It didn’t take a pandemic for Bharatnatyam danseuse Savitha Sastry to wake up to the enormous potential of the digital universe that’s now emerged as indispensable. As she releases her latest production titled ‘Colors: Green’, she finds herself at the top of the virtual game, having spent the last two years digitising her earlier stage productions.
The motivation was simple–its outreach. Leveraging its omnipresent appeal, Sastry has released a trilogy based on the colours of the Indian National Flag.
“When our founding fathers decided on the colours, they associated each with an ideal that they hoped would permeate through the great nation. We have tried to juxtapose these ideals with the position of women today,” she says, adding, “Green represents fertility, growth and auspiciousness.
In our production, we question the evolution of a woman’s dreams and desires being carried to fruition as opposed to discovering satisfaction in a model suburban life of affluence and role play.” Like all her previous productions, this one too has been scripted by her husband, AK Srikanth.
The story was born out of him observing the life of his mother, one where her dreams and aspirations had to play second fiddle to her family. Half a century later, unfortunately, things are still pretty much the same. “Even today, a woman is ‘conditioned’ to believe that raising children and caring for the family is her most important raison d’etre. That’s not entirely true,” says the dancer.
Even as the pandemic tightened its grip, the shooting of ‘Colors: Green’ didn’t stop. If anything, it made Sastry ever more determined to finish it on time. With dread and despair enveloping everyday life, she felt the positivity of art needed to drive away the gloom. “Of course, this meant we had to shoot with a skeletal staff and take on the grunt work of lugging equipment, cleaning the locations, and all other associated production work ourselves. But it brought all of us closer,” she says. The two other parts of the trilogy are titled ‘White’ that should be released by the end of 2020. By March 2021, ‘Saffron’ will be out.
Contrary to what most performers believe, Sastry says that a stage production couldn’t have done justice to a narrative like this.
“It needed a broader medium where more elements could be included to amplify the visual dimension. And that advantage came with being able to shoot outdoors locations. The main artistic liberty we took was to have different characters as part of the presentation. In a stage production, I would’ve had to do an essay for all the parts, with perhaps a voiceover playing in the background,” she says. Shot in and around Bengaluru, the production had two themes running through it —the ‘real world’ and a ‘dream world’.
The former was shot indoors, while the latter was taken to whimsical outdoor locations. “We found a charming pond in the middle of the woods, an unusual quarry and an abandoned architectural relic on a hill, all of which stood in stark contrast to the real world that the protagonist inhabited,” shares Sastry.
The costumes too differed. In the ‘real world’ they’re tinted in green, and in the ‘dream world’, they’re a splash of myriad resplendent hues. The music is composed by Chennai-based maestro Rajkumar Bharathi, who has scored the soundtrack for all her productions in the last decade.
Working on the production has kept Sastry occupied through the last few months but it has also helped her realize an important lesson: The power of resilience. “For a vast majority, the pandemic turned their worlds upside down. People had taken a lot for granted. Close ones lost their lives and jobs were taken away overnight. But through it all, if it, we all managed to find strength and a way of adapting to a new reality,” she says.We may still be stumbling but we’re all moving ahead and that’s what matters the most. ‘Colors: Green’ can be viewed on YouTube
“When our founding fathers decided on the colours of the Indian National Flag, they associated each with an ideal. We have tried to juxtapose these ideals with the position of women through the production,” said Savitha Sastry.