Growing Up:
Till a few years ago, mental health issues were not so out there; now conditions like autism, bipolar disorder, dyslexia, depression, Asperger’s Syndrome, Tourette’s Syndrome, are at least familiar, if not completely understood.
On stage, in recent times, The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time (Indian production directed by Atul Kumar), based on Mark Haddon’s novel, presented an autistic teenager brilliantly.
With fewer resources, Maneesh Verma has staged Dancing With Dad, about the relationship between the autistic Noor (Arjun Kachroo) and his dancer father (Sumeet Nagdev). It is is difficult to take a subject like autism and not make it either too solemn or unpalatably cutesy. Verma’s handling of his play he has written (inspired from a monologue by Itzik Weingarten) and directed, is light, but not frivolous; serious, but not gloomy.
The production uses live music, dance and projection to tell, with warmth and empathy, the story of the widowed, single father trying to reach out through Noor’s barriers, and prepare him to live independently in a world that may not treat him with as much affection as him, and his band of musicians. How their child will survive after them, is often the greatest concern of parents with neurodivergent children. Raising a child like that requires reserves of patience and love, which can be exhausting.
Noor is a photographer – he hates the cell phone camera—but as a child he has faced bullying, the usual taunts of “mad” but he responds to his father’s art and the music that accompanies his modern dance. He has a sense of humour, and gets along with the musicians—particularly the percussionist (Hriday Bhatia)– but he sees the world in his own way, and can be difficult to handle at times. To make Noor more realistic, Verma interrupts the action on stage twice, to seemingly calm him down, and is dismissed with, “Go Manish.”
Nagdev is a dancer and choreographer, so he brings graceful movement to the stage, but the play leans heavily on the performance of Kachroo, who plays Noor with sensitivity and such authenticity, that it is difficult for the audience to figure out whether he is really autistic.
Gaurav Singh Nijjer’s projection design evokes the inner working of Noor’s mind, and complements Kachroo’s performance, along with Siddharth Shenoy’s live musical score.
Dancing With Dad is poignant but also uplifting, with the zig-zagging graph of the emotions, keeping the audience absorbed in Noor’s story.
(This piece first appeared in mumbaitheatreguide.com)
