TWAHA ABDUL MAJEED

Based on a text by Ari Sitas (noted poet, theatre artist and social scientist based in South Africa), called Oratorio for small things that fall, the project emerged from a collaboration between Anuradha Kapur, Deepan Sivaraman, and Sumangala Damodaran and the students/alumni of Ambedkar University Delhi.

Dark Things is a play is about the dark times we live in, the life of refugees, war, migration, capitalist arrogance, factory workers, manual scavengers and bone collectors. It is a collaborative weaving together of bits of hardship from the new frontiers of work and suffering in the 21st Century. The performance uses a montage of images imbued with a sense of materiality that sets the rules of the stage to signify a world out of joint and out of moral kilter. The narrative built around these images tries to develop a geography of crisis through the labouring body, scenographically and performatively through live music, image and sound. Dark Things takes to account histories and contemporary lives of people and the labour of living in dark times.
 

The performance echoes this confluence of creative minds in the way it is structured as an open ended visual narrative threaded through experiences of oppression and tragedy in the late capitalist period. The performance raises intriguing questions about the human experience of humiliation, displacement and mechanization of labour in a world marked by histories of brutalities of man.