deponti

The Muny

(which is how the Municipal Theatre Association of St Louis--the word "theatre" is spelt that way, not as "theater", on the home page-- is referred to)

has been a great place to go to, and I have watched three musicals there already...

( If you want to read more about my experiences at the Muny )


There's also so much music to listen to, over here. Today I wanted to go for

Mozart and Beethoven at Washington U

...but Eli/Biddles decided I was going to keep her company! ND takes precedence over all else...

I walked down to Forest Park, looking at the cotton candy that I could not eat...





( some more stuff )

And I wish I knew the name of the tree which bears these lovely flowers right now:




Spent the day in the home of some close friends, will share my thoughts about the Indian diaspora later...

Seeta lies,ignored and broken.
She is, no more, the heroine, the centre of the action.
Separated from Rama, she has no value.
She is in a foreign land now;
Another man has tried to possess her.
The hero is her husband
Who will come to this country to wage war on her abductor
To redeem his own valour and his wife's honour.
Then, he will smirch that honour by refusing to accept her
Unless she walks through fire.
Perhaps the puppet thinks of all this
As she lies, and does not wish to get up again
And take up the role of the subjugated, the doubted, the helpless woman
Who is idolized and yet oppressed.

Attended a demonstration of projects in contemporary puppetry yesterday..my account is at


http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/blogs/show_entry/789-ifa-grants

(I think it's a good idea to put all the Bangalore stuff into my Citizen Matters blog...)

At the entrance was this...er...entrancing arrangement:





I stayed for a few minutes, just savouring the beauty of that! I wonder which faceless hotel employee created that?


There is so much art and beauty around us...and we sometimes don't have the time to appreciate it!


and on a separte note...how did "entrance" get two such widely divergent meanings?

I went to see the opening play of the 2008 Theatre Festival at Ranga Shankara , and did not expect to be transported back to my childhood days....but nostalgia took hold of me as I revisited the days when I used to watch various Bengali plays at the famous Star Theatre ....

The play was about Binodini, the star of the theatre scene in 19th century Kolkata, who wrote an honest autobiography, "Aamaar Kothaa"...about ambition,love, betrayal and talent....and this has been adapted by Amal Allana and brought to the stage in a very powerful, intense production.


The costumes, as replicated from that era, were lavish and colourful...and since I want to do a proper review, I will just post some of the scenes from this production.


The stage properties were lavish:





( a few more scenes from the play )

I will do a more detailed review later, off to Ranga Shankara to see some great theatre-related screenings for now...



*

This is a clear illustration of what a photograph means to different people.

I wanted to post a message for Deepavali on my blog, and decided to try out online editing on Photobucket and I chose a (yes, I admit it) somewhat random photograph for the trial, and since I was running out of time, posted the pic with the message added.

Comments as usual were few, but when I met a friend over the weekend, I asked why s/he had not commented. "Why did you choose THAT photograph?" this person asked.

To this person, the quality of the photograph is more important than the message, so the feeling was that the less-than-desired quality of the photograph did not merit a reciprocal comment.

To me, the documentation of the message ("Happy Deepavali") is more important than whether the flowers are in focus and crisp and clear and the photo is well-composed.

Different strokes for different folks! Now, when I see no comments, I don't know if it's the bad photograph that people are refraining from criticising, or the message itself is not important enough for them to respond to...

Hm. Something to be mulled over!


So meanwhile, here's a less-than-perfect, but to me, lovely photograph of the very pretty girl who played the part of the heroine of "Choon Hyang", a Korean musical by 20 children from Theatre Seoul, the review of which I will be putting up on Citizen Matters shortly.... it was a wonderful way to spend a birthday, with friends, watching children from a land far away, dance, and sing, and entertain us.....





A thing (or a human being) of beauty IS a joy forever!




*

http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/view/446-theatre-city

Inflation taking its toll here, too? :)

I was feeling very sick the entire day, and in the evening I was overcome (that's the only word to describe the craving that came over me...overcame me!) by a longing for chocolate, so I went and got a bar from the friendly neighbourhood calorie store.




Having done that, I put half the bar down and decided I would have it only as an after-dinner treat; so I put it down and went off to see a play (Common Man, by Yours Truly theatre, the improvisation by the cast was excellent, though I have seen the play earlier, too). I resolutely did NOT look at it before dinner.

But now....ah...I sat down here, and it's such a warm, inviting smell. I savour the aroma deeply. Bangalore is cool enough that when I pick it up with my fingers, the bar doesn't go gooey all over them, and force me to eat it immediately. I can nibble the edges and feel the deliciousness of the chocolate in my mouth. I am afraid, glutton that I am, that my being is concentrated in my mouth and taste buds for a few seconds. The chocolate quite literally melts in the mouth (and this is the common-or-garden chocolate by Cadbury's, not any gourmet stuff.) I know that it's going to grin at me from various points on my body when I look in the mirror in a few days, but I care not a whit.

