| Mr. C, the
first cloned human being, arrives hesitantly to deliver a lecture under
the aegis of the “International Global Cloning Authority.” What starts
out as a science lecture on the types of cloning, gets steered into an
intimate monologue, to eager listeners, on his personal life. There were
bursts of laughter from sections of the audience now and then. But one
felt there was a tinge of uneasiness about them. They did not arise out
of any inherent comicality in C’s lecture but out of a sense of slight
discomfort with the entire situation.
What Gil Alon
was repeatedly hitting at, in this solo theatre presentation, was not so
much the physical sameness that the scientific act of cloning produces
as much as at the psychological and spiritual conditioning and homogenizing
that happen, even in our times, in institutionalised ways with all our
consent. The crack in the glass laboratory canopy that had so terrorised
Mr. C and others of his community is probably symbolic of those painful
ruptures that occur in our mass-produced mindscapes and awaken us to the
fact that something is going wrong, that “it is not okay that everything
is the same.”
Yes. Those
were clear comical moments when Mr. C distributed biscuits among the audience
and showed everyone the photographs of his family and friends. But here
again he inadvertently demonstrated the impossibility of rigid, codified
and homogenised collective thinking or activity sustaining itself for long.
The sensing of a possible rupture in such a neatly packed and confident
system becomes inevitable. What Gil Alon later called “endless constant
investigation,” be it artistic, spiritual or scientific, becomes the need
- to save everyone from some painfully catastrophic awakening.
Gil commanded
the sharpened attention of every member of the audience throughout the
“lecture.” It was interesting to see that Mr.C, who came from the land
of sameness and had acquired the aura of being “different” within seconds
after his entry, soon became, somehow, “not-so-different”!
Aniruddh
Vasudevan is a Bharatanatyam dancer based in Chennai.
 |
 / |
|
