The Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) 2014 has kicked off, and one of its highlights, Give Me Your Blood and I Will Give You Freedom, takes place from Aug. 15 to 17. Over the course of 50 continuous hours, performance artist Nikhil Chopra will tell the story of the all-female Rani of Jhansi Regiment who fought for India’s independence during World War II. The work combines visual art and performance art as Chopra turns a blank canvas into a representation of that tumultuous time. Give Me Your Blood and I Will Give You Freedom was specially commissioned for the festival.
Q: Tell us how the concept for Give Me Your Blood and I Will Give You Freedom arose.
A: I’m really interested in time and the boundaries between space and time. And I really believe that in order to gain a certain kind of depth – not necessarily in a performance, but for anything you do – you need the length of time to let it crawl under your skin and allow you to get to the roots of knowing something. Yes, 50 hours seems long but you know, in the course of life, they are actually short. When you first start something like a 72-hour or 99-hour performance, it seems daunting, but when you get into it and start getting that flow, you start to live in the performance and time flies pretty quickly. And then when you look back at the performance the time feels really short. I think we as a generation are so obsessed with high speed and instantaneous results that we’ve forgotten that the best things in life take time. I do a lot of drawing during the performance and since drawing is such an important task, I feel it needs to take that length of time for it to be completed.
Q: Why was this particular period of India's history chosen for the work?
A: I’m also interested in the intersection between two cultures, one where I come from and the other where I will perform. To prepare for this piece, I visited Singapore for research early this year. I was at the National Museum and the National Archives and was struck by how much India’s and Singapore’s histories are interwoven with one another. I am struck by how much Indians are part of Singapore’s identity, not just in the past but even now.
Subhas Chandra Bose became this point of intersection for India and Singapore. He was in Singapore in the 1940s in exile from India, recruiting soldiers to fight for India’s freedom from British rule at the beginning of World War II. His politics are controversial as he pandered to the Nazis and the Japanese. Bose called out, “Give me your blood and I will give you freedom,” with the hope that he would arouse passion and sentiment for a free India – free from 200 years of British tyranny. Women joined Bose’s Indian National Army in Singapore and he referred to them as the Jhansi Ki Rani Regiment. He was directly referring to Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi who fell martyr to the mighty British Army in 1858. Her story has since been the story of many struggles, including feminism.
All these are clues for me and I am only referring to them. They serve as a backdrop for my personae to carry out the task of making drawings in the performance. You will not see me in the persona of Bose, I merely use him and his conflicted politics as a clue, a backdrop or as a point of reference. My aim is not to retell the history of this period, but to work with it as a point of departure and to critique its place within history.
Q: How have the roles of women in Indian society changed since the era of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment?
A: India is such an enormous country – and culturally, what happens in North India is different from what happens in South India and vice versa. Generally, I think India is still largely conservative, but I find that the North is more conservative than the South when it comes to issues on gender and the place and role of women in society. In the North, I find that it is more firmly structured in a strongly patriarchal sense whereas in the South I would say it is a bit more liberal in terms of women’s role in society – as contributors to society – and they are far more assimilated.
For example, I would say that women form a larger percentage of the workforce in Bombay (Mumbai) than in a city like Delhi. Women in a city like Bombay, especially within a certain class of society, are running businesses and homes. In the North however, if you walk into a marketplace, you would not see that many women heading the shops. But there is a kind of conservatism in the North and there is a different kind of conservatism in the South. By and large we are still a very sexist society and we are still a very patriarchal society. Kerala is perhaps one exception where the women are inheritors of their family’s wealth.
There is also a massive divide between the urban and the rural, and within a city, class is a strong determining factor because it establishes the kinds of exposure a woman has to Western education and ways of thinking of what the role of women should be, and what it means to find a strong, clear voice. But this is a very, very small minority. I would say by and large we haven’t really moved very far from the 1940s.
Q: Tell us more about the physical and mental exertions that you will experience with this performance. How do you prepare yourself and how do you keep yourself going for 50 continuous hours?
A: I don’t stay awake, I sleep and sometimes I feel that I take luxurious long naps. I’m not afraid to take the rest that I need in order to do the work that I have to do and I don’t separate rest from work because I think they are both sides of the same coin. If you don’t rest you won’t be able to work. And if you are not resting and you are working, you won’t be able to work for long. So the balance is really important.
