HARDHEAD FLAIR: IN SO MANY WORDS, PART TWO
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I once taught a child–one of my favorite students–who was diagnosed as mentally retarded. Unaware of the diagnosis, I had described her to one of the school counselors as unable to grasp social subtleties but able to plunge effortlessly and imaginatively into all her art projects. Once given a little guidance nothing ever stopped her, and she worked arduously until the end of the period, deep in her world, making beautiful things. None of her “intact” classmates matched her ability to create intense colors. So what if she colored her hair green in a portrait of herself as a mermaid? One wondered why the world needed to be made clear if she was able to make such beautiful sense of it in drawings. But though she was creating beautiful things, she was not understanding everything–neither the nuances of what her classmates said to one another and to her nor the nuances of the rest of the world.
Doorika reminds me in some ways of that little girl. Oblivious to the style and nuances of other theater companies and performance artists, which struggle to make themselves understood using conventional language, choreography, and movement, they create beautiful works of art, apparently satisfied to be in their own world, concentrating on what they choose to do. Those choices have positioned them squarely at the intersection of experimental theater, performance art, and dance.
