“It’s a long story and if I start narrating how I came across the concept of Manganiyar Seduction, I’ll sound like a broken tape recorder,” said Roysten Abel with a laugh, the director of the musical show which will be held in Dubai this weekend.
Well, the Manganiyars are a group of Rajasthani Muslim musicians who sing folk songs and ballads about the glory of legendary rulers and historic events, sometimes inclining towards devotional music, irrespective of religion. Abel’s first encounter with the Manganiyars was in Segovia, Spain, where two of these singers followed him everywhere, even at night, singing continuously till he fell asleep and again when he woke up. Ultimately, mesmerised by their songs, Abel decided to create the show.
“They ‘seduced’ me. Hence, the name of the show is Manganiyar Seduction.”
Abel, a 1994 alumni of the National School of Drama, founded the Indian Shakespeare Company after returning from an apprenticeship at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1995. He earned national and international recognition with his creation and direction of Othello in black and white in 1999. He has been part of the Womad music festival too, alongside musicians such as English singer and songwriter Robert Plant, who Abel is a big fan of.
Manganiyar Seduction at Dubai Media City Amphitheatre on Friday, November 7, will be the show’s second outing in the UAE after 2011. 43 musicians perform on a vertical stage designed as 36 brightly lit boxes, arranged in four rows, remniscent of an opulent darbar hall in a royal palace. The music flows randomly from one red-curtained cubicle of performers to another, creating a unique visual.
“It’s not just the stage but the whole show — the way the music is arranged and composed [that creates the visual],” Abel explained. “What we are trying to do is find a contemporary language for an art which people conveniently call ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’ and like to leave it in a nostalgic space. We are trying to reclaim that contemporary ground.
“We’ve performed more than 120 shows already and there’s hardly been an Indian audience. The thing with this show is it’s highly accessible to any kind of audience across the world. We have a lot of young Indian audiences too. We don’t perform at the classical music fests, but the young, hip ones which offer music such as rock, dubstep, EDM — where kids aged 17 to 25 come. When we performed in Melbourne, there was a family with three generations, who came to watch all five days. I was shocked, meeting them before or after every show. We performed in Abu Dhabi with Womad three years ago. But Womad doesn’t come to Abu Dhabi anymore and it’s strange Dubai took so long to make this happen”.
Excerpts from the interview:
Tell us what Manganiyar Seduction is.
Manganiyar Seduction is just another way of doing theatre. It’s just that this is with musicians. This has been part of my later work [as a theatre director], such as The 100 Charmers, The Kitchen and The Manganiyar Classroom. It’s one of the most popular shows on the music festival circuit, in fact one of the top three shows. It’s like Indian trance which takes you to a different level.
How did you come up with the stage design?
It’s partly inspired by the red light district of Amsterdam. But, having said that, it’s a combination of Hawa Mahal [Palace of Wind] in Jaipur and, for me, a wall of jewelled boxes. Each box represents a jewel box — after all the Manganiyars are gems of our country. I wanted to really showcase them. And, the bulbs will remind you of the bulbs around a green-room mirror. So it also represents the audience looking at themselves in the mirror. There are so many things that led to the design of the set.
Speaking of music, who composes it? Is it original, traditional or is it arranged to create a story or a sequence?
It’s a fully constructive piece, I’ve arranged it myself. It’s been created after listening to zillions of songs and picking pieces of each song. It’s not one song after another. The show has only one song Alfat Un Bin In Bin and then other songs are interwoven into it to give the audience a varied emotional experience which takes them to a crescendo.
There isn’t a story but a narrative, which I call an “experiential narrative” because it’s not something that you are aware of while watching or hearing it; you are not trying to decode the language or anything such. Yet at the end of it you feel as if you’ve been taken through a journey.
Manganiyar Seduction is on at Dubai Media City Amphitheatre on Friday, November 7. Doors open 6pm, show starts 8pm. Tickets start from Dh150, log on to platinumlist.ae.