The rest is also important because it is not just the physical work that one needs to be ready and fit for, but also the mental work. The more fatigued you are, the more irrational you get. The more relaxed you are – the more rested and the more nourished you are – the more rational your thinking will be. The “rest” is as part of and as fundamental to the work as the moments of activity. There is something vulnerable about the sleeping body in the space and that is something that I play with where I’m sometimes found just lying there, asleep, covered in charcoal. It’s not the kind of sleep that I get in my own bed at home, but I know I’m in a state of rest.
Q: What is the best way for the audience to experience the performance?
A: It is often that I hear audience members coming up to me to say, “You know, I came twice and both times you were not doing anything. We felt you were taking a break.” I’d like the audience to consider that even while I’m seemingly not doing anything, it is something. Sleeping is doing something and that something is very connected with the rest of the action. I think I embody an image from the start, and this image changes throughout the 50 hours. As the audience enters the space, I invite them to absorb the entire image and, in whatever shape, position, form and action, or in repose, to embrace the image. Sometimes the image can be quite uncomfortable, like a lying body in a state of sleep, or covered in charcoal or ink, but it is also extremely curious because in this space, everything is an image, everything is on display and you are allowed to look at the image for as long as you like or for as short as you like. I think there is something intriguing in the idea of staring and about the permission to do so, so I often have people come and sit really, really close to me when I’m asleep. There is something quite comforting about that.
I would recommend that the audience comes at least three times throughout the 50 hours, stay for as long as they like, and then leave – go out for drinks or eat something. Come back and see how the space transforms and how my physicality transforms. What I hope to do is arouse the curiosity of the audience to return, to imagine the missing pieces of the puzzle while they were away, and to wonder how the performance will progress and end.
Give Me Your Blood and I Will Give You Freedom takes place from 7pm on Aug. 15 to 9pm on Aug. 17 at 72-13, the home of TheatreWorks (72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road). Tickets are available for $35 through Sistic and allow unlimited return visits. View the full line-up on the SIFA 2014 website.
The Singapore International Festival of Arts (SIFA) 2014 has kicked off, and one of its highlights, Give Me Your Blood and I Will Give You Freedom, takes place from Aug. 15 to 17. Over the course of 50 continuous hours, performance artist Nikhil Chopra will tell the story of the all-female Rani of Jhansi Regiment who fought for India’s independence during World War II. The work combines visual art and performance art as Chopra turns a blank canvas into a representation of that tumultuous time. Give Me Your Blood and I Will Give You Freedom was specially commissioned for the festival.
Q: Tell us how the concept for Give Me Your Blood and I Will Give You Freedom arose.
A: I’m really interested in time and the boundaries between space and time. And I really believe that in order to gain a certain kind of depth – not necessarily in a performance, but for anything you do – you need the length of time to let it crawl under your skin and allow you to get to the roots of knowing something. Yes, 50 hours seems long but you know, in the course of life, they are actually short. When you first start something like a 72-hour or 99-hour performance, it seems daunting, but when you get into it and start getting that flow, you start to live in the performance and time flies pretty quickly. And then when you look back at the performance the time feels really short. I think we as a generation are so obsessed with high speed and instantaneous results that we’ve forgotten that the best things in life take time. I do a lot of drawing during the performance and since drawing is such an important task, I feel it needs to take that length of time for it to be completed.
Q: Why was this particular period of India's history chosen for the work?
A: I’m also interested in the intersection between two cultures, one where I come from and the other where I will perform. To prepare for this piece, I visited Singapore for research early this year. I was at the National Museum and the National Archives and was struck by how much India’s and Singapore’s histories are interwoven with one another. I am struck by how much Indians are part of Singapore’s identity, not just in the past but even now.
Subhas Chandra Bose became this point of intersection for India and Singapore. He was in Singapore in the 1940s in exile from India, recruiting soldiers to fight for India’s freedom from British rule at the beginning of World War II. His politics are controversial as he pandered to the Nazis and the Japanese. Bose called out, “Give me your blood and I will give you freedom,” with the hope that he would arouse passion and sentiment for a free India – free from 200 years of British tyranny. Women joined Bose’s Indian National Army in Singapore and he referred to them as the Jhansi Ki Rani Regiment. He was directly referring to Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi who fell martyr to the mighty British Army in 1858. Her story has since been the story of many struggles, including feminism.
