Sixty-two-year-old Savitri Mane lives with her husband, Lakshman Mane, in a tiny house in Dharavi. Life had been tough for the couple, but now with their two daughters married, they are trying to add a little colour to their otherwise humdrum existence in Asia’s largest slum.
Today, Savitri and Lakshman will join a motley group of about 30 Dharavi residents to perform a puppetry show at the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai as part of the organisation’s annual theatre festival, Centrestage.
This will be followed by a performance tomorrow at the amphitheatre on the Carter Road promenade in Bandra. And, later this month, the group will perform at Mood Indigo, the 41-year-old annual cultural festival of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay.
The puppetry performance was developed through a two-week long rigorous workshop conducted by Snuff Puppets, an Australian giant puppet experimental theatre company. It is curated and produced by artistic consultant and theatre producer Divya Bhatia in partnership with the Society for Nutrition, Education & Health Action (SNEHA), a Mumbai-based NGO that works for the well being of women and children living in Mumbai slums. The show is part of Oz Fest, the ongoing Australia’s cultural festival in India.
This mixed group of young and old Dharavi dwellers — from a six-year-old boy to the 65-year-old Lakshman — was selected by Bhatia with help from SNEHA officials and their volunteers. From housewives and engineering and management students to unemployed youth, the group is as diverse as it gets. While some of them have attended theatre workshops conducted by Bhatia and his visiting students from the School of Drama in London, for many others in the group this is a completely new experience.
On the first day of the workshop, Lakshman accompanied his wife to escort her to the venue at the nearby Maharashtra Nature Park. He waited there for a while to see what was going on. “It seemed really interesting, so, I decided to join my wife for the workshop,” says Lakshman, who has been spending six hours daily at the workshop since then.
This is Snuff Puppets’s first visit to India. Talking about the workshop, Andy Freer, the company’s founder and artistic director, says the workshop — “People’s Puppet Project” — is a model in their community cultural development programme in which diverse community groups work intensively with Snuff Puppets to ideate, design, build and perform with their own puppets. “It is a programme designed to promote the telling and keeping alive of stories, fantasies and myths.” According to this model, each project is tailor-made to suit the abilities and agenda of a community; in this case the people of Dharavi.
“Basically, we come here with nothing except for some materials sourced locally. All we have is a group of people and the first day is just spent talking and telling stories, real and imaginary. This is followed by drawing, design and making of puppets,” Freer says. Most of the people in the group speak either Hindi or Marathi and Freer understands neither. “It is quite chaotic here,” he adds.
Of the many stories narrated at the workshop, there was one about a boy in Dharavi who got scared and fell ill after seeing a ghost-like lady sitting at the common water-tap where he went to fetch water early in the morning. There was another one about a woman chopping off the ring finger of another woman to get a gold ring.
“Once people share their stories, they are asked to draw from their imagination an element of their story that they think would work and can be made into a puppet,” elaborates Bhatia. From the mapping of ideas to distilling collective thoughts into a creative piece of visual spectacle, participants go through a transformation as the process is meant to empower, say Freer and Bhatia.
So, the giant puppets that are finally made and are part of the performance include an old woman, a garbage monster, a butterfly, a human hand, sad earth, a typical Dharavi house and a few mosquitoes. “These are all a bunch of metaphors,” says Freer, who was drawn to puppetry while watching performances featuring puppets designed by Catalan painter and surrealist Joan Miro.
“The performance is about the Dharavi residents and their stories. None of them is a trained artist, but from the concept to the creation to the final performance, everything is done by them,” Bhatia says.
“The reason I decided to do something like this is to build their self worth. There’s a stigma attached to the place where they come from,” explains Bhatia. So, he says, the opportunity to perform at three venues in the city is remarkable. “Somewhere they’ve to get the sense that they are valuable.”
