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There is so much one can convey through the language of dance and at the recent performance held at the ‘Attakkalari India Biennial 2013’, one realised that contemporary dances can also have a sense of humour.
‘Esnes.N.ON 2’, a dance-drama about nonsense, conceptualised and choreographed by Helene Weinzierl, was staged at Alliance Francaise recently.
The play saw the lighter side of dance and at the same time, left a lasting impression on the audience.
The play tracks the follies of three people –– a German teacher, an American man in love with yoga and a Russian woman, who is lost in India.
All three accidentally meet at an Indian bus stop. They are trying to flee from their own lives and are on a quest to find a new meaning but at the end of it, they end up in a labyrinth of nonsense.
The play showcased the Westerner’s perspective of India. It forced one to reckon that one might attempt to make superficial sense of the world but in reality, one is not sure about anything.
An interesting play of movements, it took one on a journey and showed how the three characters handled the situations they came across.
When the narrator announced that one among the three is a murderer, it immediately brought an interesting twist to the tale. “In Austria, we have this innate habit to make sense of everything, maybe that’s why Helene tried to do just the opposite,” says Viviane Escale, one of the artistes.
The bus journey and even the cabaret dance in between left the audience in splits. Most of the sequences were imaginary and inspired by the experiences the choreographer had during her visits to India. But none of the artistes had been to India before this.
“All this while, we were performing the choreographer’s vision. But now that we are here and seen life here, I am sure it will have some effect on our perception of the country. But I don’t know how far it will change our performance as we would like to show how many of the Westerners come to India and understand the country only at the surface level. The characters tend to become blind on the inside and on the outside,” says Vladislav Soltys, another artiste.
Pankhuni, a member of the audience, sums up, “The subject is actually very universal because as travellers, we meet new people and become vulnerable to our surroundings. So, everyone can relate to the subject in one way or another.”