MADHUVE
HENNU
(the
bride)
An eco-theatrical production in Kannada
performed by Holeranga
Design
and Direction : Chandradasan
Text:
H.S.Shivaprakash
poetry: Bidirahalli Narasimha Moorthy
Art Direction: Sudheer Babu
Duration of the play: 105 mts.
A Play in Kannada in association
with Department of Kannada and Culture, Bangalore. Play Wright by Dr.H.S.Shivaprakash,
designed and directed by Chandradasan; performed by Holeranga, Honnali,
Karnataka.
About
Holeranga
Situated on Bank of Tungabhadra river, Diddibagalu should mute with
the changing time until Honnali Holeranga, an amateur troupe associated
themselves with this historical monument to develop it an eco theatre,
first of its kind in Karnataka.
Director's note
This play deals with the elemental nature of passion ambitions, pride,
hatred, love and other opposites that make the human life, a tragedy.
The play discusses many lives lived by men, animals and even trees and
grass.It is a reflection of birth and rebirth concepts of Buddhist doctrine.
Life is set to be the coming back from the other shore and it returns.
The playwright depicts human drama in a subtle, philosophical, renderings
that tough sublimes poetry with metaphors and images. The moonlit river
in the forest in which the central character samani reaches, chased
by beer is in itself a dreamy space metaphysical in characteristics,
a maya.
The story narrated to samani by the spirit of the bride-groom that wanders
the rivers washing off blood from his hands reveals to her own stories
from the past life and also dilemmas in the present. Samani identifies
herself as someone who loved to travel to and for the shore of worldly
pleasure of love, life and the shore of redemption and enlightenment.
Samani understands that she has many lives in the single life. And it
is the moonlight that diffuses the paradoxes to a dreamy and solvated
unity. In the ultimate pursuit to marry his beloved at all cost, the
bridegroom kills the bride and takes her skull to be given as the Vadhudakshina
(a bride price), so that he can marry her. Later the killed one has
to give redeem to the killer. The paradoxes of human existence where
the hunter hunts the quarry, and the quarry hunts the hunter or both
the hunter and the quarry are absent to leave the hunt as the basic
truth, is told through the many metanarratives.
The performance space at Holeranga on the bank of Tungabhadra, with
ruins of a fort, a leafless tree, thorny bushes, the tiny temple and
the slopes of grass running to the river with a moonlight sky above,
serves the ideal stage for this saga of sublime and poetic tragedy.
The production thrives on the elemental and minimalist usage of dramatic
tools even though is spectacular in a way. The culture, music, nature
and other rustic life realities of Honnali are infused to form the structure
and tone for the play. Human energy and basic acting potential of the
local people, mostly tribes were preferred over technical extravaganza.
The space design was flexible and informal so that the audience, coming
to witness the play, may feel within it and is part of the story retold.
This is further invoked by their participation in the final act of offering
lamps to the mother Tungabhadra. The dreams, lives, stories of the characters,
participants and spectators seem be intertwined. This is a play of opposites
that gives the experience of transcendence of space, time and life,
as in a dream within a dream.
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