green room
The Green Room is the performance site for this devised theatre in installation. An Odissi dancer, an auditorium caretaker and the space in between are the characters that engage the audience through a performative act. This performance explores the concept of a “green room’ that holds a unique place within the performance space for all actors, dancers and technical crew. As much as it is a site to undress and dawn new costumes a green room often bares itself to human conditions, emotions, vulnerability, revelation, jubilation and frailty that stay within those premises almost safeguarded as a secret. It holds a sanctity of being a private space that is deeply personal. It hides behind the public view of the ‘stage’ beyond the wings which infact opens itself widely to society and the masses. The transition of a person from being an individual private entity to a public performer mostly happens in this liminal space; the walk from the green room to the stage, to be precise.
The passive protagonist of this theatrical installation is the site - the Green Room. The space is designed to deconstruct this green room and open it up completely to the audience. The dancer (nayika) is found in this green room as audience enter and cluster. The whole process of ‘dressing up & costuming’ of a classical dancer is now open and revealed to the audience. They are able to walk/stand/sit/observe through/around this green room without touching the dancer’s body or paraphernalia. As she walks through this process of ‘Green Rooming’, the play takes on and the third character (of the caretaker) is introduced and woven into this amorphous space. The line between on & off stage is thus blurred for the audience. It is immersive to an extent but not participatory. This play is physical & verbose while it breaks the proscenium or amphitheatrical view. A huge part of the play is the space design and light design as it primarily is an installation.
As the designer, one of the major challenges was to plan out different stations and performance spaces for different dance pieces, maintaining the cohesive nature of the installation cum performance and treating the space(performance and office) as one. Again, this project also gave us complete freedom to experiment with the design where we could break the stereotypical ways in which classical dances are lit in India. One of the most interesting aspects in lighting was that we lit bits of a performance and a green rom station with lights coming inside the theatre from an empty building right opposite to our space which really added to the site specific nature of the show. My team was also responsible for building and fabricating three Green Room stations - Old, Modern and Abstract, for the performers while the audience entered and observed the green rooming process as part of the installation.