Under the Light of a Full Moon
“how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls.” - Sara Ahmed
This is a hybrid digital & IRL kitset performance about colonisation and art.
It is ideally done with an accompanying set of objects. Please email me through nisha.usha.madhan@gmail.com to organise one. Otherwise feel free to read and listen without one.
Enter the password: dreamdreamdream
Instructions
Before you begin you will need a computer with internet access in front of you on a surface like a table.
You will also need a lighter or some matches nearby.
You can experience this with a friend, but more than two becomes a bit of a crowd.
This piece lasts 45 minutes.
Opening
Set to the backdrop of the Ganges flowing with an accompanying box of objects.
To my younger self,
Dear one.
Meri Jaan
In front of you is the river Ganga, a famous and sacred river that flows through India and Bangladesh. The ashes of your ancestors have all flowed into this river, through a tributary river called the Yamuna, one of five rivers that run through Punjab.
In this experience you have some instructions to follow. All you need to do is relax and follow the instructions as best you can. They are simple, gentle and there’s no right or wrong way to do them. You can also choose not to follow them, and play along in a way that feels comfortable for you. You do you babe. No one is looking.
The first instruction to follow (or not) is to turn the brightness on your screen right down until it is black. Usually you find the brightness button at the top left hand corner of your keyboard, right next to the escape button, with little sun-like symbols on them. Let's try to do this in time together on the count of 3, and if not, no big deal, we’ll survive. Ready? 3,2,1. There. Now it’s just you and me.
You also have a box in front of you. In this box are a few items that you’ll need. The next instruction is to simply put both your hands on the box, in whatever way feels comfortable while you listen.
You are an artist. You have always been an artist. You have been here in Aotearoa, making your art for nearly twenty years and you have spent most of that time trying to shake off the colonial spell of writers like Shakespeare and his globally lauded generations to come of white boys only clubs.
Then live art showed up like a rainforest.
A complex and messy, tangled up root system, some of it bound and rotting, some of it sprawling and thriving. Instead of chains of being and orders of the universe making clear and cleanly defined stories, it was able to tell many stories from many viewpoints - from the roots, to the insects, to the soil, to the plants above ground, rich in perspectives. Being someone from a background that wouldn’t even touch the sides of a great chain of being, you loved that. That everything was possible at once in all its complexity.
Live art is a marginalised form, like you, it’s the nerdy wannabe punk of the performance world, like you, and it aligns itself naturally with intersectional viewpoints, just like you.
Live art resists colonial power and allows you an escape route from a white gaze and a male gaze. It allows for storytelling that softens the edges of defining people of colour, like you, through identity politics alone. It allows you to wholeheartedly throw the clean and clear answer expected to the question, “No, but….. where do you really come from?” straight in the bin. It allows you to soften the edges between you and your audience. It allows you to soften the edges between us and them and you and me.
Once you begin to locate and question power, you will never stop.
You realise that Live art still hails from a Western, privileged and elite society, I mean,, the term was created in the United Kingdom and you discovered it in a book in Brussels which is the home of the European Union. You become sceptical of saying that live art allows you a fuller way to express yourself, free from colonial/patriarchal eyes. Really, it is another Western label that is a convenient little box for the kinds of art that is already in your blood and bones.
In this experience you'll remember your bloodlines and cherish yourself in a world that is forgetting the origin of it’s own blood. Take full advantage of this opportunity to treasure the ancestral tools learned from aunties, mothers and grandmothers in your majestic family tree.
This is not a live art experience. This is a new ritual, complex and messy, pieced together from the root system of your histories. . Use it when you want to blur, bamboozle, and break away from pesky colonial and patriarchal eyes.
Unboxing
Let’s Begin.
Open the box.
Inside you will see five objects. A small bundle of red thread, a candle, a photo, a package, and a vial of water. There’s also a small card in there with your name on it. Save that for after. And you should have some matches or lighter next to you ready to go.
Object 1 - The Meaning of Thread
Take out the small bundle of red thread and stretch it out between your fingers.
