THE SONG OF THE STRANGLED SPARROW
Space • Immersive Theatre • Site-Specific Participatory Performance • Scenography • Storytelling • Spatial Lighting and Sound Design • World-building • Mythology • Injustice • Quest • Installation
Where do the stories of the silenced go?
Among myths and messages, sparrows and silences, what will you choose to hear? What will you choose to forget? To remember, or to retell?
The Song of the Strangled Sparrow was a live immersive show designed to invite individual participants into a scenographic experience wherein they are given a misleading quest to enact in a space with light and shadow movements illuminating six Hindu mythological stories depicting cruelty or injustice, and a specially composed melancholy spatial music track setting the atmosphere. The concept was to question the meaning of absence and the purpose of telling stories. The participant wanders through The Garden (or is it a Graveyard?) of the Primordial Storyteller, wherein they must deliver a scroll to the Being without getting waylaid by the song of the strangled sparrows which hang overhead. The film documenting the show attempts to evoke the same experience.
TIMELINE
ROLE
ROLE
SPONSOR
MENTORS
December 2020 - January 2021
Director, Scenographer, Writer, Singer, Experience Designer
Film and Video Communication Discipline, NID Ahmedabad
Hitesh Chaurasia, Nayantara Kotian, Shilpa Das
COLLABORATORS
SKILLS
Amal Zen, Lakshmi Vidyasagar, Namya Chadha, et al. See credits.
Material handling, spatial and production design, conceptual writing, sound design, direction, leading a production team, graphic design and illustration
TOOLS AND SOFTWARE
OUTCOMES
EXHIBITS AND SCREENINGS
GLIMPSES OF THE PROCESS
Premiere Pro, Adobe Audition, DaVinci Resolve, Photoshop
Film documenting the show (below)
Process Video -watch here-
Poster, personalised invites to the show, brochure, documentation images and films of the immersive show, musical soundtracks created for the experience, a scroll with a secret message, and a journal full of musings, research and thumbnail drawings for the illustration
The Fountain, National Institute of Design Ahmedabad (04 and 05 January, 2021)
In the Design+Film project at NID Ahmedabad, our brief was to create an audio-visual experience for our audience, not necessarily limited to film. As each of us created an independent idea, we became the directors of our own exhibitions. As a filmmaker, relinquishing authorial monopoly was exciting and rewarding. Rather than a spectator, the audience became the participant-protagonist in the immersive show, creating a unique, personalised experience each time. The authority was limited to creating the elements of the experience; the experience was created by the participants themselves.
ELEMENTS
The concept started with a space. Our course sessions with Nayatara Kotian introduced us to spatial worldbuilding and immersive theatre. The course brief allowed us to work with any of the spaces and galleries on campus, and when my team and I observed the enchanting movement of light at the Fountain, with its modernist beams and square gaps, we wanted to create an experience there that would combine storytelling, art, movement and participation.
RESPONSE
It was heartwarming to receive live feedback from the participants after their time in the space, and hearing about their unique experience and interaction with its elements. It made me wonder how I could lean towards participation rather than spectatorship in all my future filmmaking endeavors.
REFLECTIONS
The Song of the Strangled Sparrow taught me that a project of incredible scale and a tight schedule is possible to achieve with a good team, supportive mentors and perseverance. With over 50 people in the credits list, it showed me that to be a designer is to love working with people and to have faith. I realised also that studying filmmaking did not limit my scope to films; it enriches a personal practice which I can expand and explore by conscious navigation. It taught me that being interdisciplinary is a choice. I began to love working with spaces, studying and understanding their character, how they could be harnessed and transformed, and their potential to tell embodied stories.