All these are clues for me and I am only referring to them. They serve as a backdrop for my personae to carry out the task of making drawings in the performance. You will not see me in the persona of Bose, I merely use him and his conflicted politics as a clue, a backdrop or as a point of reference. My aim is not to retell the history of this period, but to work with it as a point of departure and to critique its place within history.
Q: How have the roles of women in Indian society changed since the era of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment?
A: India is such an enormous country – and culturally, what happens in North India is different from what happens in South India and vice versa. Generally, I think India is still largely conservative, but I find that the North is more conservative than the South when it comes to issues on gender and the place and role of women in society. In the North, I find that it is more firmly structured in a strongly patriarchal sense whereas in the South I would say it is a bit more liberal in terms of women’s role in society – as contributors to society – and they are far more assimilated.
For example, I would say that women form a larger percentage of the workforce in Bombay (Mumbai) than in a city like Delhi. Women in a city like Bombay, especially within a certain class of society, are running businesses and homes. In the North however, if you walk into a marketplace, you would not see that many women heading the shops. But there is a kind of conservatism in the North and there is a different kind of conservatism in the South. By and large we are still a very sexist society and we are still a very patriarchal society. Kerala is perhaps one exception where the women are inheritors of their family’s wealth.
There is also a massive divide between the urban and the rural, and within a city, class is a strong determining factor because it establishes the kinds of exposure a woman has to Western education and ways of thinking of what the role of women should be, and what it means to find a strong, clear voice. But this is a very, very small minority. I would say by and large we haven’t really moved very far from the 1940s.
Q: Tell us more about the physical and mental exertions that you will experience with this performance. How do you prepare yourself and how do you keep yourself going for 50 continuous hours?
A: I don’t stay awake, I sleep and sometimes I feel that I take luxurious long naps. I’m not afraid to take the rest that I need in order to do the work that I have to do and I don’t separate rest from work because I think they are both sides of the same coin. If you don’t rest you won’t be able to work. And if you are not resting and you are working, you won’t be able to work for long. So the balance is really important.
The rest is also important because it is not just the physical work that one needs to be ready and fit for, but also the mental work. The more fatigued you are, the more irrational you get. The more relaxed you are – the more rested and the more nourished you are – the more rational your thinking will be. The “rest” is as part of and as fundamental to the work as the moments of activity. There is something vulnerable about the sleeping body in the space and that is something that I play with where I’m sometimes found just lying there, asleep, covered in charcoal. It’s not the kind of sleep that I get in my own bed at home, but I know I’m in a state of rest.
Q: What is the best way for the audience to experience the performance?
A: It is often that I hear audience members coming up to me to say, “You know, I came twice and both times you were not doing anything. We felt you were taking a break.” I’d like the audience to consider that even while I’m seemingly not doing anything, it is something. Sleeping is doing something and that something is very connected with the rest of the action. I think I embody an image from the start, and this image changes throughout the 50 hours. As the audience enters the space, I invite them to absorb the entire image and, in whatever shape, position, form and action, or in repose, to embrace the image. Sometimes the image can be quite uncomfortable, like a lying body in a state of sleep, or covered in charcoal or ink, but it is also extremely curious because in this space, everything is an image, everything is on display and you are allowed to look at the image for as long as you like or for as short as you like. I think there is something intriguing in the idea of staring and about the permission to do so, so I often have people come and sit really, really close to me when I’m asleep. There is something quite comforting about that.
I would recommend that the audience comes at least three times throughout the 50 hours, stay for as long as they like, and then leave – go out for drinks or eat something. Come back and see how the space transforms and how my physicality transforms. What I hope to do is arouse the curiosity of the audience to return, to imagine the missing pieces of the puzzle while they were away, and to wonder how the performance will progress and end.
Give Me Your Blood and I Will Give You Freedom takes place from 7pm on Aug. 15 to 9pm on Aug. 17 at 72-13, the home of TheatreWorks (72-13 Mohamed Sultan Road). Tickets are available for $35 through Sistic and allow unlimited return visits. View the full line-up on the SIFA 2014 website.