SAMAADHI: Riverside Studios
stageplay | 60min | 2022
writer • co-director • producer • actor
crew
producer - Mohit Mathur & Ivantiy Novak
director - Mohit Mathur & Ivantiy Novak
writer - Ivantiy Novak
lighting designer - Wing Kiu Chan (Cherry)
associate lighting designer - Eliska Van Lelyveld
cast
The Indian - Mohit Mathur
The Being & Reginald Dyer - Ivantiy Novak
the project
Written and produced for Riverside Studios in 2022. This was a further development on the piece showcased at Bridge House Theatre a few months prior.
The story follows an Indian man as he deals with the spirits of the past recounting to him the loss of his family at Jallianwala Bagh.
Desiring to move away from the previous iteration of Samaadhi at Bridge House Theatre which focused on an objectivist account of history, Mohit and I decided to move further into an exploration of post-colonial trauma and identity through a personal lens.
The piece became far more experimental in nature, skirting through multiple timelines, with subjectivist framing through multiple characters’ point of view as the ‘voices’ from the bullet holes move into our protagonist’s lips.
I broke up the text to mirror a mind fragmented by trauma, and centred the piece on Mohit as the man struggling to keep his identity from being torn apart by the stories from the past. We worked in-depth with Vakhtangov’s transformation and manipulation of costumes, garments and props to ‘weave the threads’ of our protagonist’s mind into a comprehensive whole outside himself, which became the story that he lives through in front of the audience.
Movement and repetition was heavily used to visually synthesise the fragmented text, with choreographed sequences of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre replayed multiple times with stylised changes to reflect the passage of time, characters’ psyche and manipulation of narrative.
cherry-picks
«Mohit and Ivan are master storytellers» - Anita Anand (journalist and TV/radio presenter)
«the duo uses physical theatre and spoken word poetry to depict a non-linear, fragmented narrative of the massacre. ...historical details and facts of the event are cleverly captured in Mathur’s skilful choreography and Novak’s eloquent spoken-word poetry. Portraying excellent chemistry, the duo created powerful images to showcase the pre-shooting atmosphere with people celebrating Baisakhi» - Khushboo Shah for North West End UK.
