Latest news with #JyotiDogra
Mint
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Mint
‘Mezok': A play featuring six actors and a shapeshifting table
Actor-director Jyoti Dogra's penchant for using objects in her productions dates back to 2014 when she worked with a table and chair for a short performance in Japan. 'I started working with it, climbing on it. When you stand on a table, you are a different—a changed—person," she says. In her previous award-winning production, Black Hole, she used a sheet in a big way. But it all began with a wooden stool that broke mid-rehearsal. 'If that hadn't happened, Black Hole would have been a different play." And now, the table returns in her latest play, Mezok, as well. Dogra is best known for her solo work like Notes on Chai, Black Hole, and recently, Maas. But this is the first time that she has traded an actor's role for the director's seat in an ensemble piece featuring six actors and a shapeshifting table. They take you on a journey across mountains and towering malls, through stories of desire and longing, frequently interrupted by bureaucracy and fate. Dogra has little interest in linear stories or narratives or, for that matter, in language in its literal sense. But she uses some form of all three to give her piece its unmistakable rhythm. She began Mezok, which was earlier named Mez (table in Hindi), with no idea or theme in mind. All she had was an image of six actors walking on a table. 'You begin with nothing and stay in the nothingness till the end. That allows things to change," she says. Siddharth Sirohi of Baro Design was roped in to design the formidable piece of furniture straight out of Dogra's imagination. 'I had told him that the table must look like a tree had been uprooted. It must reflect in the texture. And indeed, Siddharth's table is made of old teak. It has a certain coarseness," she says. Her characters in the play, though, are rootless—in search of homes, lives, and connection. Dogra chooses to layer textured moments and images that can unlock something deeper in the audience. Despite the devised nature of the play, the lines are poignant and often stop just short of being poetic. Dogra's extensive exercise in elimination ensures that discomfort, not beauty, takes precedence. Also read: 6 events you must check out this Mother's Day weekend The devised piece began with the cast mining their own lives for stories rooted in their culture and region. A week later at their residency at Prakash Raj's Nirdigantha in Mysuru, the enormous table entered the fold. It was welcomed and cared for as a new actor— a raw giant member of the ensemble. Dogra encouraged the actors to walk on it, sit underneath it, and note the change in experience. They moved the table around— it stood upright at times and was overturned at others. When they stood on top of it, the actors looked up and said they felt like they were atop a mountain. 'Because when you are on a mountain, you look up. It is only when you are in buildings that you look down," says Dogra. This is how the idea of the fictitious mountain Mezok was born. It helped that two of the cast members (Ambika Kamal and Tsering Lhamo) came from the hills. The group discovered and developed many ideas, and eventually distilled them down to longing for different lives, and homes. The central characters are all named Pavitra Kumar and have the same distinguishing features. The first, a driver from Delhi, dreams of a life in Alberta, Canada. The second makes the move from the mountains to Mumbai to work as a watchman in a glitzy new mall. The third accompanies an army battalion as a porter in high-altitude conditions. A fleeting fourth, Pavitra Kumar, a corporate slave, visits the mountains in search of peace. He dreams of quitting his job, marrying a Pahadi girl, and becoming a potato farmer. The two hill women, though long for the men, live robust lives filled with labour and simple pleasures. The sixth member of the ensemble (the table) becomes the seat of every rendezvous. It stands tall when the lovers meet amid mountains, is dragged around when the women gossip while they labour, doubles up as a passport office, and turns into the door to a childhood home when a son comes calling on his estranged father. The under-shelf shapeshifts into different kinds of windows in an office and a home. It unlocks a new space for the actors to explore. The table is never left behind and is central to the scenography of the play as the seventh member of the ensemble. It urges you to look deeper, not simply marvel at its form and function. Mezok, majestic and imposing at once, sees you before you see it. It is as much a metaphorical mountain in the lives of its protagonists as the real snow-capped image. But the play does not exist in the fantastical space one may imagine. Its moments are deeply rooted in the politics of labour and class, migration and urban development, and more. Also read: White smoke on the silver screen: How Hollywood sees the papacy Much like Dogra's other work, it doesn't pontificate but lets the layers unravel for the viewer. Dogra believes it is 'unconsciously' political and it's the way she'd like it to remain. 