Devissaro: an embodiment of experimentation

Tim Supple’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream left Australian shores a month ago, but for those who chanced to see it, the visual extravaganza still lingers in the mind’s eye, and the music still reverberates in our hearts. Even as I write, I can hear the percussionists easily capture the chaos of the fairies’ ritual dance at nightfall as they burst through the paper backdrop and climb irrepressibly along the bamboo wall. Or the perfect comic timing of the flute every time the hilarious Bottom cracks us up with another joke.

“The music for the Dream was often just small 30second fragments¾it had to capture the audience in that small time frame,” says music director Devissaro. And capture it did, creating a memorable musical atmosphere even when competing with Supple’s stunning visuals. “The percussion was often just a punctuation for the text,” says Devissaro. “The musicians had 200-300 cues and had to rehearse tirelessly to perfect their timing.” And cues in Supple’s play came in seven different languages - English, Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi and Sinhalese. “The musicians do not understand all seven languages, so the cue must be recognised merely by the sound of words,” he explains.

Yet, the multilingual production had its advantages, Devissaro believes. “The blessing song in the beginning, in Shakespeare’s original English text is really quite corny and stupid,” he laughs. “But once translated into Bengali, it sounded perfect, especially with my Indian melodic sounds.”

Just as the text of Supple’s play was multilingual, so was it’s music. From Manipur came N Tiken Singh’s hand made string instruments, including the Sananta, a folk version of the Sarangi. Kaushik Dutta, among his regular guitar and other string instruments, also learned to play the Dotara, a tribal, folk instrument from Bengal. And there was D Prakash’s Carnatic mridangam, and percussion of other multiple folk instruments. Often during the play, my eyes would be drawn from the main action on stage to Prakash’s deft handling of all these instruments perfectly on cue.

The live music performance for the Dream was as much theatre as the actors’ performance on stage. “A good musical performance is theatre,” says Devissaro. “There is as much drama and pathos in a live musical performance as in a play.”

“Prakash had a larger-than-life stage presence¾after all he was a street performer,” says Devissaro. For the last eight years, Prakash had contributed to Government of India projects as an actor and composer for numerous street plays, creating awareness about AIDS, the environment and Education for All.

Prakash died in Sydney just after finishing the Australian tour. “It is really unfortunate. Prakash was especially wonderful as the drummer on stage in the scene of a play within a play. The musician replacing him, in fact will not come on centre stage,” says Devissaro regretfully.

The greatest challenge Devissaro believes, was working with actors who had to be singing, though they were not trained singers. “The songs went through several changes and had to be simplified for the actors. The accompanying music also evolved during rehearsal,” he says. “Tim is very sensitive to music and wanted a lot of music throughout the play. We were experimenting and creating as the scenes evolved. There was an openness to experimentation, much like playing games and discovering new things,” he says.

Devissaro is not new to experimentation¾in fact he really embodies the crux of experimentation, in every aspect of his life. Devissaro was born to a middle class family in Australia, a life he left to lead an alternative lifestyle in rural Western Australia. “At the time, like a lot of young people, I wanted to understand who I am without the distractions of things like the TV and refrigerator,” recollects Devissaro. “I wanted to simplify life. I lived without electricity or running water. I learned to grow my own food, milk cows, put out nets and catch fish, build a house and even raise a bee hive. I was living much like an Indian sadhu, without knowing that at the time, of course.”

There he built a meditation retreat, where city dwellers were given a small hut to meditate and their basic food requirements were fulfilled, all free of cost. Here he met a Buddhist monk¾ a bhikshu¾who used to conduct meditation classes at his retreat on weekends, while maintaining silence for the other five days. Influenced by him, Devissaro left for Thailand, to become a bhikshu himself. “A bhikshu is a beggar. He has no physical existence unless people do not have the faith and charity to feed him. Those four years, I lead an elemental lifestyle¾as a bhikshu you do not listen to music or even sing. It was like stepping into a time machine and going back 2,500 years.”

His spiritual quest then led him to studying Dhrupad vocal music with the famous Dagar brothers, Hindustani classical Bansuri (flute) and Pakhawaj (drums) in India, where he has lived since. There he met, and has been married to Daksha Sheth, often called the enfant terrible of Indian dance for her experimentation and innovation of Indian traditional dance forms. Outcast, including by her famous Kathak guru (teacher), Pt. Birju Maharaj, she has established the Daksha Sheth Dance company, of which Devissaro is the Co-Artistic Director, creating experimental dance productions such as Chaya, Yagna, Bhukham and Postcards from God.

“Both Daksha and I are lovers of tradition,” says Devissaro. “We do contemporary work in the knowledge that someone else is preserving them. With globalisation, traditions have become even more fragile. When Daksha took to learning Chau, it was not to innovate, but to preserve the tradition,” he adds

Devissaro has studied his arts in the guru-shishya parampara--the traditional, oral, Indian style of learning where the shishya (student) lives with, learns from and often serves the guru. “It is a wonderful way of preserving tradition. It is because of this parampara that India still has a wealth of traditional knowledge,” he says.

“However, the shishya, in this process becomes a close copy of the guru. They are so serious about their own gharana (music style), that they don’t appreciate any other. If one even shows the slightest appreciation for another style, one is thrown out.”

“Very often, musicians even refuse to teach outside the family, because they see it as a personal family heritage. Many of those who do teach, have secret material which they don‘t share with outsiders,” he says.

Devissaro was also trained in Australia as a classical pianist¾is there any trace of the Australian in him? “The real Australia is the vast country¾the vast open spaces of the dessert, where things are reduced to their elemental essence¾very primordial. Nature there is powerful and unforgiving, which I have only found elsewhere in the Himalayas. I like to believe that there is a little of that in me.”