This thread could represent a river, or a road, or a line on a map, a border or a boundary, if you laid the thread out on the surface in front of you and thought of your fingers as legs and your fingertips as feet you could make your fingers walk the length of the thread or road or river. It could represent a journey, a hikoi, perhaps it represents the newly created border of Pakistan and India that your ancestors left behind in 1947, or your parents crossing into the Middle East in 1981, or the Waitemata harbour line that the ship arriving with all of your stuff sailed in to in 1995. Maybe it represents a wall, brick wall, a dry wall, a long and historic wall, the great wall of China, the wall you sat on in the mountains, legs dangling, eating sweets in the Himalayan sun.
You think of walls a lot, you often feel walled in, but you should know that those walls in your mind were not installed by you, nor your mother. The building and installing of walls is done through knowing and manipulative practice over hundreds of years. Your dismantling of them will come down to knowing and heartfelt practice. The demolishing of walls is something you will become an expert in.
You will spend too much time admiring walls and falling in love with them. They are beautiful. They are cool, aloof and unattainable like an unrequited crush. You spend years just wanting to throw yourself up against them over and over again no matter how hard they are to bust down. They are lined with white women in red bikinis drinking Coca-Cola and somehow staying slender with genetically perfect teeth. You spend a lot of time watching your mother follow suit, drinking Coca-Cola but somehow growing bigger and battling gum disease. She is years ahead of you in figuring out the practice of scaling walls. At this stage, in the eighties, she is using sugar, tobacco, family recipes with foreign ingredients, silk and cotton to finely cling to her Delhiite roots. In time though she will solely rely on memory, strong nails, interdental brushes and a radical amount of determination-fuelled love. She will perfect the art of scaling walls. And she will be as slender as she likes. And she will have perfect teeth. And she will be infinitely more beautiful than the Coca-Cola girls.
She has tied hundreds of yards of red threads around your wrist, trying to protect you. Sometimes it was too tight and made you feel conspicuous. You already had way more hair on your arms than the Coca Cola girls did and they wore dainty charm bracelets, not raggedy red threads. You would pull at it, trying to escape. After all, look at this thread. Really it’s 2just 10 strands of dyed cotton, a textile import bought from a small shop in Sandringham. It’s a material, an item on a shopping list, a product. It’s a future tangled mess or a trap for a tiny animal. You would always feel guilty when you finally managed to snap it off your wrist. Yet somehow you can never bring yourself to throw it away. You will find yourself one day tying thread just like this onto your niece's wrist and will watch her wriggle out of it straight away, just like you did.
Object 2 - The Meaning of a candle
Leave the thread there. Let be a reminder of the space between us. If I were an actor on one side, you were the audience on the other side of this thread, it could represent the fourth wall, or a fifth dimension, a dimension where you and I can exist at the same time.
Take out the candle next, and here’s where your matches or lighter comes into the story like a special guest star or celebrity cameo. An integral supporting character to the candle and thread’s well thought out plot.
Place the candle on top of the thread as far left as you can go. Light the candle, and allow your matches or lighters to take their exit. Hover your hand high above the candle and lower it down as far as you can without burning yourself. Just until you can feel the heat. Try to stay here with the heat through the next bit, but if you feel uncomfortable just stop. Remember, no one is watching, it’s just you and me.
This candle could represent the heat of the Delhi sun, the light reflected in the warm glow on your palm. Perhaps it represents essential life, cooked food, warmth, protection, a weapon to fight off predators. It could represent the first fire that man ever made like that scene in Cast Away where Tom Hanks finally gets his fire going and dances around it. Maybe it is the homecoming of Rama and Sita to rows of diyas, tea lights lit by their village to guide them. Maybe it’s ancient storytelling shadow play through fire. Perhaps the flame is the sun and the round white wax is the moon.
