Israeli director Gabrielle Neuhaus staged her latest production at the 16th Bharat Rang Mahotsav. She spoke to Iknoor Kaur about how she picks up objects and weaves a philosophy around them
One look at Gabrielle Neuhaus and you’d know that she is a woman of bones, literally. A stick thin lady with hair cut short, high cheek bones, a wrinkled smile and an incredibly flexible body — she has the power to grab eyeballs through the art of silent movement. She recently performed her new production, The Woman Who Didn’t Want to Come Down to Earth, at the NSD’s 16 Bharat Rang Mahotsav.
Performed through the medium of physical and visual theatre, the play was about a woman who didn’t want to touch her feet to the ground. Gabrielle explained, “The play is in three parts so that I could cover all aspects of the character not wanting to touch the floor. The first part is quite literal. This woman is at home when she suddenly hears the noise of war and explosions. She is someone who is quite obsessed about cleanliness. So she has a big dilemma — she wants to go out of her house because its wartime but at the same time she doesn’t want to tread on the dirty floor. So she has to find ways to get out without touching the floor.”
In the second part, Gabrielle depicted the philosophical aspect of the story. She continued, “Now this woman realises that maybe the war that was going on was inside her head. So she starts going back in time and somewhere down the line she realises that she does need the floor, she wants to go back to her sources. But she wants to fly in the air. These are all ways of not wanting to be in the reality.”
The third part looks into the psyche of the woman. “This is actually a dream segment. I used 50 bottles of water spread in the space and this woman is immersed in water. In this part she is underwater, so she is still not on the floor,” she shared.
Gabrielle is a woman of her own mind. She thinks alone, works alone and performs alone. Thus, being the one performing the role of the woman, the most difficult segment for her to enact was the third one. “In the third segment I’m dancing on the stage between the bottles without touching them. So it shows that I was treading on water,” she said.
In this form of theatre, Gabrielle uses her body and images to tell a story. Gabrielle is originally a dancer and picked up theatre only out of whim. She shared, “As a dancer I always wanted to do something more. I found it difficult to just use movements to express. I liked objects and theatre. The combination of the two fascinated me. Even though there was nobody to guide me, I picked up the art gradually.”
Though Gabrielle tours alone to most places, she was accompanied by her daughter to India who will also be helping her with the sound and music. Gabrielle’s latest fascination is with the food processor. “I want to connect the processing of food with the processing of life. like you process food to make something tasty, you have to process good and bad things in life to make it a fruitful journey. The food processor also has some violent actions, but in the end we relish the finished product,” she summed up.