Delhi-based theatre artist's interactive show makes the most of melodies and melancholy, humour and heartbreak

The Hindu

21-04-2025

Haunting melodies and melancholic reflection knit a daisy chain of emotions as theatre artist Mallika Taneja portrayed the pain of broken dreams and crushed aspirations at a show staged during Adishakti's 11th Remembering Veenapani Festival.
'Do You Know This Song', the Delhi-based artist's solo theatrical piece, transported the audience into a sort of wormhole of childhood artefacts, memory fragments and elusive voices.
With a harmonium, hardbound book 'The Colours of India', and an assortment of fabric dolls, Taneja would sing, speak and share secrets in a space that was reconfigured to seat the audience on either side of the performer, rendering an almost three-dimensional feel to the proceedings.
The interactive musical theatre, which virtually dissolved the performer-observer barrier, has the audience group- reading multi-lingual lines from a pamphlet that resembles a roughbook filled with scribblings, qaudrant shapes and queries on the margins. Some vocal warm-up and sing-along exercises follow under her baton.
The audience is now fully primed to join the artist's search for a long-forgotten voice of a singer who once reigned supreme, but was consigned to oblivion.
Alternating between humour and heartbreak, the ethereal and real, the intangible and the palpable, the artist digs into her memories to reconnect with a voice that belonged to the singer within who had belief in her talent and dared to dream of making it big.
Among the featured songs in the piece are'Vali' and 'So Ja Re', from Taneja's concept album, 'Sapno ki Duniya Mein' (In The World of Dreams)—a collage of songs and sounds for the theatre piece.
Taneja has said that the show was as much about loss and grief as about wanting to find voice, family and fulfil dreams. It speaks of dreams getting shattered, especially those of women who get trapped into domesticity--- the whistle of the pressure cooker on the set that also symbolising one of several structural impediments that stifle dreams.
In a particularly poignant moment in the story-telling act, the artist reads out a letter that asks of her well-being, about 'the dark circles under your eyes', whether she gets enough sleep and wonders what would happen if she stayed off the kitchen for a day.
The show ends with the artist curling up amid the dolls and descending into sleep to the refrain, 'So ja re, gudiya re; sapno ki duniya mein kho ja re, gudiya re' (Go to sleep, dear one; Be lost in dreamland, dear one).
Taneja, whose previous works have focused at the intersections of body, cities and gender, is a symbolic marker of everyday struggles that stifle the spark of human imagination and creative endeavour; it offers a remembrance of and expression of solidarity with, than propose any remedy for the multitude of hapless souls trapped in a loop of incomplete stories and unfufilled potential.