Adorning and Witnessing - Part 1

The world inside a mask is a space of vulnerability, more so because my mask was an adornment and not a disguise, it was not a place of hiding. I was adorning traits and a persona that would reveal meaning and experience for the other. My stomach was churning, I was nervous, I was not a performer by any right and to have made a grand announcement of providing an experience to my audience was beginning to scare me. To ease my frayed nerves, I made a few decisions - I will constantly be true to how I feel, I will not enlarge my role into playing a charade and I will reveal as the environment demands of me. I will witness the environment and be wholly present in it.

I made sure that the audience did not see my real face until the final conversation circle. There was only Zaba and Bhootham in this environment, they were given no opportunity to build meanings with my real face.

The entire act lasting around 1.5 hours was conducted in absolute silence. I was at War with Words like never before! Both I and the audience were making meaning in our stillness, our shared meanings were emerging through keen observation of the other. Both of us were testing and probing each other to generate meaning. We were co- inquirers in this space attempting to navigate our own mind, emotion, and senses while drawing from the larger environment around us.

In my act, I felt completely present and experienced absolute freedom, where the moment in hand mattered the most, with no expectation of an outcome. This state of Flow was shared.

In time my adornments became a space of play, where the audience started experimenting with sounds, movements, and their own bodies to provoke my adornment to interact with them. It was in this play that meaning was being generated, the relationship with Bhootham and Zaba was being built in a way that was true to them.

The experiences were many, realities were multiple, the attempt to witness was running high and each participant was trying to spot the 'significant' to construct meaning that was relevant for themselves. They were going back to their memories and 'knowing' to decode the reality they were witnessing. At the end of 4 hours, I was exhausted and delighted. In adorning Zaba and Bhootham I had created a space of Maya!
Here is the video of the experience I created through Adorning and Witnessing.