Auroville: A cultural desert?

Later on it was also performed at the Sri Ram Theatre in Delhi, where it received good reviews. The play is about a bourgeois couple (admirably acted by Croquette and Yanne) who meet one last time, just after their divorce has been finalized, in a hotel room at night; a hotel that they used to frequent. They meet to talk, and to try to come to an understanding of their relationship. They have loved each other, but have yet to realize the full nature of the passion which has finally torn them apart – although the woman intuits and understands what’s going on, and as a result is perhaps more in control than the man. The play is in two acts and the tone of the first part is one of confrontation and even, at times, comedy; in the second part there is a growing recognition of the hopelessness, the impossibility of their love.

Dialogue is the central element of the play; there is little physical contact between the characters throughout the performance. However, even more than through the dialogue, it is in the many moments of silence – sometimes interspersed with music – (in the way the woman enters the room, in the way she holds her partner’s gaze for two long minutes, in the way she half turns her back on him) that the tensions, uncertainties and intensity of their attraction for each other are most successfully evoked and brought out.

The play was performed in the marble floored living room of a house in Sharnga, and the intimacy of the setting and surroundings, combined with the close proximity of the actors to the invited audience, created a special form of interaction that was very tangible and even at times unsettling. It was almost as if the audience was part of the play in a silent way, as if each one of us was sitting helplessly in the living room of two friends whose relationship was in the final act of breaking up.

Yanne spoke to me about the play just a few days after the performance. She also talked about the history of Theatre d’Expression d’Auroville and the difficulties encountered by any form of creative expression in Auroville, as well as the barriers of fear and lack of communication that frequently divide us.

The company

For five years Theatre d’Expression, a close-knit troupe of fifteen people, met and worked together three times a week. They performed some fifteen different plays, including a number by Molière and Racine, comedy and café-theatre, and improvisations as well as poetry. Yanne described it as popular theatre that could be enjoyed even by those who didn’t speak French. There were tours in India – to Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Goa – as well as to Singapore, which she felt for those involved were a genuine collective Auroville experience through theatre: of living, being and travelling together.

A few years ago she and Croquette felt the need to step back. Later they moved to Dana, to be joined by other members of the old troupe.

She wrote a novel (Pour l’Amour de Kali), about a French woman who discovers India, and with a number of other Aurovilians helped to produce two films, one of which was a documentary for French television in Pondicherry, which won two of the highest awards for television documentaries in France.

Of the old troupe only Sylvain continued to work with theatre, producing a number of plays with the students of the Alliance Française in Madras.

She described the choice of a play by Marguerite Duras as a move away from popular simplistic plays with the message, to one in which the audience can identify with what’s going on, ordinary as it might be. “We are after all ordinary people here, even if we aspire for something else.”

Along with Duras’ fine writing she feels there is a spirit of search in her plays, in the way she studies the psychological relations between people. For Yanne, the play is simply about two people who still love each other but can no longer live together – because passion destroys love.

She was struck by the intensity of attention from the audience, and remarked that Duras envisaged the audience as being part of the play in a voyeuristic way. Speaking of the many moments of silence in the play (which takes forty minutes to read out loud but lasts an hour longer when performed): “In silence one continues to speak and think, and one’s thoughts are communicated to the audience. The character’s presence has to be maintained through a density of concentration.”

The wider context

We then shifted to a more general discussion about Auroville which, she feels, is somewhat like a cultural desert. She feels there is no creative atmosphere on the artistic level in Auroville, a fact that has something to do with the difficulties of daily life here. She mentioned that she and Croquette could only find time to rehearse in the evenings, as their days were taken up with their normal work (she works at the Press, he teaches), and their children. But she feels there is the absence of a need, there is no collective call for artistic expression, and this she feels has something to do with Auroville’s fragmentation, its individualization (everyone doing their own thing individually). Then there is the increase of such tendencies as the politicizing of Auroville into groups, constituting one of the after-effects of the long, traumatizing struggle with the Society, with the loss of simple human relationships characterized by friendship, trust and camaraderie. One of the results of this is that there is fear in Auroville. Fear of being alone, fear of what others might think of you, with a resultant self-censorship. There is also a lack of places, forums, and theatres where people can meet and talk, and drop their masks.

Yanne believes it is serious because all of us came here for the same thing and yet we are not able to recognize it, or even speak to each other any more. “We have come here for the work, the yoga; and even though we are far from realizing it, we should still be able to meet and talk about simple things.”

In an evolving society, people should be allowed to make mistakes – to fail. She believes that there is a horrifying intransigence in this regard in Auroville, and all in the name of the ideal. We need to go beyond the petty clichés, projections and formations we continually lay on each other. In her view it is on the level of daily life and not in our heads or in formal meetings that we can change, that we can meet each other again in another way.