Resilience of art through unprecedented times

NT Correspondent

Bengaluru: Born as a theater piece nearly 9 years ago, Hidden in Plain Sight v2.0 is a collaboration between Mallika Prasad Sinha and Ram Ganesh Kamatham.
“We had written this together nearly a decade ago and had put it away. But the loneliness and isolation we felt during the pandemic made me revisit and see it in a new light,” says Mallika, the founder and creative director of Actors Ensemble India Forum.
Being locked in during the pandemic made her realize the urgency of communicating with people across the world who were feeling the same way.
“When the pandemic began, we had no audiences and a lot of artists had nowhere to perform. All we had was Zoom performances. This is what helped us create a hybrid performance style that incorporates live streaming with previously recorded material,” she says.  
Adding the collaboration with Vishnu Namiar, a filmmaker, who experimented with different lenses to capture different moods really elevated the performance. She explains, “The aesthetics emerged from an exploration of being isolated, mental health, voyeurism and feelings of claustrophobia via a variety of lenses. The choice of dual/multiple frames of the same moment became an invitation to drifting or a wandering to allow the eye to be drawn to what feels right to the viewer in the moment.”
Our lives online is one of the primary inspirations for the piece. “What we realized over the last couple of years is that when the world was locked down, the virtual world opened up. At times my social media feed was like a continuous obituary of people talking about loss. But also filled with people helping each other find beds, oxygen and resources. It showed how people had the ability to find resilience in the face of catastrophe. Which is what we have tried to represent in our piece.”  
Hidden in Plain Sight was staged online last year on Insider and Bookmyshow where at one point it was the only show during lockdown. And has since then gone on to win the Infallibles Awards 2021 for ‘the Best Show’ at the Edinburgh Fringe and has been accepted at numerous film festivals.
You can catch the digital edition at Bangalore International Center this evening and also interact with the creators after the screening.