Day 5: Everyday Series

At Ravindra Bhawan, the Assam state theater, four performances happened simultaneously: a free hair cut, a line of teeth brushers, a crowd of jumpers and a thick cloud of body spay in the air.  

The night began with Get a Free Haircut,  Dharitri Bodo's fleeting roadside hair parlor named Carefree Hairfree. The scene was set in the front entry way of the theater: scissors, a comb and spay bottle, a small mirror and chair, and a light bulb for vision-so that any acquaintance or passerby was invited to get a haircut free of charge. But the title begs the question: what is at stake in getting a haircut, or likewise a performance, which is free? Does the sitter still have the "freedom" to chose what happens to their hair once they place themselves intimately in the hands of an artist who is not receiving money for her service? Can a performance still serve as a commodity and can it (or should it) be "free" from the documentation that allows it to become archive and art object? Moreover, can the subjects of this scene be read freely from the social text that writes their cultural positions: performer and audience member, laborer and consumer, and a woman cutting the hair of others.

If sitting in the barber's chair of Carefree Hairfree parlor your gaze would be directed to a line of teeth brushers, which stood in front of the theater doorway making an everyday hygienic ritual seem oddly like an expression of solidarity. And next to them, another mundane task was exaggerated to a point of absurd but reflective excess as Syed Taufik Riaz stood solemnly spraying the entire contents of body deodorant into the air- a performance from his one-year series entitled The Everyday of the Small Things. The fumes filled the entire space bringing tears to the eyes of any audience member/pedestrian, so that an object sold with the promise of enticing the other, and keeping them close by, instead acted as a repellant. Any spray that wasn't absorbed into the air dripped on the artist's hands and captured speckles of light, appearing eerily seductive and toxic at the same time.

And then a few people began to jump, "just jump!" as Sumudra Kajal's performative poem joyfully demanded. The poem proclaimed the ways in which the simple act of jumping is at the heart of any motion, as a small group of jumpers steadily grew into a broader contingency of reverberating giggles and shouts that collapsed with an exacerbated jubilent finish. The camera also began to jump, the documentation embodied the motion, and the performance persisted in the body's memory as people left the venue with sore mussels, tender lungs and perhaps, paradoxically more life. The poem and act locates jumping at the site of freedom-a freedom here performed within the theater of the state. Is there any theater outside of the state, and is there a space for freedom within this theater seeing as freedom itself is the state's perpetual promise? So within this untenable and absurd economy of freedom, not unlike the exchange in the Carefree Hairfree parlor, how is movement produced? Kajal's Jump suggests, "Jump when there is nothing left to do in your hand...you are only alive when you are jumping."