The play Be-loved opens up heart-warming conversions about queerness

Be-loved: the Hindi play celebrates Indian queerness through music and theatre

Let’s start at the end. When Be-loved (a play that threw together a montage of queer love stories set firmly in the Indian context) ended on the fifth day of the Remembering Veenapani Festival at Adishakti Theatre, Auroville, the applause would not stop. It was a while before the cast and crew could be introduced. The mostly Hindi play was well-received by the audience though it did not carry a single subtitle in any language.

Be-loved was much loved. It’s difficult to pinpoint which elements worked more towards the play’s effectiveness. The right on cue, live music held together the many narrative strands running through the play, like the spine of a book.

The cohesive, sprightly energy of the actors made the characters come alive and feel familiar. Well-composed scenes, movement choreographies that flowed and excellently rendered songs (by the actors and two musicians who played crucial roles in the storytelling) — all added to the play’s success.

Be-loved began on a heart-winning note as the actors paid a musical tribute to all the writers and poets whose works have been used in the play. The way it portrayed coming out stories, finding out how one journeys and the attempts to make it to happily ever after (even after many heartbreaks) made for a warm, vibrant patch-work quilt of love stories.

The play skillfully employed song, dance and humour to explore the question — why is love so heart-breaking? It depicted the complexity and willfulness of love, besides its ability to shake up relationships — inside and out. It showed how desire plays out, or would play out, if it weren’t given such bad press in society, while keeping the audience emotionally in tune and mostly laughing with it.

A Tamasha Theatre production, Be-loved “has been built in a hugely collaborative way,” says Sapan Saran, the director. Having come across an abundance of stories of “courage, hope, belonging, passion, love and loss,” at the research stage, she particularly sought to delve into “the experience of Indian queerness.” Aspiring to depict its many shades in all fullness — where “vulnerability and desire could sit next to loss, wit and satire,” she put together an ensemble of “multi-skilled performers.” She says, “We knew we had to celebrate queerness by embracing it in its entirety with all its joys, confusions, contradictions and strengths. We had to share these stories not as victims but as human beings — flawed yet complete – like everyone else.”

The playmaking process involved “reading, sharing, open discussions, language training, movement training, ensemble work, object theatre training, listening to personal stories, a whole lot of text analysis and deconstruction, music making and learning, and hours spent on the floor ideating, mulling, thinking, dreaming and hoping together,” says Sapan. Much importance was given to creating “a space that was open and safe for everyone, where we could unabashedly be ourselves, a space that did not ever ask — “are you queer?” but silently understood and respected boundaries” she adds.