Dark Fairytales: In conversation with Anjan Saha
By Iman Qureshi
A shadowy auditorium, a dimly lit stage, and a lone stool in the centre: we all know why we are here. When writer and director Anjan Saha emerges on stage to introduce the evening with a story of his own, the audience lean in, softly.
The experience of storytelling is patently different from reading. It is aural, it is visual, it is collective. It is always unique – never has quite the same story been told in quite the same manner. There is a frantic desire to hold on to every breath, every word, because it is inherently fleeting – there is no text to read back over again.
There is a guitarist and a tabla player strumming and tapping to one side, and visual projections flowing on the screen behind. “Dreamscape” is how Anjan describes it. “Storytelling is visceral,” he suggests to me later. “Everyone’s brain is different – they receive art and culture in different ways.” And so, through his art, Anjan attempts to engage all our senses.
Storytelling is an extremely rich tradition in South Asia, both as a method by which to preach religion or morality, or art for art’s sake. The form is one which enables stories to be passed down over centuries and across oceans. The premise may be the same, but details and contexts are almost always different.
Anjan Saha’s Dark Fairytales works on this basis, employing fairytales that are familiar to us in one form or another, with the performers contorting them in fantastic and delicious ways. Be it through cultural twists as with “Dreadlocks and the Three Bears” by Baden Prince Jr, or by giving them explicit contemporary significance, as Sabrina Mahfouz brilliantly crosses Alice in Wonderland with eating disorders by using the motif of “down a hole”, these stories are complex lattices of meaning and feeling.
These lattices are created by the combination of different sensual elements in the process of storytelling: whilst we relate intellectually to the meaning of the words spoken, we respond emotionally and viscerally to the sounds and the visual elements. It no surprise, then, when Anjan reveals that music plays a huge part in structuring his storytelling. Interestingly, music in North India is not taught by a written system of notation, but rather told from guru to student – music essentially becomes a story to be told.
Moreover, Anjan explains the importance of a cyclical narrative in these stories, and says that this also draws its pattern from Indian music: “Western music is linear – forward moving,” he explains. “Indian music, on the other hand, is circular. The emphasis is on the ‘1’ – the first beat; you’re constantly coming back to the beginning.” But the idea of circularity is not only in Indian music, but also inherent in Indian philosophy. The idea of eternal return, and the kalachakra—the wheel of life—is formative of many belief systems and religions across India and elsewhere in Asia.
Perhaps what it most significant about the concept behind Dark Fairytales is that it takes Indian music, philosophy and methods of storytelling and then proceeds to weave in other stories and voices from across the world, so that they are applicable to everyone. Our increasingly multicultural society all inevitably find reference points within these culturally specific stories, allowing us—altogether—to marvel at the beauty of our shared humanity.
Dark Fairytales also saw the launch of the CD “Sounds of London Literature Lounge”. Here is a preview track called “Benares Hoedown” which brings together blues with tabla music.
01 Benares Hoedown by Sister Siren
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