I am not fond of white chocolate, and would prefer dark chocolate, but today, any chocolate would do...and did. No woman wailed for her demon lover with the determination that I went off with, to buy that single bar!



I love chocolate from Cadbury's to Godiva to those fancy liqueur-filled chocs; I would be hard put to decide if I liked Ferrero Rocher better than Tobler One; I would probably ask for several samples of each to help me decide....

And a strange thing...I love having chocolate with sips of water in between, I can never figure out why. I will drink more than half a litre of water with the amount of chocolate in this pic.

I still remember with regret that we were driving from the US into Canada, and at the duty-free I saw a large bottle of Cadbury's chocolate liqueur. I was persuaded to buy it on the way back..and that never happened, becuase the bottle was gone when we returned a few days later.

Oooh...chocolate...when I die, I hope that if I have a tombstone, instead of being inscribed as the late Deponti, I will be entered as the choco-late Deponti....

beast666...this post is dedicated to you!

Tags: chocolate, love, photography, ranga shankara, theatre

I conducted my first two "celebrity" interviews....first, Lillette Dubey and then, yesterday evening, Girish Karnad .

Both of them are very articulate people, and having organized my questions well, I got quite a lot of info about them, for two articles....one, I thought would be a kind of "reminder" post for Metblogs, as I had put in an announcement of Karnad's new play, "The Wedding Album" (ha, that's not on the Net yet; when I googled the words, this is all I got!), which is being staged in Bangalore today and tomorrow.

But then, I decided that the article merited an appearance in a more "serious" forum, and today, Citizen Matters is running it as a curtain raiser, and I have provided a link to it on Metblogs,


here

It contains the link to the Citizen Matters article, too...only, for some reason, CM has used the word "screening" and not "staging" for a play!

I'll be going to see the play tomorrow....and I think I am going to enjoy it!


A more broad-based (don't ask, "which broad?") article, dealing with their thoughts on Bangalore and theatre in Bangalore, is in the process of being written...and will appear in Citizen Matters, too.







"http://www.citizenmatters.in/articles/view/269-wedding-album"

http://bangalore.metblogs.com/2008/06/01/lilies-and-the-stronger-at-ranga-shankara/

I enjoyed writing these reviews...!

I realize that I hardly ever give my Metblog posts URL's here...well, here's a review *I* think I wrote well...


http://bangalore.metblogs.com/2008/04/02/common-man-at-ranga-shankara/#more-1580

Yesterday, A was down again, and decided that the best way to cheer herself up was to go to a play; so she chose the Kirkwood Theater Guild , where there was a production of The Fourth Wall by A R Gurney , an American playwright.


The play was very much in the style of Ibsen and Shaw, both of whom were extensively quoted in the course of the action...and though I felt that the cast were rather self-conscious (well,it was a self-referential, deconstructionist play to begin with) about their being actors on a stage, they warmed up as the play went on , and it became very enjoyable. Much of the political humour, though, it topical, and the playwright would have to keep updating it or changing it if the play is not to become dated or stale. Steve Callahan was Roger, Ken Lopinot as Floyd (an excellent comic assay), Colleen Malone was Julia, and Janet Roby Schwartz was Peggy. Jan Meyer directed the play, and Danny Austin was the asst. director.


( more details that won't be of interest to anyone else but me )

As part of the ongoing struggle to prevent our esteemed government from razing trees to make broader roads, four of us went down Kasturba Road, that abuts Cubbon Park, today. It was a wonderful walk in one sense, because starting from the Karunashraya at the corner,








( for some more pictures of Kasturba Road, click here )




Tomorrow we take our huntin'-shootin'-fishin' guest to Galibore, to show him a forest and a river where huntin', shootin' and fishin' (except for catch-and-release) are NOT permitted!

However, because of his interests, our guest is excellent at spotting birds...so he's going to be a great help in whatever photography KM and I do tomorrow!

Have a great Sunday, everyone...I love my life and I wish everyone were as happy as I am...

http://bangalore.metblogs.com/archives/2007/10/the_ranga_shankara_theatre_fes.phtml


95% enjoyable,and the 5% is the unfriendly way they have organized the sales to the limited-audience plays at 10pm and 11pm...it is an illogical, user-unfriendly method.

http://bangalore.metblogs.com/archives/2007/10/lack_of_transparency_in_ranga.phtml

I don't like such things happening...

http://bangalore.metblogs.com/archives/2007/10/another_landmark_which_may_not.phtml


Soon, like other landmarks (for example, Cash Pharmacy springs to mind...I used to buy medicines there ) this, too will be gone...sigh.

When you put your trust in somebody, and that someone does not live up to the trust...when you think someone will do a good job, and they smile at you and you find later that the job was done shoddily...evem as small a thing as thinking that someone who promises something will come through, and finding that it doesn't happen...betrayal of trust, and lack of commitment comes in all sizes, from the very small to the quite large.

As one ages, one tries to take these fall-short situations in one's stride. First of all, one tells oneself that there must have been situations when one did the same thing..but of course one cannot remember such incidents (does recollection whitewash away the memories where one was at fault?)

