Friday, October 30, 2015

The Tenth Head - from Friday 30th


In the play, nine of the ten heads of Ravana are a company who are quite happy to conform to a common way of seeing things. Their individuality is limited to each representing one of the nine emotions/bhavas, from the traditional Indian aesthetic.
The tenth however is the odd man out. He does not fit in graphically or psychologically with the other nine heads. He does not want to dumb down so as to be the average man in the collective. And he believes that nine heads on a torso make greater geometric and aesthetic sense than ten. So tentatively he looks either for independence from the others or failing that an equitable relation with them so that he can give free expression to his unique thoughts. He asks a group of artists to work around the conundrum of his visibility in graphic representation.

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