidelines below which a gaggle of pupil activists was arrested in the course of the nationwide anti-NRC motion in India.
The play additionally tried to discover the concepts of feminist Utopia towards the backdrop of letters written from jail by three girls activists — Devangana Kalita, Natasha Narwal and Gulfisha Fatima. By the way, all three occur to be college students related to ‘Pinjada Tod’, an organisation primarily based out of Delhi that seeks to make hostel and paying visitor rules much less restrictive for girls college students.
Firefly Girls is concerning the recollections of chilly winter nights at protest websites.
Concerning the central thought of the play, director Manjari Kaul defined: “We endeavour to make inroads into solidarity, collective dreaming, resilience and hope. We attempt to discover the voices of an intersectional feminist revolution that focusses on hope and braveness to combat the oppressive instances we reside in right now.
“That is how we wove within the heart-wrenching letters written in jail by the three incarcerated inmates with the same story Sultana’s Dream written by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,” Manjari added.
Firefly Girls hopes to make inroads into solidarity, collective dreaming and resilience.
These girls wrote about their recollections of chilly winter nights at protest websites, Shaheen Bagh and different spots, studying from their fellow inmates, the numbing monotony of jail life, maintaining hope alive, and the necessity to maintain the work going.
At this time, simply writing a play on the theme of those delicate letters, and touring and staging this throughout the nation is a difficult, dangerous job. And, in Auroville, there have been back-to-back performances.
Staged within the black field house with hanging electrical bulbs to make it appear like a jail cell, it was tough for the 2 performers to behave and transfer by the swinging bulbs.
A projector hooked up to a laptop computer dealt with the sound system and visible show on display screen. Although the textual content of the play was socio-politically heavy, performers Priya and Manjari engaged the viewers with their gripping actions, animated interactions with spirited songs and poems and displaying puppets and card video games.
Sound design by Neel Chaudhuri and dramaturgy by Nisha Abdulla had been revolutionary.