Your grandmother accompanied you to the Taj Mahal. She will say to you before she dies, “there is nothing more beautiful than looking at the Taj Mahal under the light of a full moon.” But when she took you there the sun was beating down through smog, and it was crowded, and smelled like dust. And you were only small, you couldn’t see the building, you couldn’t see the walls. All you could see were your shoes jumbled up amongst everyone else's, you worried you wouldn’t be able to find them again as you held onto Nani’s hand. All you could see were throngs of brown men and women who did not look like the Coca Cola girls, happy and free. Brown faces lined with deeply carved ravines of stress. Eyes wide and wanting. You see a wall of these faces everytime you exit the airport in Delhi. You never know how to be in your body when you encounter the thick oppressive air that comes with arriving at Delhi airport. She had no idea how disembodied you will feel. You have no idea how you will find your shoes again.
It was not your choice to be born in between borders or to have a keen sense in your flesh of where one country ends and another begins. You were simultaneously privileged and screwed for spending the first part of your life in aerospace. You grew up learning how to navigate small spaces, with your small feet through turbulence. You deserved to get on with feeling free and thinking about astrophysics, how to get beyond aerospace. You were sure that this was the natural state of the girls in the red bikinis. Alive and free and thinking about the solar system while hanging out with Keanu Reeves on those impossibly clean and cool pavements that belonged to the New Kids on The Block.
You were sure that all this was right around the corner for you the day that mum and dad picked you up from the Himalayas and said that everything was on a ship headed for the Waitemata Harbour. A western, white and celluloid life lay ahead of you. If Western White was a colour in a Resene house paint catalogue, you would have happily painted yourself and everything you owned top to toe with it. You’d be there, the fancy new kid at school, Resene Western White with a classic pair of Doc Martins and an intimate knowledge of Janet Jackson and Mariah Carey’s back catalogue.
When you arrive the smell is wet and green and dense, far from the dust and smog. You realise you will need to assimilate quickly and rethink your camoflauge. In the years to come you will watch your mother frustratingly try to keep the diwali diyas lit outside the door in the October wind.
And maybe this candle represents all that but it’s also just just wax and wick. It’s butane and sulphur, it’s a potential hazard, a danger to a child, it’s an accident waiting to happen. It’s a useful thing in a blackout. It’s one of billions and trillions that are lit in India when a Grandmother dies. Or it’s just a junk shop find, something you can buy in bulk, a business in wax and tin, it’s another thing in the world that will need to decompose. For now, leave it burning.
Object 3 - The Meaning of Cardamom
The great chai hack.
take out that little wax paper envelop
Inside you'll find three cardamom pods.
Rub these little guys between your fingers to release the smell.
To make a great cup of chai you need THESE
Black peppercorns
Cloves
Grated fresh ginger
Loose leaf black tea,
Milk
and
Sugar
Drink with rusks.
Have several rescue dogs around.
Chew paan.
Or use the great chai hack.
Put three busted up cardamom pods into any cup of tea, allow to steep and add milk and sugar to your liking.
For now, take out the vial of water.
Open it up and plop your bruised pods in there.
Screw the cap back on and place this vessel about two inches away from the candle.
Allow to steep.
Object 4 - The Meaning of a Photo
Take out the photo, lean it against the box and place the candle directly in front of it.
What were you doing feeding fresh milk to stray kittens by the Mosque that day? How did you get from temples and rivers to mosques and sand dunes to bush and black sand? From stray dogs in Delhi to stray cats in Doha to stray artists in Tāmaki, for some reason you were always determined to help them feel great about themselves. Maybe you thought that we were all in this together. You always identified with animals, even when you were winded by a cow in Nani’s garden or bitten by a rat in a cage in your great grandmother's yard, you thought the best of them and that you were the same as them. Was it altruism, kinship, or was it imagining yourself as Snow White, as Cinderella. Where kinship is so perfect, your animal friends would never bite back, they would only ever help in your pursuit of truth and freedom. Pure intentions for pure souls.
Your first memory of your aunties is crystal clear. (music fade in for 10 seconds) They were teenagers and making a collage on the wall out of pictures from magazines and listening to pop music. Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, shoulder pads, high-waisted jeans, Madhuri Dixit and Hema Malini, Anil Kapoor and Shah Rukh Khan short haircuts, motorcycles.