'A position is too simplistic a way of doing things. As much as I am interested in politics, when it comes to my art, I am interested in other things," she explains. Mezok has a bare black stage for its abstract world with inventive use of threads to aid movement. As the table is dragged around its periphery, the heaviness produces a coarse grating sound upon friction. Though discomforting at first, it finds its rhythm in the musical interludes by Kaizad Gherda. A vocal call to the mountain Mezok, by the actors, flirts with the idea of a different realm and escape from reality, but the play never fully commits to it. It's quite like the lives of the many Pavitra Kumars and their imagined existence in different worlds, so clear yet so far. It creates the space for a track on bureaucracy and endless paperwork. The limbo and the language are in stark contrast to the emotional graph of the scenes. The son, dealing with his father's death, is seen grappling on an extended phone call with an insurance company. The driver's flame of hope is quickly doused by the jaded officers at the passport office. And a woman's search for her missing husband in the upper reaches of the mountains is impeded by forms and formality. Mezok is filled with these subliminal inner explosions, and a particular externalised one. And while at it, it leaves you on the verge of one of your own, offering a rare catharsis wrapped up in the swathes of an imagined picturesque landscape. Like the mythical mountain, it makes you feel seen — sometimes small and defeated, and at others, tall and hopeful. 'Mezok' will be performed at the Prestige Centre for Performing Arts, Bengaluru, 10 May, 7 pm. Also read: What to watch this week: 'Gram Chikitsalay', 'The Royals', and more
The Hindu
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Tabling out existentialism with Mezok by Jyoti Dogra
Bengaluru-based Linear Festivals and the Prestige Centre for Performing Arts (PCPA) is celebrating their collaboration with Mezok, a play. Not only will this show be Mezok's premiere in the city, but it is also the inaugural show of the LinearX PCPA performances. Mezok is a multi-narrative performance that unveils the complexities of human nature. According to Jyoti Dogra, playwright and director, 'Mezok is a made up name, of a made up mountain, a mountain that sees you before you see it.' Mumbai-based Jyoti Dogra who has 20 years of solo and original work to her credit, says Mezok is the first time she is writing, directing and producing an ensemble piece. Talking about the ideation and conceptualisation of this work, she says, 'It began with explorations around a table, and from there we began building a world suspended between the real and the abstract.' 'Over the years I've been working with various pieces of furniture and somehow, I was fascinated by the table. It is three dimensional, but when you look at it vertically, it transforms into something completely different as opposed to when one accesses it from underneath. The kind of spaces a table opens up, just in terms of our presence inside it fascinated me, and I decided to work on this idea.' Jyoti and a few like-minded others developed the idea further at Nirdigantha, the art education centre at Shettihalli,over a period of two months. 'We started with a table and no plans, but within the first 20 days, ideas began to emerge — of a mountain, offices, dining tables and bureaucracy. Soon, the table stopped being a table — it became a bar, a home, a plough, a field, and more. Our material began to develop and I started to structure it; that is how the piece came about.' 'An upside down table is a space that is different from the one that is created when you stand up on it. You are in a different place altogether, and not just physically,' she adds. Though this weekend will see Mezok debut in Bengaluru, it has already completed 20 shows after opening In Bombay and has been staged in Bareilly, Hyderabad and Delhi. As many as six regional languages can be heard in Mezok — Kannada, Hindi, Punjabi, Sirmauri (a Pahari dialect from Himachal), Garhwali from Uttarakhand, and Ladakhi, apart from English — courtesy actors from Ladakh, Jaipur, Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai. 'From the beginning, I urged actors to improvise in their mother tongue, even though the rest of us would not understand. Language played an important role in the way their bodies responded to the table and the spaces within it,' says Jyoti. Jyoti elaborates on how a mother tongue causes a shift in the way a person is present in their bodies and how those changes play out when they relate to other people. 'While most of these actors now live and work in urban communities, the process was a journey back to their roots and childhood and where their families are from.' 'Though the table starts off as an object you can identify with, it has a contextual use and changing its position opens up spaces which changes how you feel within your own body,' she says, adding that, 'the table is not a prop, but is one of the actors, playing many roles in Mezok.' Linear Festivals was founded by Vishruti Bindal and Bharavi in September 2024, with the intent of 'pushing boundaries and expanding possibilities in the performing arts'. Mezok is their first show in Bengaluru and one of the more pragmatic aspects of the festivals is that their events are held at venues along metro stations to make them accessible for all. Mezok by Linear Festivals will be performed at the Prestige Centre for Performing Arts on May 10, at 7pm. Tickets starting at ₹299 are available on BookMyShow.
