As blind-folded audience, you turn into a participant in Aruna Ganesh Ram’s immersive theatre experience to perceive the notions of gender, reports Heena Khandelwal
What's your risk appetite? What are the terms you associate with your gender? The answers to these questions would dictate the Bengaluru-based artistic director Aruna Ganesh Ram's production titled Coloured and Choosing – A blindfolded Gender Experience. Curated for one audience-cum-participant at a time, the 30-minute production involves blindfolded partakers as they perceive their gender through touch, noise, emotions and instincts.
The act starts with a person offering the participant a stool to sit on while talking in English mixed with gibberish. There is a loud, ongoing buzz. A voice talks about a woman's bra, a man is questioned about his identity and a couple is bullied by a cop for being together at a secluded stop. The conversations circle around judgement about clothes, masculinity, femininity and the sex lives of people as he/she moves from one segment to another.
Throughout the segments, the participant becomes the performers as he/she starts reacting to the stimuli. Towards the end, two cushions are pressed against the participant's body while a voice constantly asks him/her to fight this representation of societal norms.
"Can you figure out whether a touch is masculine or feminine if you can't see the 'body'?" asks 32-year-old Ram, who began questioning gender and its associated norms while growing up in Bengaluru. "Once my music teacher scolded me and asked me to 'sing like a girl'. I had no idea how to change my voice," recalls Ram. These thoughts accentuated after she participated in an immersive theatre workshop by a London-based theatre group that worked in the domain of gender. This happened while during her Masters in Advanced Theatre Practice at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2012. On returning from London, she started Visual Respiration, an immersive theatre company, which eliminates the fourth wall and encourages each audience member to become a performer.
It wasn't until she was commissioned by Gender Bender that she started exploring the world through the spectrum of gender, rhythm, noise and touch. The team would blindfold themselves to see how it works and realised that "touch in blindfolded form is very powerful when it is minimal". "When you look at 'gendered bodies', you pretty much think curves, breasts and private parts. But what about the other parts of the body which are regardless of gender? At my workshops, we specifically touch the collarbone, the shoulder bone, knuckles and arms," says Ram.
Ram further adds that the script is organic in nature and although the main sketch remains the same, the permutations and combinations within each segment changes each performance. "In one performance, a participant stopped a performer from being beaten up," she says.
This is echoed by the participant-audience. "At times I felt intimidated, at times I felt sexual. There were times when I felt that I'm in the market. Once I even felt that I was at a party," says 23-year-old Fiza Jha, who works at a design studio. "Being a heterosexual Hindu man, I never faced any harassment. When I was touched on my butt and chest and when my body was rubbed against, I realised the struggle of women in their daily life," says 24-year-old lawyer Vijayant Singh.
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
 "Aruna Ganesh Ram")
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
)
)
)
)
)
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}
){kind=small}