One of your aunties worked at the airport. She’d wake up at 5am and half asleep, tie an Air India sari and paint a bindi on in record timing. She’d spend all day at the edge of aerospace. She’d either be there to pick you up out of one aerospace, or send you off into another. Back and forth it went for you. Navigating invisible walls. An aunty for you was not just an add on to your major family occasions with caramels in their pockets. An aunty was an agent of freedom and love. She knew how to get you places and she knew how to make you feel like you belonged in your own skin. She gave you your first cigar paired with a glass of red. She stole the fancy cheese out of the fridge with you. She refused to marry until she was fifty. She moved to the hills and lived in an ashram. She regulary refreshes her plot to finally murder your uncle without leaving a trace. She introduced you to Prince and Cyndi Lauper, all in the dirt of New Delhi streets.
You thought they were the coolest people you’d ever met, they were just like Coca Cola girls. well dressed and sexy they listened to pop music and dated boys but they were gloriously brown and devoted to their family at the same time. They treated you like you were entirely theirs and taught your body what protection feels like. Weighted, on all sides, like walls, but soft.
So maybe his photo represents family, maternal lines, maybe it represents innocence. Maybe this photo represents feminism, tin all it’s intersectional glory. Maybe this is the cute little Indian girl at the end of the Jungle Book except this time she’s the centre of plot, rather than the epilogue and she refuses to play into any assumptions of who she is supposed to be or who she is about to become. Maybe this photo will single handedly lead to the collapse of the patriarchy and end of capitalism. Maybe it’s generational resistance or perhaps this photo will decolonize your mind in one fell swoop, as easy and effortless as taking a picture out of a box and looking at it. But you know that this is just light refracting in your eyes. It’s a chemical reaction, pixels on paper. It’s negative and positive playing together. It’s Kodachrome, the latest technology at the time it was taken. It’s a neat effect, a performance, a convenient way of tugging at your heart strings. It’s a result of your father’s passion for photography. It’s the result of your father’s adoration of you.
Object 5 - The Meaning of Water
Turn the vial of water upside down. Place it between the candle and the photograph.
Today it is raining and the sun has refused to come up. Outside your cabbages are growing which dumbfounds you. How do some plants love the cold rain while others die in it? You never had a green thumb, you managed to kill a fair few birthday gift plants. But recently you’ve been growing and growing. Perhaps your inner life has slowed to the pace of photosynthesis and it is all you can understand now. You are practising kinship. With the kittens and strays, artists, plants. Everyday is a practise of kinship. Over empathising with bubbles in the swirl of your coffee thinking about that scene in the Jean Luc Godard movie. That close up on the bubbles as if they were the universe itself. You believe that everything, down to the song playing on the radio that happens to be your favourite is a sign that everything, all subjects and objects co-exist. That somehow the fate of candle and it’s flame are tangled up in the manufacturing of red thread and the result of the cardamon spice trade led to your father buying his first camera and role of Kodak film.
Keep playing this game. Repeat it. Never end this game. It makes you feel sane and the playing of it will save you from a colonial grip inside you that is telling you something otherwise. It is telling you that you are alone in your thoughts, that you have no one to blame for this loneliness except your nature. It will tell you that your natural yearning for freedom is something that they invented, and that by pursuing it you are in agreement with them. It will tell you that there is only one way that the story goes.
As they gaslit you, penetrating your molecules while in the walls of your mother’s womb, they want you to think that the only path to freedom for you is through playing their game, making their money, and resigning yourself to their gaze upon you.
They will tell you the bubbles in the coffee are a product, when you are sure that it is a process They will tell you that the next rational step is not to eat the cabbage but to sell it and celebrate how smart you are for doing so, as if you invented the process of photosynthesis and the cabbage was just a guest star. They will tell you the kittens chose to be stray through their refusal to domesticate, when you are sure that all they need is food, not judgement. They will tell you that art is not essential to survive, but you are sure that it saved your life. The process of making art released the gas they lit in you, bursting it out of your molecules back into the atmosphere for your cabbage to turn into oxygen again despite the cold rain.
