PRIMARY COLORS OF MUSIC
In his new show, Stories in a Song, Sunil Shanbag isn’t quite plumbing the depths unraveling the cultural strands that make up the rich tapestry of Hindustani music. Instead he serves us bite-sized morsels through a montage of seven loosely interwoven theatrical set-pieces. The show was conceived by Shubha Mudgal for the recent Baaja Gaaja festival, where the music aficionados in attendance weren’t really expecting theatre after a kind. The stage seemed configured typically, the accompanists were a familiar bunch, but where a ‘lite’ evening of semi-classical airs would have sufficed, something rather more inventive was put out on stage by a fifteen-strong ensemble of actors.
The actors were repositories of oral traditions, anecdotal memories, and those little archival tidbits that tend to usually fall between the cracks. The history of music, mammoth as it must be, isn’t one that most people have on the tips of their fingers. The mythology just doesn’t exist. Here, there was an attempt to scratch the surface and look at the way Indian music has been disseminated over the ages, what it has engendered, how it has been created, or parodied, and what these stories ultimately tell us about ourselves. At the end of its two-hour running time, the production began to feel suspiciously like a full meal rather than just a selection of light entrées.
