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.
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
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| Roshni as Ophelia in Santiniketan and I.P College for Women, Delhi |
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| Mise-en-scene of Ophelia, 2003-2004 |
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| Ophelia in Baroda, 2007 |
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| Saadh Nawab as Hamlet |
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| O for Ophelia, Auroville |
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| 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.
[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.
