Alaknanda Samarth pushed the limits of ‘safe’ theatre
The Hindu
She believed that if we did not reach a point of breakdown with our voice and body, we were simply wasting our time doing theatre
A few days ago, I lost one of my dearest theatre friends, my most avid and soul-searching correspondent over the years, Alaknanda Samarth. In a way, her death was a blessing because she was spared the excruciating pain of cancer. And yet, even while she was coming to terms with her imminent death in the last two months, she spent much of her time reading and recording Eliot’s The Waste Land in counterpoint with the Upanishads.
Even as I face a loss of words in attempting to pay a tribute to Alak, I realise that words mattered deeply to her. Not just their meaning, but their resonance. She relished the concept and practice of dhvani. At one level, this was an uncanny, musical tuning to the sound of words — not just in English, but in a spectrum of languages, including her mother-tongue Marathi, her theatre language Hindi, and the language that she shared with her husband, Francois Duriaud, a veteran of Reuters, with whom she spoke in French. When I worked with Alak on an experimental performance piece called Prakriya, she amazed me with her capacity to repeat passages of Peter Handke’s Kaspar in Manipuri, along with songs in Marathi from sangeet natak, and Racine’s soliloquies spoken pianissimo in French. She was a profoundly multilingual being in her embrace of the world.