[category]
[title]
An experiment on head lice… modifying your very genes… and in the process… tinkering around with humanity. Slimy pests roped up in sci-fi nets, baited by hope. Beyond this description? You're on your own. This upcoming play in Delhi is ‘hard to capture in writing’, as writer and director Alia Sinha tells me, fully aware that it would’ve only helped her case.
Before you walk in, while you’re at it, chuck every single preconception you have about puppetry out the window. Screw entertainment and puppy dog tales, at least for one evening. Clinical Trial No. 0001 is a shadow-puppetry performance that carries fever-dream promise.
July 31 and August 2 are the evenings to watch out for, and while I can’t tell you the venues just yet, I can assure you they’re well-chosen – intimate and fitting just based on the premise of this play alone. For tickets, we’ll update you, but in the meantime you can stay glued to Alia’s Instagram, @minor_grace.
‘We definitely hope to make this a recurring show and do future runs of it,’ Alia writes to me. ‘The show came about through a highly intensive and beautifully facilitated Puppetry Incubation Lab, run by Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust… The aim of the lab was to train and support the growth of new puppeteers in India, and create a network of independent puppet and material theatre makers.’
‘I was also fortunate to be one of four grantees from the lab who received production grants to develop our shows towards a public performance. That happened in the Katkatha Puppet Fringe Festival in April this year,’ she adds. That’s around when this play screened in Delhi for the first time; presumably, when all ‘participants in the study’ first received ‘free products and placement opportunities’, or so a cheeky teaser says.
I would find myself reaching for words like Kafkaesque, Frankenstein, and absurdism, if I wasn’t busy in my confidence that this is something to watch out for if you’re tired of artists aspiring for exactly those terms. This is a glimpse into a performance medium that most of us in Delhi may have been missing the potential of.