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| CULTURE & SOCIETY |
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THEATRE |
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Pandora’s boxes in a puppet world
Subhadra Kamath
Gurgaon
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Photo: Bhanu Prakash Chandra |
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THERE ISN’T much Pandora and puppets have in common. Unless you decide to create mundane characters out of them and put them in a box. That’s exactly what contemporary puppeteer Varun Narain did.
Using puppet characters that he had created over the past two years, Narain, who calls himself ‘an object theatre consultant’, conveys quite succinctly his views on the various ‘boxes’ that our world is divided into. Drawing from his experiences of working in the corporate sector, the characters and boxes are inspired by his short encounter working amidst corporate people.
This resulted in Into the Box — an hour long performance through 16 puppet characters manned single handedly by Narain — staged at Epicenter in Gurgaon on the 5-6 May. The audience, which ranged from children to those young at heart, either watched in rapt amazement or was bursting into fits of giggles as Narain and his puppets churned out a thought provoking satire on our compartmentalised world. Fascinated kids walked out wondering, ‘How does he make so many noises?’
The story is about characters living in the noisy box — the forbidden and greedy box and those who are living in the boxless world. The everyday drama in the noisy box continues until Katran, who is the daughter of a poor man named Jhadan, changes the norm when she transcends from her boxless world to the forbidden box and finds the dust of wisdom. Using her newfound knowledge and the dust of wisdom she transforms everything by making people see things beyond what they want to see.
“For me, the noisy box was really about regular people who are emotional, loud and are mostly friends because they have a common enemy,” says Narain, who drew a lot of his noisy box characters based on observations en route to work in the metro. He would hear these people conversing loudly in the cramped space and characters like Sheela, the loud dancer who is in search of her lost batteries, and the badshahs seem depictive of the regular loud people we’d meet anywhere.
The forbidden box is the fascinating and secretive box where amazing things can happen, but the world forbids us from going there. Eventually we discover that it is there that wisdom lies untouched. It could very well be a box in our own head that we didn’t really open. The greedy box symbolises competition, the silver claw constantly on the lookout for great things that they can nab and destroy. The boxless world is the world outside of the structured economic world where a lot of potential exists but goes waste because they’re not in a box.
“When I was working in the corporate sector, we had separate elevators and floors for people with different pay packets — highly exclusive and hierarchical. You couldn’t interact with the helping staff and each floor was a little microcosm of its own,” says Narain.
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Using puppet characters, Varun Narain conveys his views on the various ‘boxes’ that our world is divided into |
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When asked which characters he associates with the most, he says “All the characters have a little bit of me at different points in my life. Although Jhadan and Katran are very close to my heart, and I also relate strongly to the badshah who dares to step out of the box.”
Narain is currently working on puppets for an NSD festival and spends most of his time creating puppets and teaching kids puppetry. He is currently working on the Tehelka Foundation’s project with juvenile offenders and has worked with underprivileged kids with various NGOs. The show is expected to be back in June, till when he continues to work as an events consultant.
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