Don’t believe them when they tell you that to be a part of a collective means giving up your freedom but do believe your father when he says he had to get as far away as possible. Believe him when he tells you that were it not for a battered copy of The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged, he wouldn’t be where he is today. And even though you do not understand it, believe that when he read those books, his molecules recognised the hurt of another who had been driven from her home, and that your molecules are inseparable from his.
And you will be righteously selfish. And you will deny mysticism. And you will follow your own will. You will live out the story of the traumatised immigrant. You will distance yourself. You will try to be rational, to be objective and neutral, but you will never think of love as a business deal.
Pick up the vial of water and unscrew the cap. Give it a good sniff. Perhaps the vial represents all those molecules, the rain, or oxygen, life and death. Maybe it represents the water of the river we imagined our thread to be. Perhaps it is the water that surrounds the Taj Mahal. if you look hard enough you might see the reflection of the marble tomb inside it. Perhaps the cardamom are the shoes I lost that day. You may think that this is the water that the girl in the photo is soaked in, playing holi with her cousins in her nani’s backyard. It could be the monsoon rain your mother and aunties would rush out to dance under. Or is it absolution, a cleansing of all the complexities of a centuries long exercise in superiority over your bloodlines that without a doubt shaped your relationship to your body, and therefore your sense of the world around you? Perhaps this charged elixir is your mote that you surround the walls of your body with. A way to begin leaking through your ruler's closed fist.
This is water. It is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, a chemical compound. This is liquid. This is hydration, it’s a drink. It’s a life saver. It is a precious resource. It’s what makes up 75% of the planet and 75% of your body. When frozen it becomes solid. It’s the ice in Tom Hanks’ drink at the end of Cast Away, you know the scene where comes home after lighting all those fires and he says: “And now here I am , I’m back in Memphis talking to you, I have ice in my glass…(crying) and I’ve lost her all over again.”
It’s the result of asteroids crashing into each other, creating planets, planets that get pelted by comets that create volcanoes, volcanoes that erupt and melt ice into oceans, oceans with tides that get pulled by moons, all orbiting around a star like the sun, and then your great grandmother was born, and her daughter was born, and your mother was born and you were born and then here we are, connected through an intricate network of wires and cables, and a million zillion tiny choices, looking at this vial of water, trying desperately to make a point about colonisation and art.
A Toast
Remember when we turned the brightness down on our computer? Let's reverse that action now. Together on 1, 2, 3.
Here you are, back at the banks of the Ganga River. This river represents the ancient world that you are from. It is also one of the most polluted rivers in the world today. Whenever you look at it you remember the story of the doctor, throwing his fathers ashes behind him, dutifully drinking the water handed to him by the pandit. He’d spent the entire morning researching the bacterial counts of the river and prescribing himself antibiotics, knowing he’d have to drink the water. He still developed giardia. But at least he felt peaceful, knowing he had connected to something far far greater than himself.
Now would be the time to hold your vial up and make a toast
To your younger self, drenched in coloured water
To your quiet and shy observations of the world
To your refusals and your tantrums
Your bridges burnt
To the fire and the water and the wax and the thread
Yo your ancestors and those of the land you wrote this on
To your ancestors and those of the land you're listening on
Your ancestors who stared at the moon and bathed in the sun
Here’s looking at you.
Let’s drink to that.
Aerospace grows between you and the mosque, the sea and the sand dunes, the temple and rivers, the dust and the mountains.
Instructions for ending (on a note in an envelope with recipient’s name on it at the bottom of the box)
Thank you for participating in Under the Light of a Full Moon. I invite you to use or dispose of these objects as you like. You may like to use the cardamom in your next cup of tea. Burn the candle in front of a photo of your loved one. Put a message in the bottle. Put the photo in your wallet as a reminder of me. Perhaps people will think I am your child! Bury the thread in soil somewhere, a house plant, a garden, your compost. Bury it somewhere with the potential for life to grow.
Made by Nisha Madhan
Direction by Julia Croft
Featuring clips from Guide, Lamhe, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, Baaghi 2, Sholay, Beta, Sailaab, Vishwathma, and ChaalBaaz
Photos and me and the moon taken by my father
With special thanks to Emma Willis, Sananda Chatterjee, and my family.