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 this site-specific live immersive show I directed for my NID Design+Film semester project, audiences transitioned from spectators to participant-protagonists, wandering through The Garden (or was it a Graveyard?) of the Primordial Storyteller with a misleading quest to deliver a scroll to the Being without getting waylaid by the song of the sparrows that hung overhead. Through choreographed light movements overhead illuminating six Hindu mythological tales, a performer, and a bespoke spatial soundtrack to set the atmosphere, the experience urged them to consider the meaning of absences and the purpose of stories.
Scaling through an interdisciplinary team of 50+ collaborators in fabrication, production, and performance, the project also generated a short documentation film as an evocative cinematic echo to the show exploring ecological loss and mythic hauntings. It led me to move beyond controlling the message to designing vivid conditions for communication, and approaching spaces as sites for meanings to be birthed in mutual dialogue by setting, elements and bodies; this experience has continued to shape my exhibition design work since, such as at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale.
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. I began asking what stories could live inside that rhythm of light and absence, what kind of encounter the space was already half-proposing. The answer arrived not as a narrative but as a world: one that invited participants to embody agency in familiar mythological tales depicting injustice.
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.