The 45th Vikram Sarabhai International Arts Festival opened at Natarani on Saturday with the premier of Meanwhile Elsewhere, a visually spectacular production inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Written and directed by Yadavan Chandran, Creative Director of Darpana Academy, the play is an Indo-Italian co-production, sponsored by Nexion, an Italian company with operations in Morbi.
Italo Calvino was one of Italy’s greatest writers, with popular novels like The Baron in the Trees to his credit. Invisible Cities is conceived as a dialogue between Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan and the Venetian explorer Marco Polo, who spent 17 years in his court. Marco Polo is famous as a travel writer, but the cities described in Calvino’s book are fictitious, a means to explore broader themes like culture and language.
Invisible Cities has been adapted into an opera in the past, but Yadavan presents a wholly original take. Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are there, but so is the city of Ahmedabad. In one scene, Mallika Sarabhai reminisces about Bankura, Ahmedabad’s first discotheque located in the Parsi quarters of the old city. Another visually impactful scene speaks of the Pirana landfill, with dancers performing in plastic sheets.
The play has dialogue in English, Italian, Hindi and Gujarati, with players often speaking to each other in different languages. One memorable scene has a Hindi-speaking truck driver conversing with a hitchhiker, a girl who answers in Italian. Another scene has a small-town visitor to a big city who bursts into the choicest gaalis when he loses his luggage, much to the Ahmedabad audience’s delight. Then there’s a longish repetitive sequence that depicts the sameness of cities with the only difference being the “temperature outside” announcement on the plane.
The production scores high on stagecraft and uses the architecture of Natrani Amphitheatre to great advantage. The opening scene has a song written by Yadavan with music by Italian composer Edoardo Catemario, set way up under a tree in a nook above the amphitheatre. Then there is the transparent net (much like a mosquito curtain) that covers the stage through a large part of the play. The netting represents a membrane between imagination and reality and is the most striking feature of the show.
With a cast of 35, Meanwhile Elsewhere, is not going to be an easy production to transport, butYadavan doesn’t seem too concerned. “I designed this production for Natarani. We want to do at least 20 shows here before we think of performing elsewhere,” he says.
