The ordinarification of profound things
I do not allow myself to feel sad in everyday life; but in the theatre I cry freely. The grief I have held back over the decades, finds a way to leak out of me in a dark auditorium full of strangers
After many years of Covid shutdowns, I have really enjoyed this winter, the return to cultural events. I have stolen time from life, to do what was once so banal for me: sneak into an auditorium and watch performances. As is the custom with things we return to after a long hiatus, I am beginning to see this ritual differently.
Sometimes when I enter Delhi’s auditoria, I feel a strange quiet descend on me. Amidst the commotion, the chatter, the darting check-you-out looks, the bright lights, the buzzing entries and exits, I feel like I am inside a temple. All my senses are awash; and yet I am at repose. My husband often complains that I am the worst person to watch anything with, because I behave as if I am alone — as if I only happened to be a stranger sitting next to him.
It’s true, I know, that I retreat into myself with relish in the hum of an auditorium minutes before a performance begins; I love the semi-darkness, the bucket chairs, the thick air of secrecy in old, semi-lit spaces. I love even more the cosy warmth in howling winter, the cool air-conditioning evaporating my sweat in humid summer. I love the way spotlights on a dark stage evoke hope in me. I love the silky voices and pauses that announcers pour over my ears. I love, most of all, feeling a part of all the bodies sharing the space — not just the dancer’s, but of those in the audience, sitting by my side, facing the same direction as me. When the house lights go off, and the stage is not yet illuminated, I feel a strange confidence; like someone ready to face the unknown because they don’t feel so alone. I feel connected and safe.
Ever so often, I feel whether this is the purpose of art: to reinforce the way humans are wired to exist. We are wired for two basic needs: safety and connection. Every time I watch classical dance, every time I perform it in a space shared with other human beings, I feel both needs being fulfilled.
Before I explain how, let me ask you where? Where else, do we find spaces that provide a safe space for every part of us: good, bad and ugly? Is there a place where we can find utter and total acceptance? Perhaps between the pages of a book, but that’s still a metaphorical, imagined space. I want a safe space I can walk into, stay behind in.
In the dark blackout of the theatre, I feel an invitation. To step out of the daylight me, while totally anonymous and yet part of a collective. There are so many primal emotions that leave all of us very vulnerable in our daily life, especially at the time we were children. As we evolve and grow up, we learn to survive by feeling our feelings less and less; we find manoeuvres and tactics to evade our emotions because the business of life needs to be carried out. Adulating is hard; why make it harder by fingering potent things?
But while watching a performance where an artist is painting a story with her body or voice, peeling back the layers of sensation and memory, deepening the emotion, throwing it right at you, it becomes easier to acknowledge those primordial feelings that never go away, never throb less, never stop making us as vulnerable as the first time we felt them. I do not allow myself to feel sad in my everyday life; but in the theatre I cry freely. I let me feel my throat choke and a rift emerge in my chest. I do nothing to fix myself. The grief that I have held back over the decades, finds a way to leak out of me in a dark auditorium full of strangers; I feel my feelings along with all of them, collectively and anonymously. I acknowledge my own sadness, knowing fully well that it is not merely mine; I share it with the world, with the character coming to life onstage, with the semi-lit torsos facing the heat of the stage.
When this happens in classical dance for an audience, there is a name for it: saadhaaranikaran. It’s a centuries-old theoretical word for a never-old poetic experience: when the personal is alchemised into the universal. A ras is evoked; your mere everyday feelings are transformed into Emotion.
I think of saadhaaranikaran as an exercise in self-compassion: realising that your own emotion is part of a common humanity. Which is why you need to be sitting in that crowd and looking at a real person feeling this way. This is the moment when you know, and are comforted by this knowledge, that it’s not you alone who feels this way. You begin to recognise an emotion for what it is — fleeting, filling, moving — and not a truth about you. And then, collectively letting it go.
“Saadhaaran”, I used to scrunch my nose at that earlier — why would you call this lofty process ordinary? But now, very often, I think, why not? There is a pleasure in the ordinarification of profound things. It is a great and wonderful thing sometimes: to know that this enormous thing you are feeling, is not yours alone to bear. What is this, if not a tender point of human connection, an unbecoming, a great melding into the multitudes, like the crowd in a cool, dark auditorium?