The magic of puppetry and the passion and the hard labour involved in the tugging of strings come together in Lipika Singh Darai’s Backstag...
The magic of puppetry and the passion and the hard labour involved in the tugging of strings come together in Lipika Singh Darai’s Backstage. Darai’s absorbing documentary looks at a range of performance styles in Odisha, from shadow puppetry to the use of life-sized figures to narrate episodes from the epics and folklore. The puppets are often heavy but you cannot let the pain show until the curtain drops, one of the artists tells Darai – an apt summary of the film’s efforts to examine the burden of legacy.
Backstage began to take shape way back in 2013, when Darai watched a government-sponsored programme of folk puppetry.
“While it’s considered a dying art form, I was watching something that has been performed and curated for me,” Darai observed. “This folk art form had already been displaced, in a sense. These artists had come from various parts of the state to perform on a stage for us city folk.”
Even as the Films Division production provides portraits of four sets of puppeteers and their individual concerns, Darai poses other questions. How do age-old folk traditions survive? Can a performance in the present day truly be called authentic, especially since the puppeteers tweak with the storylines and the...
