Aanmaiyo Aannmai (Macho o Macho!)

Marappachi

presents

Aanmaiyo Aannmai (Macho o Macho!) 

Script
V. Geetha

Direction]
A. Mangai

On Commedia dell’ arte
Commedia dell’ arte (comedy of skills) is a satirical form that is about social equality. It developed in Italy from the 12th – 18^th centuries.  The pleasure of comedy corresponds to our need to overcome fear – of death, of hunger, of lost control, of ourselves and each other – and so these themes are explored in the comic tradition. In our work together on Commedia dell’arte, Marappachi developed locally relevant character masks who could explore the world around them.  When we present characters, we imagine the most extreme extent of their personalities and desires, and are true to that.  The use of mask is at once a tool and a ritual of communication, opening a direct emotional channel between audience, performers, and masks.  Mask happens on a grander scale than our everyday lives, relative to the great human and social landscapes that art must explore. It is this process of amplification that enables us to see more clearly. 

    Mar Stine

Today, in Tamil Nadu, we do not possess a historical memory of the Self-respect movement’s vision of women’s liberation. What happened to all those revolutionary, intelligent women in the movement who were enthusiastically present and active in the public sphere? Why did that heritage not yield a feminist politics in the years after? This play is a search for answers to these questions.
Rather than focusing on the the women who were thus ‘decieved’ and made to disappear from the public sphere, the play calls attention to the masculinised logic that achieved this deception. Arguments and counter-arguments on a range of issues - a masculinised political sphere and the discourses that shape it, the choices made by those who were and are active in this sphere and the imagination that keeps it alive – structure the play; while humour, satire, anger and sorrow move the scenes along. This play marks a distinctive moment in our feminist politics.

      V. Geetha

Undermining the role of women and their points of view in public space is not new in history.  It is slighted, criticized or belittled for reasons best known to gender hierarchised social structure.  Yet it becomes impossible to remain unaffected when the systems believed to be progressive give away their true nature.  One has been part of its making; one deals with these realities on a daily basis.  Humour alone possesses the necessary strength to articulate our failed hopes and frustrating realities.  Nobel Laureate Dario Fo, the Italian political theatre artist has provided a mode by which one can make statements of the most abominable political contexts through Commedia dell’ arte.  This production deploys that form to treat art and politics as equally significant.  What else can one do but laugh till it hurts, when one engages with the political history of Tamil Nadu from a gender perspective!
                                                                                                A. Mangai