Politically-charged events can always provide ready fodder for the dramatist?s mill. Spandan showed again how true this was with back-to-back performances of 16 Millimetre and Operation Flush at the Academy of Fine Arts on March 4. The first dealt with the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the Parliament House while the second tackles the US army trial following the Abu Ghraib sex-abuse case in Iraq. Both the plays failed to utilise the brevity of the one act form and the shock value of the two sensational events. 16 Millimetre began like a classic, tense whodunit, but then panned out into a catalogue of dark hints and vague insinuations. Operation Flush, while telling the tale of woe of an abused Iraqi woman, was marred by coarse acting and broad, loud, rhetorical exchanges.
Satadru Ojha
Old habits die hard. And there is more to Indo-Carribean legacy than Vidiya Naipal and Shivnarain Chanderpal as a rollicking performance by D?Bhuyaa Saaj, a Chutney group based in Trinidad, demonstrated at the G.D. Birla Sabhagar (February 23). ?Remembered Rhythms?, put together by the American Institute of Indian Studies, discovered to its amazement that very little has changed musically for the people of Indian origins whose ancestors were forcibly deported to the Carribean Islands in 1845. The Bhojpuri immigrants branched out into newer areas, giving fillip to the Chutney genre which owes its origin to the Bhojpuri wedding rituals, as Helen Myers explained in her prologue. A svelte dancer add-ed colour to the Bhojpuri-English medleys.
Anshuman Bhowmick
Ganjifa (traditional games) is as ancient as the motifs discovered in Harappan pictographs. The spread of card playing all over north and south India had a variegated past. The variants are the round shaped Dasa Avatara (Maharashtra); Manasa Mangal, Shiva Shakti and Nava graha (Bishnupur); the miniature Sonepur Ramayana ganjappa and Mughal ganjifa from Andhra Pradesh; and rectangular Naqsha cards. In Orissa today, the original game called Ashtamalla is played in many households. The ganjifa exhibition at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture has been curated by Vasudha Joshi and her associates with imagination and care, not forgetting to mention the alterations made by emperor Akbar in the ancient twelve-some suit of cards, as narrated in the Ain-I-Akbari.
Samir Dasgupta
