“Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?
Vladimir: Yes, yes, we're magicians.”
- Samuel Beckett
There are two kinds of people.
One, who see
Hot chocolates as brown.
Two, who see them
As creamy mauvish purples.
Well, there are also those
Who would argue.
That in today’s day and age
It is marginally conceited.
To write about hot chocolates.
But who gives a shit.
My father drove
A sensible fucking car.
It was still
A pickle coloured one though.
A jalapeño inside out.
That smelled like lavenders.
I suppose,
That explains a lot.
‘Masakali; Dancing Pigeons’ is effectively an initiation.
It establishes a Framework Engine.
Just a Framework Engine.
No, My Framework Engine as a Poet for crafting and directing Devised Theatre.
I suppose they’d scholarly discuss me over on Jstor too someday. Till then let’s just pretend to take me seriously and read on...
I constantly toy with my own truth. It is how I impress upon myself that I exist.
With ‘Masakali; Dancing Pigeons’ I situated a modus operandi of Scripted Transgressions, it was motivated by the desire to impress upon the viewer’s that they too exist, as animatedly as I and my troupe presented them to be.
I for the first time, blatantly performed my poetry in an effort to peel off the life-mask, within the realm of performed theatricality; aided by its full-fleshed perceptivity, with the simple motive of provocation.
I as a Well Taught Madman | Wise Clown | Self-Certified Idiot triumphed reason and better judgment through cunning, presenting cryptic, witty, instructive remarks in the form of anecdotes or parables.
The piece brings out the mundanity of life in an exquisitely sublime, and profound fashion. I take simple, quotidian objects and exalt them to profusely serene and elegant depths.
A CUTE provocation, if you must.
Some might say I transmutated gossipy hearsay into something academic.
It is a plain argument. Irrespective of who we are, or where we come from, we as human beings have one trait in common for certainty. All of us look at our individualistic lives as a piece of screenplay. We live in a film, with ourselves as the protagonist, or more honestly as the ‘Hero’ of our own lives. In this crafty little charade, all of us need a villain, a problem, an obstacle, an anguish to overcome.
No matter how cushioned our tushies might be, we all want to be underdogs going up against the tumultuous world.
And that is the point. That is where my theatre positions itself. It is gross and conceited, yes. But none of us can do without villains, for it is they who provide us with our purposes. I wouldn’t dare trying to get into the business of taking them away, nor would I commit adultery by pitting one’s villain against another’s. All I am saying is that scripting this vicious little shit-show with a bit of style, even in the silhouette of our current context in mind, is art.
My father doesn’t like my short stories
That is a good sign you know.
No one likes
A little shit for a son.
6 feet 4 inches.
I bet you,
He never expected
To see filth stacked up so high
Under his own roof.
I didn’t imagine myself
To have the nerve to say that.
Well, he can’t stop me now.
Cause I suppose
He likes a son
Who is almost alive,
Just the same…
… The words
They never caused agony
They came out easy
Like melted butter.
I just sat there
In my underwear
Thinking that the entire world was mild.
I am a lucky man.
I was lulled in
By an over wooed wobbler.
And punched in
By her sextet.
It is also the first time that I introduced the notion of a ‘Decommissioned Domesticity’, and attempted at curating it visually as an act of world building.
“time, incarnates for the simple-minded the connections between imperturbability, stupidity, and joy of life, then the nags laugh and sense it deep down…”
- Bertolt Brecht
My satirical barbs are aimed at the not so obvious horrors of ‘normal’ reality. The performance sought the essence of the ‘political’, the ‘social’ and the ‘cultural’ within the realm of human chemistry and social kinesthetics. It showcased figures who were somewhere, in-between ‘performing’ social class behaviour and politely; though ever so condescendingly, rebelling against them.
The satires and parodies make visible unseen realities to reveal their ideological underpinnings as constructs of privilege.
‘Masakali; Dancing Pigeons’ is an act of offering potentially a knowledge tool to the viewer, that displaces the happy ending from the stage into the viewer's reality, where she must find answers.
I perform, in many senses as a bizarre academic believing that one can understand reality and even change it through dialectical thinking equipped with profound longing for teaching and learning rather than organizing for social change. A prophet without a prophecy.
I along with my troupe wrote, directed and performed verses and gestures in a non sensical non place. We created membranous surfaces/objects/spatiality that acted as a performative skin for a group of characters. Our methodology for preparing the set was aimed at achieving figures that do not represent class positions but rather move between them. As an identifiable trope and anchor however, I still wished for the character of the narrator to ripen and lay bare an intimity.
The performance was scored through a scenography of simplistic yet absurdist gestures within this skin and space, along with an ensemble of sounds alluding to music.
For the piece ‘Masakali; Dancing Pigeons’ I crafted a script that is deeply rooted in my own personal observations of persons in cafés and their behavioural nuance. I subsequently resorted to scripting a mishmash, an exquisite corpse of encounters that I had observed in the motely of cafés that I had frequented until then.
Through its complicated, bloody wit, the performance has a very dry, interiorized sense of the comic during which the audience can smoke and drink, be shaken by a ceaseless introspective laughter that has nothing benign about it.