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Tamas: The Darkness
Community, its essence, and its collective power, are the forces that drive me to create. For me love, social justice, equality, freedom and our rights as human beings, living in societies, countries, and the world at large are the most important aspects of life.
The violence that fear wrecks on the subconscious heart, mind and soul is often so destructive that it takes generations to wear off. That is why we are told that the poor bird cannot survive if it is set free. Just as we hear that slaves would not know how to fend for themselves without their master’s guidance; that a state and its people are similarly doomed without a king; and so on.
My concern is neither about the restrained stage nor the freed state, but that space where one’s anxiety overwhelms one’s integrity, one’s dignity, even one’s existence … The performance ‘Tamas: The Darkness’examines the present national scenario suspended between hope and despair, light and darkness and jyoti and tamas. The performance raises important questions about some of our ‘famed’ national values and characteristics such as honesty, trustworthiness and simplicity. It impels us to ask troubling questions concerning the status of a subject and a citizen in a modern national state (Nepal).