DHARAMSHALA, April 10: Over a dozen of Indian theater artists yesterday presented a So Many Socks, a play that tells a story of a Tibetan refugee family in India.
Speaking to Phayul before the performance, Q, the director said, “The play not so much part of the freedom movement or the political movement, it is very much a personal comment. It is about the struggle that happens inside people where when you don’t have a sense of home and across three or four generations, people who have come here before, people who were born here.”
“People who were born here, currently generation want to fight and go back home. So, it is really about the individual struggle and that for us was really interesting and beautiful to bring out.” Q added.
Hundreds of Tibetans and visitors from all walks of life attended the play performed at TCV Day School in Dharamshala. This was perhaps the first time that a major theatre was performed in the exile capital of Tibet.
The ninety-minute long play written by Mumbai-based writer Annie Zaidi was inspired by Kora, a book of poems and stories by Tenzin Tsundue, a Tibetan writer-activist.
“The play is an approximate of Tibetan exiles inquiring into the exile nature of life through dialogues between three generations of the refugees. It shows how politics shapes their life and how they personally respond to the challenges, a first of its kind,” Tenzin Tsundue said.
The performance in Dharamsala was funded by The Foundation for the Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and was organized by Students for a Free Tibet-India in collaboration with Mumbai-based Q Theatre Productions (QTP).
QTP has performed this play 19 times in various parts of India. The same will be presented today at Tibetan Children’s Village in upper Dharamshala.
During an informal discussion with artists after the performance, some of the performers said that the play has ‘hugely impacted’ them and their awareness about Tibet.
“I had a very shallow understanding of what we were doing of the people that we are playing. May be at some level I was regarding it as characters as an actor but when you actually come here and experience it, you know it is very easy for struggles to become statistics and the print,” said Saattvic, who played a cop in the play.
