Actors Ensemble India Forum presents

Hidden in Plain Sight - Version 2.0 (Digital Edition)

Supported by Bren Centre for Arts

Synopsis

You must have heard of the Mailer Daemon? She faithfully replies to you, every time an email bounces. From the message fragments she often finds, she knows there’s a girl in the apartment who’s possibly losing her mind. Sandhya is trekking up in the mountains but can’t quite seem to find her freedom. And then there’s Mrs Raghuraman, who loses her head at a party.

Four characters intertwined by fate, their stories woven into a tapestry that can only reveal the unspoken, the partial, the incomplete…

About the play

Hidden in Plain Sight is a solo theatre performance by Mallika Prasad that blasts through a blistering array of material, from a Bollywood cabaret number, to the letters of a seventeenth century Zen monk, from the city as a mythic backdrop to cyberspace as urban wasteland. In this moment of extreme isolation we explore relationships, online communication and the fragility of human connection.

Hidden in Plain Sight premiered at the Going Public Theatre Festival at Goldsmiths, University of London, in June 2012, developed and performed by Mallika Prasad. It was further developed at the Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Arts Research in Puducherry, in collaboration with writer Ram Ganesh Kamatham with a presentation in December 2012. The show then toured, with performances at the January 2013 editions of the International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFoK) and the Windermere Theatre Festival, Bareilly, to critical acclaim. Public shows took place at the Jagriti Theatre, Bengaluru in June 2013.

While the stage show was set aside in 2013 to focus on new work, the research questions raised by the performance endured. The piece is now being presented with a renewed sense of urgency and relevance in a digital avatar!

In this moment of social distancing, where almost all communication is mediated by digital platforms, what happens to the energetic presence of the performer? Is it possible to connect with an absent audience in a shared moment of truth? What does hearing the human voice have to offer to one’s sense of physical and mental well being?

Credits

Written by Ram Ganesh Kamatham & Mallika Prasad Sinha

Dramaturgy – Scott Walker Ferrara

Cameras & Editing – Vishnu Nambiar

Sets – Prasanna Sagara

Make-up - Aditi Raman

Crew - Disha Rao

Designed and performed by Mallika Prasad Sinha