Friday, April 12, 2013

Multiplied Monologues: Aloud Asides (Work in Progress)


This is a "Work in Progress" Blog: to keep the process going...

Ophelia (the original piece on the basis of what the performance was designed initially)


You said the time is cursed
But my love is cursed by time
And I am cursed by my love

You have only one time
 to set right the time out of joint[1]
I have too a single time
For my love

Your time is yours
Mine is mine
A firefly reminds the moon
I have a time too
For my ambition

“Life is a nightmare. Death?
   That is also a mere consolation.”[2]

A nightmare has a time
A consolation has a time

The time has no time at all.


[1] ("The time is out of joint; O cursed spite!/That ever I was born to set it right!" [I.V.211-2]).
[2] Ophelia, Homen Borgohain


Mix media, 2006


Hamlet’s New Monologue: (work in progress)

Life remained being a mere possibility.
Or just a hesitation before birth as Kafka felt,
Or as an premature ejaculation.

Life, like a performance always lie in the past
Or in the future. As Gilles Deleuze[1] speculated.
As for Yorick[2], it was all past, as for Boris Pasternak[3]
It’s yet to happen in near future... always...
There is no present of a theatre.
U just kill a theatre the moment you announce
“now we are going to present...”

You cannot breathe the same air twice.
There was one life Buddha could live,
Like Heraclitus[4]
Took only one step in a river

But they were many. Laughing Buddha. Manga Buddha.
Warrior Buddha. Monk Buddha. Bodhisattva Buddha.
Like Jorge Luis Borges, like Shakespeare, Like God[5]

A childish mistake of Hamlet and Helmet
Could bring you profound something.
As you know it well, this also can be Yorick’s skull.
Yorick: who is jerk and death.
Helmet: which is speed and death.
And Hamlet? It is being and not being.

Or life is a nightmare, death?
That is too, mere consolation.

What dreams may come? What dreams may come?
Dreams became synonymous the day Paash died.
The day Kabiranjan Saikia died, the day Safdar died,
the day Lorca died


 
Roshni as Ophelia in Santiniketan and I.P College for Women, Delhi

Mise-en-scene of Ophelia, 2003-2004

Ophelia in Baroda, 2007

Saadh Nawab as Hamlet

O for Ophelia, Auroville

O for Ophelia, Auroville





[1] The actor or actress represents, but what he or she represents is always still in the future and already in the past, where as his or her representation is impassible and divided, unfolded without being ruptured, neither acting nor being acted upon. It is in this sense that there is an actor’s paradox; the actor maintains himself in the instant in order to act out something perpetually anticipated and delayed, hoped for and recalled. The role played is never that of a character: it is a theme (the complex theme or sense) constituted by the components of the event, that is, by the communicating singularities effectively liberated from the limits of individuals and persons. The actor strains his entire personality in a moment which is always acting out other roles when acting one role.
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense P. 171.

[2] Yorick, the jester whose Skull was found in the graveyard, Hamlet, Act V scene 1
[3] The Russian writer of Hamlet
[4] “Since everything is changing constantly and being renewed, one cannot step into the same river twice”, a famous saying attributed to both: Gautama Buddha and Heraclitus.

[5] There was no one in him. …the story goes that, before or after he died, found himself before god and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vein, want to be one man: myself.” The voice of god replied from a whirlwind: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons – and none.”
Jorge Luis Borges (Everything and Nothing), LABYRINTHS, Selected Stories and Other Writings, Edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, Pengiun Books, 1970, pp. 285.




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