Open your doors. Jyoti Dogra is back, says Saumya Ancheri.
 The pamphlet accompanying Jyoti Dogra’s performance of The Doorway at Gallery Beyond in April 2009 describes the play as a collection of narratives which “sometimes feature unambiguous beginnings and endings, but, more frequently, begin in the middle and are then abandoned, or conclude abruptly, or begin independently only to subsequently merge with the others”. It didn’t lie. Dogra used a doorframe and pulsating light to present her memories and associations with space. She contorted her body and voice in a bizarre, captivating sequence that evoked loss, death, arousal and violence via excerpts from Punjabi fairy tales, songs and, possibly, nightmares. Dogra didn’t want to complete her stories but to set off a personal chain of associations in the viewers. She travelled to several Indian cities and towns last year, including Ujjain, Bhopal, Jabalpur and parts of Kerala and Karnataka.
It wasn’t until Dogra performed in Puducherry last August that she realised some members of her audience were feeling left out. “A person said, ‘It’s like we’re watching you enjoy the rain from a window; we’re not standing in the rain with you.’” So Dogra went back to the drawing board to figure out how to make her work more inclusive. “People know how to negotiate their way through a linear narrative,” explained Dogra. “With imagery and a little text, the piece is more experiential, the participation has to be at an emotional level.” The stance seems to have worked, as it elicits strong audience feedback.
Viewers debated if the overt sexuality in the piece was a Western influence. One of the recurrent images in the narrative was a jar of pickles, an everyday object that often came up in Punjabi folktales and lyrics. “A woman in Ujjain took me aside to say she knew that I’d meant the jar to represent an unborn girl child,” said Dogra. While some people were reminded of a man or a lizard when they watched her perform, a college principal in Ujjain was quite sure her performance stemmed from her unmarried status. He said that the whole play talked about the problems of a single woman because Dogra was one herself. It angered Dogra but she accepted it as his view of her world. “To him, instead of settling at home and rearing children, I was going to small towns and doing strange things, [exhibiting] deep melancholy and loss,”
she said.
Dogra hopes that the performance that has grown over the past year will throw up new associations for her original audience.
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