O My Goodness

From the darkness outside Sohaila Kapur’s Maharani Bagh house comes the call of a muezzin. But the Delhi-based theatreperson,it seems,is already in prayer. She has transported herself to Iraq of the eighth-century,where Rabia,a young saint,is creating miracles,among them bringing the Kabah,the holy mosque in Mecca,to where she stood. “Rabia was like me,she hated depending on anybody. She was quite firm about her faith,” says Kapur,as she watches actor-dancer Shilpika Bordoloi enact a miracle scene. For the past few months,Bordoloi has been perfecting the art of being Rabia and a sixth-century Tamil saint called Karaikkal,for Kapur’s next work,a dance theatre piece called O. The play will open in Delhi on August 27.

“Everyday,I get a new reason to believe that the world is full of stress. I realised that the saints of the past had survived many of our modern-day ordeals and their lives could hold a message for us,” says Kapur,who had initially planned to showcase the stories of four saints but couldn’t fit it into one-and-a-half hours.

While Rabia shunned worldly elements,including marriage,Karaikkal lived in domestic bliss until the day her husband left her. She entered into an intense tantric meditation,praying for that ultimate un-womanly desire — ugliness. Even today,Karaikkal is worshipped in her demonic avatar. Bordoloi,who adeptly switches from the sprite-like,Rabia to the sensuous Karaikkal,says that “understanding why the saints did what they did was one of her biggest challenges”. “I wondered why Karaikkal didn’t move on when her husband left her. Then,slowly,I began to grasp her philosophy,” says Bordoloi.

O is a deeply meditative piece in which dance performances by Bordoloi and Giles Chuyen are accompanied by puppetry,multimedia visuals and background scores of the saints’ own poetry. Mime forms a large part of the performance and Kapur explains,“An expression can tell a thousand things. If you can speak through the body,who needs words”.