Onnamande Parajayam was a unique performance I did in Regional Theatre Thrissur with my friend Hari who is a theatre artist. Onnamande Parajayam is a Malayalam poem by Sree Balachandran Chullikkadu. This poem has the body of a script for a drama which is impossible to be staged. It was full with interesting – if not weird – visual images and totally crazy way of depiction. During one of our long night crazy talks (‘crazy’ we call it because nobody other than me and my brother could understand or get involved in the discussion) my brother casually suggested the possibility of staging this script. At that time it was a totally absurd idea.
But the seed stayed in me and I shared it with my friend Hari. We began to think about the real possibility of staging this. Within no time this small crazy idea flared up into a full-fledged program. The interesting part was finding correct visual parallel to the verbal script and this was the real challenge of the whole thing. I started to paint different scenes as I saw them in my mind while reading the poem and made miniatures of the same. The idea was to convert this paintings and miniatures into the scenes of the play with props and real artists. We arranged it in 21 different scenes. The script depicts the protagonist’s journey through killings, blood, hatred and devastation. But it never gives the hero the comfort of salvation in the end. The images are so strong and wild and progress through massacres and wars. The main distress of the hero is his inability to die and incapacity to change things for the better. He wonders why he, the poet is always chosen from the crowd to see the wrongs of the society. He stands like a prophet who can sing the future never change it. Weird and sinister images haunt him through the play and it ends in an incomplete fashion. The basic body of the drama is that of the traditional Sanskrit drama with a ‘Naandi’ in the beginning and a ‘Bharatha vakya’ in the end.
It took us more than 3 months to conceive and conduct this play. There were more than 50 artists involved in the same. The sound design and lighting were done accordingly. There were more than 20 people to arrange the different props –many of them quite huge too – for the smooth running of the show. In addition to the props there were film screenings and animation. We wished to call the program a 4D painting: a painting existing in all the four dimensions of space/time. We decided to weave a one day program around it ‘Sankalanam” meaning unification, including an exhibition of paintings of hell and a seminar on visual art. Artists and art critics were called from all parts of the country to talk about visual art. Many stayed for the performance too. The performance was during the evening session which went on amazingly well without any real problem in putting up all the props and stuff. All in all the experience was an amazing one.