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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Theatre: Multinational Mahabharata
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Theatre: Multinational Mahabharata

A four-country theatre production of the epic, currently in India, explains the need to share stories

A scene from MahabharataPremium
A scene from Mahabharata

A mammoth stage production, spanning four countries over four years (2013-16), Japanese director Hiroshi Koike’s Mahabharata commences its India tour with three performances—the premiere and a second show on 12 January at the International Theatre Festival of Kerala, and a third show at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai.

The epic has been divided into four chapters, the first of which established the rivalry between the Pandavas and Kauravas, and opened in Cambodia in July 2013. Koike’s team is now in Thrissur, where the Indian segment—produced in association with local group Theatreconnekt and dealing with “Vanaparva", the story of the Pandavas in exile—is being rehearsed.

Although work started in 2013, the idea of harnessing the great epic’s “big wisdom" came much earlier, when Koike was grappling with what he perceived to be irrevocably diminishing human values in a Japan roiled by manifold crises—the economic downturn of the 1990s, neo-fascism, the destruction wreaked by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It was a karmic cycle straight out of the Mahabharat itself, at the end of which almost everything is destroyed.

In 2012, Koike disbanded Pappa Tarahumara, the theatre organization he had run for 30 years, and set up the Hiroshi Koike Bridge Project to “create bridges between people, time and cultures". Initially, he worked with the deceptively simple stories for children by popular poet Kenji Miyazawa, which explored piquant relationships between humans, nature and animals, but the sprawling narrative of the Indian epic continued to resonate with him. “In a way, it is flowing history. Within it is our past and our future. It shows human nature in the face of great difficulties. The idea was to find a way to discover what is human through the Mahabharata," he says.

Adapting the epic seemed daunting. Peter Brook’s celebrated 1985 stage version—which Koike saw—ran into 9 hours. In One Hundred Years Of Solitude, the fatalistic masterpiece by Gabriel García Márquez, Koike found a compelling multigenerational saga that captured destruction in its essence. Emulating this, he pared the Mahabharat into narrative chunks that were then crystallized into four distinct chapters. Its pan-Asian scope was now clearly visible, with so many parallels with contemporary history around him—Cambodia’s “killing fields" or India’s chequered past (apart from its legacy as the country of the epic’s origin). As a response to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s shrill military rhetoric, the third chapter in Japan will devote itself to the battle of Kurukshetra, highlighting in particular the pacifist leanings inherent in the text. The final post-war apotheosis will be showcased at Penang, Malaysia, in 2016.

Malaysian butoh artiste Lee Swee Keong, who plays Duryodhana
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Malaysian butoh artiste Lee Swee Keong, who plays Duryodhana

Koike believes this enmeshing of cultures and sensibilities creates a challenge, but also leads to the harmonization of culture and artistic practice. “I don’t have any difficulty with differences in culture, because my work is broken down to what a performer can create with his body," he says. As the actors immerse themselves in their characters, Koike strips away the text and instructs them to keep just the gestural to create a universal story that flows seamlessly from one ethos to another.

This amorphousness seems at odds with the discourse emerging in India on the ownership of Hinduism, and what it means to be Indian, with a focus on the control and purification of Hindu culture—the Mahabharat remains a potent symbol of this. Koike notices this trend in Japan as well. “As we saw with Fukushima, it affected people all over the world. In the end we cannot create boundaries. It will result in huge problems if we close our minds. We have to make a solution between us and them, whatever is the ‘other’—religion, nationality or gender—with the intention of crossing over."

Koike finds the cultural ecology of Thrissur very conducive to their aim of reaching out and embracing the world beyond. This is his second visit: He first travelled to the town in 2013 with his Miyazawa production, The Restaurant Of Many Orders. His troupe too has taken to the simple living it has encountered in Kerala. In one of the sporadic entries in the project’s blog, Swee Keong writes about how it’s such a great idea to do this production in the land of the Mahabharat. Hopefully, some of this enthusiasm will rub off on the audiences in Thrissur and Mumbai.

The Mahabharata will be performed on 14 January at the Experimental Theatre, NCPA. Tickets, 300 and 400, available on Bookmyshow.com and at the venue’s box-office.

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Published: 10 Jan 2015, 12:47 AM IST
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