When filming his swan song starring Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, Eyes Wide Shut, legendary director Stanley Kidman put the couple through a gruelling regime of cinematic takes and re-takes which ran into tens in number, occasionally hundreds. Though this was enough to drive most actors insane, the gritty Cruise and determined Kidman did not allow this to deter them from conforming to Kubrick’s will, and apparently it was when they were at their most exhausted that they gave their best performances. The point of this being: they reached their dramatic peak while in a state of radical vulnerability.
Although the Kubrick story is my example, not Nagar’s, her work indicates that SKMS grappled with terrifying hunger and abysmally low wages on a regular basis to the point where one would have assumed (and rightly so) that these gut-wrenching social issues would have crushed the spirits of most. Yet out of the depths of this despair were born some of the most major creative endeavours of the text. Nagar writes how a play whose working title was ‘Kafan’ was transformed into the text Hansa. Focusing on the death of a poor woman who prepares food for the community, it implies that money that could have bought a shroud is better utilized buying food and alcohol for the mourners. Although the spirit recoils at such callousness in the face of death, in point of fact the ethos of the play makes perfect sense from the grim, all-too-realistic perspective of the SKMS. Madan Lal Nagar’s equally grim cover artwork for the book displays a Picasso-like type of surreal quality, lending itself to multiple imaginative interpretations.
Nagar must have appreciated Shakespeare’s sentiment regarding one picture being worth a thousand words, because she includes several touching and useful black and white photographs of members of both SKMS as well as their performances. I was impressed to find that much of the poetry in the book was written by Nagar herself—though hardly the stuff of great literature, it resonates with emotive sincerity. Although she refers to ‘Hansa’ as ‘the soul’ (which is appropriate in this context), there is poignancy to the fact that the word technically means swan, especially since traditionally a swan is known to sing only before it dies. (My reference in the afore-stated to Kubrick’s final film was specifically and deliberately chosen.) Given that global hunger annually results in the deaths of millions of men, women, and children the world over, while one experiences a sense of horror at the tribulations of the SKMS, one also applauds their committed desire to salvage the dignity of their souls by means of artistic ‘swan songs’ if nothing else.
The latter portion of Nagar’s work deals with a course created and taught by her at the University of Minnesota titled ‘Stories, Bodies, Movements.’ Through this course she expects to fulfill an agenda that underscores the importance of personal stories when it comes to achieving social justice. Many scholars of feminism and drama have attempted to create spaces within which the energy of human interaction is allowed to move freely and with explorative dynamism until the chaos eventually coalesces into artworks that possess both meaning and definition. Again, a set of casual but vital photographs of her students expressing themselves (or judging others) via performance lends a sense of clarity to what Nagar wants us to believe she achieved.
Certainly for those who avoid gender issues (and discussions of them) like the plague, this text will come across as excessive, and I can visualize several people abandoning it without doing justice to appreciating what it is about. But that would be a shame, because in the twenty-first century one has a moral imperative to truly understand diversity. Perhaps this imperative has been imposed on us by the likes of Richa Nagar, but the imposition is nothing if not heartfelt and informed.
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