iLOGY – just a shack along your way

iLOGY – just a shack along your way

by Sudipto Dawn

A few of us, and in naming i would be excluding, as so many people, events, accidents which have been with us and influenced our approach & thoughts. But for practical purposes, we pursued theatre of a kind which constantly wanted to break the shackles of being and always become. There was no way that any existing praxis of theatre or telling a story can fit in exactly in our lives, and there is no way that we would be able to fit into their requirements and ideology. In the process of creative evolution iLOGY praxis can then be only a reflective medium. We are an experience on which one can reflect, we would not want to be the destination nor a container. Just a shack maybe in your long journey where we catch up for a few sessions of adda and share a bit of what we know and experienced.

Love & Delight (Shringara) is the primary rasa which draws us like fireflies into the immense suffering at times, only with the hope that we will recover that feeling – a whole bunch of industry has grown out of this, wars have been fought – and perhaps the hopelessness of all this leads one to seek for the blissful state (shanti rasa). Who knows? However it is true that none of this has helped averting in erasures and alteration through colonization – the biggest victim of which has been the ecology & culture both of which has been flattened – and the bir (heroic) rasa has only contributed toward it bibhasa (disgusting) destruction and the consequences are bhayanaka ( terrible). Order is for the armies of destruction, for poets, our kind of storytellers and lovers – it is the wilderness and the unknown, more of the edges, corners, masks, nothingness and beyond.

Ways to witness memory, see how it has been mediated, how the body reacts – as if like that animal we are taught we are – fight or flight, that we are evolving from apes – that still some of haven’t quite made the mark – yet. Well what is an autonomous body mind? Unlearning and remediating memory – we thought why not while we put on a different track – maybe this time of rasas & (other such things which we can find in the ancient past or in our immediate vicinity which tatses nice). Dive in with a bit of this and see what happens, what are we seeking and what do we sense now? Looking back with some Karuna (kindness) perhaps like that of Shakuntala (too much to ask in real world).

Queerness is as marginal and central depending on the way i experiences it – so as much as the performance theories are about how the west (not necessarily a geographical entity but perhaps also an intellectual and cultural one) performed their identity thoughts and values, much of the way the other world performed was appropriated and mediated through the western lenses and a certain vocabulary, modes and methods were bench marked and idolized while the rest was spoken of as this and that – well experimental, exotic, etc. All this institutional categorization is fine, but what does it do to our (not identifying with the normative west as mentioned above) body mind, our soul – to this i. This question haunts us and makes us mindful of the Laxman rekhas of this and that, well in theatre we rather meet the Ravana and get kidnapped anyways to see what queerness looks like. As long we are not exiled by Rama to end the tale. Well the other side is filled with wonders not in comparison but like in everything in sensing directly the depth of the i and the i’s, which are not always necessarily human or animate and real entities but abstract concepts like culture, experiences, technology, etc. After all who is experiencing and how one is experiencing – ways of witnessing and sensing is what one meets with iLOGY.

This shack then, is on a ragged serpentine road, somewhere between Bohemia (aesthetics) and Utopia (mystical), hidden besides a lake nestled under a canopy of pine, cedar, oak, where the i sits on a bed of wildflowers moist with the morning dew. Silent, smelling of the rain washed forest, with the breeze sweeping through with the sound of birds and the occasional far way truck horns passing to the other side. Soon the dusk will slip into the a dark green horizon, where the million stars will meet the thousand filaments of tungsten, phosphor, glass & sapphire. Soon the rivers will swell with a mountain of memories , with i as a witness and be wedded with the choppy waters on a noisy motorboat somewhere along the mangroves where the tale of Bono Bibi, Manasa, Shitala, will be retold.

To be continued

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