The Doorway by Jyoti Dogra is poetry in motion

It’s exactly one year and the audience will be back at a city gallery to see how theatre actor and director, Jyoti Dogra’s iconic performance arts project titled The Doorway has shaped up during the past 12 months. After all, the project has travelled through ten different cities in the country, added and subtracted content, documented the audience reaction in smaller and big cities as well and added perspective to her much-evolving work.

Dogra chooses to define her project in her own terms, “The Doorway is a collection of real and imagined stories that have been woven together in a physical narrative exploring the nature of our physical inhabiting of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ spaces. While some of the material in the piece is loosely autobiographical, the rest has been drawn from images or impressions of life around us, some from fairy tales and folk songs, and some from entirely imaginary experiences.” According to her, the narratives are communicated through bodily images, gestures and sounds (mumblings/chants), with minimal spoken text.

The project that has been funded by the India Foundation for the Arts has kept Dogra on the road for a year, but she has no plans of calling it quits yet. She points out, “For the last one year, I have worked on this every day, either rehearsing, researching or travelling across cities. Though my project now finishes, I will continue to work on this form.”

Dogra also points out that travelling through various parts of the country, small towns and metropolises has added perspective to her work. People in Ujjain, she points out, reacted quite differently from people in Kerala. She explains, “The response in people is connected to an overall culture of a particular place. In Ujjain, people associated my doorway with a womb, but in Kerala, they associated my project with imagery in Malayalam poetry.”

Back in Mumbai with her theatre project after one year, Dogra admits that she does not expect the audience to remember her every nuance of what she started out with last year. She explains, “I want them to remember the associations they made with the doorway. It is not just time that has passed; a year in their lives too has gone by. Their associations in life have changed and I am urging them to look at themselves again though my project.”