Event Details

NCPA Library in collaboration with Metamorphosis Theatre and Films

THEATRE / POETRY PERFORMANCE

MAHMOUD DARWISH – IN THE PRESENCE OF ABSENCE

Design and Direction by Dr. Omkar Bhatkar

“Be a child again. Teach me poetry. Teach me the rhythm of the sea. Return to words their initial innocence. Give birth to me from a grain of wheat, not from a wound. Give birth to me and take me back to a world before meaning, so I can embrace you on the grass. Do you hear me? A world before meaning. The tall trees walked with us as trees, not as meaning. Be a child again, so I can see my face in your mirror. Are you I? Am I you? Teach me poetry, so I can elegize you now, now, now. Just as you elegize me!” – Mahmoud Darwish

In the Presence of Absence (Fī Ḥaḍrat al-Ghiyāb) was published in the original Arabic in 2006. As with every work Darwish published in the last four decades, its appearance in the Arab world was an event. Darwish was the most popular and prominent Arab poet and had become a major world poet. He died two years after writing this book. Thinking this might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous text that defies categorization.

Dr. Omkar Bhatkar, the Artistic Director of Metamorphosis Theatre and Films for the last ten years has been exploring poetry as a performance and has been able to create an aesthetic sensibility beyond genres at the crossroads of theatre, dance, film, and poetry. After creating poetic plays on Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Narayana Guru, Han Kang, Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson, Janabai, St. Theresa of Avila, and Kamala Das, his present exploration of Mahmoud Darwish’s final text is this sublime experience that takes the audience into a unique hybrid world of verse and prose, shadowed by mortality, an oneiric journey of exile, return and the delicate sensations of ‘life’.

Cast: Rekha Shetty, Sharmila Velaskar Kadne, Salome Raye, Omkar Bhatkar

Admission free on a first-come-first-served basis.