Could be, Maybe, love...? by Kavita S. Sunil

Around the ramp is a junkyard that holds the debris of life as it were, with the familiar and the strange scrunched together-old tricycles, worn suitcases, discarded walkers- the things that don't matter.

The travellers walk along a specially created ramp, with lights rigged directly above illuminating the slow passage as they stop and stare and listen and then move onwards-in which each aspect of their being seems to gradually unravel before our eyes, with the subtle lighting aiding each little disclosure. In many ways, our composure warrants a physiological reaction to the stillness, like it were a kind of meditative therapy. Through the running time of the play, a cast of fifteen actors (playing twenty different characters) arrive at a tap with a broken faucet, from which drips a steady trickle of water, the sound of which creates a buzz in our ears that when an actor finally reaches in with her cup for a drink (having been on stage for more than fifteen minutes already), the few seconds of silence take on an almost deafening quality. It can be a difficult watch for a more restless audience, and some perseverance is required before it all pays off almost in transcendental fashion. Even as we pay rapt attention to the glacial pace of the actors' crossing, we are caught unaware sometimes by the uplifting cadences that waft our way despite the seeming lugubriousness of it all. It features a procession of actors who traverse what may seem like a few meters on stage but with every moment stretched out lovingly (the play is performed in slow motion), each flicker of emotion acquires the quality of a full-blown tale, each gesture is drawn like a skein and woven into a texture of rich transfixing images that are frozen in time like a series of three-dimensional snapshots that capture illusions, and journeys and transformations without the loss of any small detail. Sankar Venkateswaran's interpretation of Shogo Ohta's THE WATER STATION is an example of the kind of evocative avant-garde theatre that Indian audiences are not quite accustomed to.

Could be, Maybe, love...? by Kavita S. Sunil