Mesmerized!

On-stage performances leave a long lasting impression on you than on-screen performances. They have an impact on you you probably cannot imagine with the moving pictures. So I have always heard from the theatre lovers around me, if I don't address them as fanatics to do the least. Well, Saturday was a day when I came face to face with this dawning realisation.
I have started watching some serious Theatre work very recently and Sunday was another such day my better half, who is a fanatic herself and justifiably so, decided to take me to watch Draupadi, a baby of Kanhailal (for ignorant souls like myself, he's one of the well known faces of national/Manipuri Theatre and truely a visionary to say the least), at the ongoing Nandikar Theatre Festival in Kolkata. I did not know this evening would change my perception of Stage Performances forever.
Kalakshetra Manipuri is a group which was formed by Heisnam Kanhailal who is an alumnus of NSD.
The entire play progressed pretty smoothly. Although i did not get anything out of their language, they used the stage and their body languages to keep the audience in loop. The play appeared a very well composed social play with equally good, if not brilliant, performances from each member. However lightening struck me in the last half an hour when Savitri Heisnam, playing the old Draupadi, took the stage by surprise.
She made the audience sit up, right to the edge of their seats when she enacted the scene of getting humiliated by the millitary personnel, raped and bruised, and then came the moment of naked truth. She took off her clothes to the horror of her tormentors and the very object of their desire was now her strength. And it is now that i realise I shared the horror of those tormentors. She made me feel ashamed of my existence in a bold act of defiance. There was no lust, no love but only shame in what was to follow. It is indeed a difficult feeling to explain. She refused to bow down, to cry or lament of surrender to evil. She decided to rise up against the atrocities using her very own body as her weapon. Yesterday this body made her vulnerable. Today, it was her strength. I saw my companion literally on the edge of her seat and her hand covering her mouth gaping in horror. I had goosebumps. Savitri the actress or Drapadi the character, someone out there had stirred a hornets nest. How? By defying the social norms of Indian Theatre? Or by taking us to watch in real the grave injustice that happens around and yet, we keep living in denial?
There are a thousand thoughts racing in my mind and while I write this, I am having goosebumps again. I am no expert in Theatre but I am definitely a changed person after last nights performance.
This was one of those moments which keep you thinking for all times to come. In these times of "development" are we not forgetting the pityful state of affairs that women are still in? Should we still continue to live in denial or get up and act?