Director, Vidhu Singh and Jennifer Marshall, a freelance writer for India Currents magazine, talk about “Dancing on Glass” (@ CounterPULSE on Oct 8-10)

1. How did you discover and learn about the lifestyle stresses of Call Centre employees in preparing to direct the play?

I had heard about the lifestyle stresses of Call Center employees over the last few years— fatigue, insomnia, depression, nightmares, illness, dealing with racist customers, burn-out, inter-generational conflict and gender issues.

I was listening to a paper on plays about Call Centers, presented by a colleague of mine (Jisha Menon) at the Asian American Studies Conference in Texas this April—she spoke about the city of Bangalore and how it had changed visually and culturally with the influx of the IT industry and then she mentioned Dancing on Glass by Ram Ganesh Kamatham. Something clicked for me in that moment. I was touched by the fragility and brittleness of the characters of Megha and Shankar, by the metaphor of them dancing on glass, as something both celebratory and destructive. That’s how the whole thing started—Jisha put me in touch with Ram and Ram generously agreed to let me direct his play.

2. What do you feel are the impacts of India’s growing IT services industry on human relationships?

I am not an expert on the IT services industry. As an artist, I am primarily interested in how the two characters in the play are impacted by the IT industry.

For example, Megha, a Call Center employee loses her boyfriend, Pradeep. Pradeep oversees the Call Center employees and returning from a non-stop 48 hour shift, his bike crashes into a lorry. Apparently, he fell asleep on his bike or lost control. When he was alive, Megha and Pradeep never had the time to meet because of their ridiculous work hours. After his death, Megha does not have the luxory to mourn his death which occurs as a bit of an ‘inconvenience’ to her. She continues to be ‘a practical cold-hearted bitch’ till she literally has a breakdown and consequently yells at an angry American customes and gets fired from her job.

Shankar, a software engineer, is not a full-time employee, he works from one contract to the next. Finding respite and freedom in the 5-6 days off between contracts. When he gets an offer to be full-time employee he doesn’t know whether to celebrate or just jump out of the window, because he is trapped in a work life that is a living hell.

I was later connected with UCLA professors, who have studied the impact of lifestyle stresses in the IT services industry. Their research is helping me and my actors ground the characters and circumstances of the play in real facts.

Everything that happens to Megha and Shankar is based on fact—her hair falling, her skin peeling, her hands trembling, nightmares, her emotional disconnect.

At the same time, this play is not a documentary on people working in the IT industry, it’s a work of art. This is a dark comedy about the IT industry—it’s a poetic interpretation of how this industry effects the characters of the play. It’s heightened and somewhat stylized rather than literal in it’s approach.

3. Your use of expletives deviates from more traditional Indian theatre, how have you used expletives to express emotion throughout the play and how do you hope the audience will react?

Regarding the use of expletives in the play—the article in the UK Guardian sensationalizes the use of expletives in the play. Megha does breakdown and swear at an angry American customer, but I think the article exaggerates this and sees it out of the context of the play.

4. What, above all else, do you hope to communicate to the audience through your production of the play?

I hope that audiences are touched and charmed by the characters of Megha and Shankar—characters rarely seen on the American stage. Theater should create a kind of transcendence for it’s spectators. By witnessing the characters’ lives in a heghtened, poetic way perhaps we can identify with them and sense the beauty and fragility of their lives, as well as our own.

To order tickets for the show : http://dev-counterpulse.pantheon.io/dancing-on-glass-by-ram-ganesh-kamatham/