13 April,2009 07:45 AM IST | | Manish Gaekwad
From playing a doormat in Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal to getting stuck in The Doorway, Jyoti Dogra holds the key to a stage act, we warn you, will make you wish she didn't live next door
Gallery Beyond is a quaint hidden corner in the art district of Kala Ghoda, where Jyoti Dogra's strange Inuit sounds are muffled in the phantom-like space she invades in the hall. What manifests through her devised performance piece is that she has learnt well from her study of Jerzy Grotowski and Antonin Artaud's experimental theatre art forms, to launch on her unsuspecting audience a "theatre of cruelty" method rarely seen in this country. Scraggy and unkempt after an arduous rehearsal, clad in worn-out track pants, Jyoti talks about how sounds can give rise to images.
PICS/NARENDRA DANGIYA
What is The Doorway about?
The Doorway is a collection of real and imagined stories woven together in a physical narrative, exploring the nature of our physical inhabiting of "closed" and "open" spaces. It is also to wake the sub-conscious. I will be using sound, movement and gesture to articulate a point. When I move my upper body, and add a sound to it, an image will arise. The audience then needs to connect an incident from their personal history to that image or sound.
So the audience can see a part of their own personal story in your performance?
Yes, absolutely. This is participatory theatre and each individual, through the cancelling of text, which allows us to make logic of everything, will have to rely on sounds and gestures to interpret from their own reservoir of real or imagined stories.
As a devised performance piece, how different is The Doorway from any other stage act?
I am taking the audience to a primal level of experience, where I do not explain. I invoke your sub-conscious memory which is not logical. There is an element of nakedness for the audience that walks in to be assaulted by this kind of sparseness. They are a part of the act, as I surround them with the "acting" space.
You are going to encourage first-time viewers to come back a year later to see the same act and give it the resonance of a "collective performance" as they internalise. Why?u00a0
The answer to that is two-fold. First, the logical one the IFA (Indian Foundation of the Arts) is funding this project. (She chuckles to stress on that). Second, I want people to return after a year to know that my work gets shaped by how you watch it. I become the material of my work. After logic, there is abstraction and abstraction in this piece is about what you can take that's yours, from me. A lot of people are going to find themselves befuddled after they see my performance, but when they return, it will be an experience that will make the first time seem logical.
From April 13 to 15, 7pm.
Entry is free.
At: Gallery Beyond, 130/132, first floor, Great Western Building, Shahid Bhagat Singh Marg, Fort.
Call 9930548769 to book your seat.
