In the beginning, there is the body. Jyoti Dogra lets hers tell stories that cannot be found in written texts. She sits at night, reading about black holes and begins to have a “personal, physical sensation of the world being much bigger”. Why is the Mumbai-based actor, famous for the play, Notes on Chai (2013), reading astrophysics in bed? Dogra, 47, answers in a phone interview between rehearsals for her latest work, Black Hole. Excerpts: How did you start writing Black Hole? I started with a table, then garbage bags and, eventually, I picked up a white bedsheet. As soon as I did that, I found myself being pushed towards astrophysics. I have always been interested in astrophysics, particularly the general theory of relativity and, in 2011, I had researched it. A lot of that material now started to come in my improvisation. I went with the flow, which is how I work. Why the idea of a black hole? For a long time, I told myself, ‘Why not? Why do you have to make a play about a love story?’ The more I went into the subject, the more it became aggressively personal. I started to look at things like loss and death, which one can empathise with but not share. What is the premise of the play? A woman is telling you about a recurring dream, in which she is standing on the edge of a black hole. She is waiting to be sucked in so that she can become one with the universe. But the black hole is not pulling her in, it is waiting for her to jump in and she is not able to. There is a deep existential contradiction in us, between trying to extinguish oneself as well as in the fear of giving up the self. I started reading about consciousness. That our atoms are millions of years old is scientific. How do these ideas battle with the idea of the self? When a person is dying and I am standing before that person, I feel deeply for that person but I cannot share the experience as I am outside it. So, if I am in a black hole and you are outside, we are disconnected for eternity. How do you weave science into a narrative that the layperson can understand? There are three people in this piece — the protagonist, the mother who is terminally ill, and the protagonist's male partner. Their relationship keeps changing because one of them is dying but also because of their different worldviews, The mother decides that she no longer wants to talk about illness or life but about something bigger. The protagonist starts talking to her about the laws of thermodynamics, which says that energy cannot be created or destroyed and this thought has a parallel in the Bhagavad Gita. I am looking at something that is deeply personal, in terms of existential questions, but addressing them from the standpoint of science. How do you deal with death via science? It was proposed by Albert Einstein that if two particles are in entanglement, even if you place them at two ends of the universe, millions of light years apart, they will still stay connected. The dying mother holds the protagonist's hand and says, ‘Do you think we are entangled?’ and she answers, ‘This is a theory for particles, not human beings’. The mother replies, ‘But, human beings are made of particles’. This is moving into pseudo-science because, scientifically, it is not proved that humans are entangled. Taking artistic liberty, I worked with the idea that we feel connected with random people, they are not family and not always our friends. How far is the piece autobiographical? I had a very close person who passed away, who I was looking after. I am not here to tell you my life story. I am exploring the nature of loss and death and mortality. How do you come to terms with your own mortality and, more difficult than that, the mortality of another person you are very close to? Tell us about your journey in theatre. I started doing theatre when I was 10 in Delhi. I did a lot of text-based work, in Hindi and English, in Delhi before coming to Mumbai because I could not earn a living as an actor in Delhi. I started with films, but increasingly I felt that the work needed from me was rarely very demanding. In 2006, I worked with theatre director Rehan Engineer in a solo piece, Man to Man, and that changed my life. I decided to return to the theatre.
