Between the Camera and I
by Tanima
When I was young I had a game where I pretended I was being filmed all the time — while falling asleep, walking, eating, playing. I would leap from the bed to the floor and this all-seeing camera would capture me mid leap, producing in ‘court’ a photo of me touching neither bed nor floor but suspended in between, which rendered me safe from the clutches of the monsters of either territory. If I nicked a chocolate from a corner shop without paying it took a photo of my bare hands (bulging pockets always out of the frame). I would show off to an imaginary audience by being extra boisterous with my friends in the playground when I remembered this invisible camera following me.
It was a strange game for a 90’s kid, since media and self-fashioning and technology hadn’t yet attained the surveillance levels possible today (hello vloggers, Instagram, Pegasus). What made my game fun, though, is also what makes Allegedly’s pandemic-era Zoom chorus of 15-ish womxn fun — in both there is a thrill to risking exposure, to finding in the everyday a spotlight in which to stand, even if briefly. Within this space of framed, mediated performance much is at stake — pushing limits on what one can get away with, seeking confirmation of one’s own innocence and importance, and figuring out one’s place in the world in relation to everyone else.
In the initial days of creating the chorus the camera was a self-centered distraction for me. I’d be trying out scenes while jostling with thoughts like — is this clown face I’m making funny enough? (Self-criticism.) My hair looks nice today! (Vanity.) Unlike the medium of film where camera angles and shots edited together forge perspective and pace, theatre’s audiences generally have access to the entire scene of the show — whether it is on a proscenium, in the round, on a street corner — unmediated by a singular eye.
When Allegedly’s chorus first started working together in September 2020, it was in the form of a theatre group, with devising and improvisation exercises based on songs and text that had been written already. But as we experimented with form, the eye of our webcams became more than just a transparent device that allowed us to occupy the same space on computer screens. The camera also became a site for play (it helped our concentration veer back towards the totality of the group to turn off self view so that we couldn’t see ourselves in the grid anymore), opening up new opportunities to create drama, tension, and intimacy. It added that extra juiciness that made up for the static drag of my body sitting on a chair in front of a laptop for hours. It made mobility and depth, or the illusion thereof, possible in new ways.
The camera brings the chorus together for every show, albeit tenuously. It is in relation to the camera, to seeing and being seen, being in separate boxes but also too close for comfort, together but never on the same page, that the chorus enacts its particular claustrophobia. As the play progresses the chorus increasingly talks at one another — going from a cackle of jokes as at a kitty party (‘So…what was the color of his chaddis?’) to a TV debate shouting match (‘She shouldn’t have done this!’ ‘HE shouldn’t have done this!’). These tensions are not unlike some of the affinities and fault lines in feminisms today.
Yet there is also a consensus of sorts when it comes to what the chorus wants. At the very end, in semi-darkness lit just by the light of the Zoom window in front of us, we speak our desires. We want…revolution, chai, rain, our rights, Begumpura, freedom, more butter, a return to childhood, to walk in a park at midnight, more lovers and orgasms, Instagram followers, never to have to wear a mask again. These desires are utopic, personal, political, joyful and unreasonable. As desires go. They are certainly not meant to be a manifesto, but they do have a specific location.
The exercise of eliciting this list of wants from the cast one rehearsal in December 2020, was a window into longing during the lonely days of the lockdown. So it makes sense that we spoke as ‘ourselves’ and that these wants could just as easily be spoken by the chorus as by an individual middle-class savarna woman, liberal and progressive, a ‘good’ feminist. This is not to confess that the cast and the characters are all singularly bound to all these identities but to point out that irrespective of that, the structure and articulation of our desires is. Whose labour, whose oppression is the condition for these dreams to be dreamt? Is it even possible for moneyed womxn to dream alongside (or behind, instead of for/in the name of/in front of) the domestic workers employed by them? But those are questions for another play. In this one, within its frame, the squabbles that abound in the chorus are telling for they strip off the shiny veneer of precisely this broadly liberal, progressive, feminist world where doubts, challenges and pure nastiness regarding consent, sexual violence and pleasure abound.
Consider Jugnu. She thinks of herself as a good person, is cute, talented but also insecure, hungers for attention, wants to be proximate to power, and feels increasingly dismissed by others (WHY won’t anyone listen to her song?). This makes her lash out in cruel ways against the only person she can put down who cannot speak back to her — the woman narrating her story. She is also easily hurt and feels misunderstood when someone points out that she is, in fact, being ridiculously patriarchal — ‘Of course WE believe her. But I also lie sometimes na. Then?’ Or — ‘she could have turned the shower off, surely!’ Jugnu finds it most unbearable to have her own complicity in maligning womxn pointed out, since she KNOWS that no one is a bigger victim than she herself. Only the others don’t seem to notice.
And this is my favourite kind of villain, if Jugnu can be called one — fairly ordinary, self-pitying, dangerous, full of mischief and contradictions, perhaps even beauty sometimes. I get real joy from putting on her face every now and then. The villain all good people can be, under the right circumstances. These are the spaces of everyday life — kitty parties, TV debates, our living rooms — where our own innocence, and that of our friends and families, is rehearsed in echo chambers. In the context of the knotty realities of #MeToo but also when the Brahmanism and transphobia of the comedians and feminists we like are pointed out online. There are real and imaginary cameras and audiences popping up around us all the time — and in life, as in the chorus, we try to shine, or hide, or take sides, or some slippery combination of all of the above.
Thankfully the chorus is more than just villains — there is a Chabeelee and a Chamko to ooze sexiness, a Bunty and a Kattu to scold bad feminists, a Sansanee and a Jhumki to add dazzle and shine, and so many more. Still, not a great showing of solidarity, which Begum knows as as she wipes the makeup off her face at the end of the play, refusing the sign that marks her as one of this chaotic group. Her refusal spurs a similar refusal in the rest, whether in shame or rage or tears. Perhaps other styles of refusals are also possible, and even necessary, in order for a different world.
The question I am left with is — what can be played and what must be refused in front of a camera? Maybe the answer to that is where the messy, glorious work of building feminist struggles across differences really begins.
Documenting and archiving the journey that the play has taken since 2018, the conversations and people that it has been a part of, the questions it has raised and continues to try finding answers to! If you have watched the play and have something to say/write/sing to us and something to add to this blog’s journey, reach out at Khoyepaaye@gmail.com. More writings coming soon, keep in touch!