Today's small betrayal...Evam, the theatre group from Chennai, staged a play that was named "And Now For Something Different"..and proceeded to give a rehash of their last Monty Python play. It was hugely enjoyed by the audience...but when I see actors with the talent that Evam has, selling out for hype, mindless slapstick (some of the scenes were repeats of the old sketches) and lucre...it's sad. But again, I am in a minority here, as Chowdiah had a full house and the play seemed very popular.

But I have seen their first play, "Evam Indrajit", a translation of a serious, excellent Bengali play...and I feel so bad at the way such great acting talent is now subordinate to, quite literally, playing to the gallery. Must entertainment be mindless, hysterical comedy? Can't an audience think while being entertained?

Ayn Rand addresses this question in her play, "Night of January 16th". She makes the point that educative and entertaining, serious and interesting, need not be mutually exclusive. But I suppose an audience on a weekend afternoon, after a hard week's work, seeks only escapism, and does not want anything else but escapist slapstick...

There is also sadness in knowing that for many people, I am a "foul weather" friend...when things don't go well, and depression and rough times are reigning, then I am someone to talk to interminably and share the sadness and adversity with...but when fair weather sets in, other interesting alternatives and pursuits appear, I am an ex-friend.....of course, lip service is paid to the friendship, but the shell is all that is left. I wish I had the wisdom to both see it coming each time, and not mind about it.

But the good part of the weekend was a cleanup campaign by Clean and Green, that was sponsored by Oracle...it's great to see so many people DOING something instead of just complaining and leaving it at that. Will be posting about that to Metroblogs tomorrow; yesterday was a great day in spite of the awful way it began.

And of course, the beauty of the Kaveri, with her rushing waters, her majestic trees, the scudding clouds and the sunshine...no matter how many people try to foul and mar her beauty, she remains still magically lovely.

I got a call sometime ago from the Bangalore Mirror , a tabloid which the Times of India launched ( One rupee a paper!) asking me if they could use one of my Metroblogs posts...I said yes and said I would also send them articles which were Bangalore-specific. They seem to have taken the yes for a single post as a blanket permission, and apparently, more of my metblogs posts have been used in the paper...oh well, since it's on the public domain, I guess it's OK, but...for a paper to use a not very widely-read blogpost...

Well, anyway, today someone called me and asked me if I could do a review of a play The Flame of the Forest by Gowri Ramnarayanan (the granddaughter of "Kalki" R.Krishnamurthi , who wrote the novel she has adapted ..she writes very well indeed)..it happened that I had just come back from the play, and seven of us were sitting and discussing it right then.

We all had, the previous day, also seen a play about Iranian women who are living in Germany, which none of us liked very much (as one friend said, what deprivation are they talking about if they are living in Germany??)...and I said I would write that review too. Our discussion formed the basis of one review...but when I reached for the brochure which I normally bring back from every play (providing they give one)...it just wasn't there! Then I remembered having given it to one of the friends, and I had to call him up at a not-very-earthly hour to get it out and read it; I was hoping that it would give important information like the names of cast members, set designer, and so forth. No such luck! It was the friend who summoned up the SEG (Search Engine Genie) and got me a lot of info.

Writing a review of a play one doesn't like is much more difficult than of one that's liked. It's quite tough to stand back, look objectively at what it is in a play one doesn't like and articulate it so that it doesn't seem as if prejudice or preconception are driving one's words. And with many experimental plays, there is always this element of emperor's-new-clothism , where people feel they MUST appreciate it as it IS experimental theatre. You see people getting up around you to give a standing ovation, while a big question mark is hovering over your head and YOU feel that the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes, but you don't quite like to say so and bring down the wrath of your appreciative fellow-watchers. I need to understand the symbolisms or the metaphors or the whatever, and am totally mystified if I can't. I think I am symbolically challenged.

I have, I am afraid, been seeing too many of these question-mark (the one that manifests itself over my uncomprehending head) plays lately, about eight of them to every good (imo) play...

And another grouse: when Ranga Shankara committed itself to charging only Rs.49 for plays at its inception (it will be putting on its thousandth performance shortly,on Sept 12), the ticket cost going up to Rs.150 and, day before yesterday, Rs.200, is not something I think of with pleasure. I still cannot understand why Kannada plays should still be the same rate and English plays so much more expensive..what is the logic behind it?

Oh well, I am generally with at least one friend, and whether we agree or disagree about the play, the discussion is interesting..much more so, to me, than discussing the neighbours, their jewellery, or their maids...that WAS a value judgement, I am sorry; but yes, I do find that kind of conversation boring after a short while.

I am also hoping that Bangalore Mirror won't do a Suvarna TV Channel on me...they said they wouldn't pay for stuff they took from Metroblogs, but will pay for stuff I send them directly...and since they asked for the review...I Am Opeful...I am oping to get, at least, bigger peanuts than the Deccan Herald pays!

My sincere sympathies to everyone who tries to make a living out of freelance journalism....what a tough,rocky, impecunious path they tread.