Eating bread crusts can make your hair curly. If you want to grow your hair faster, cut it. A 100 brushes a day can make it silky. If you pluck the horrid grey, two will show their ugly heads in its place — we’ve heard several tales, some fantastical, some bizarre, some enforced by culture and some just so it’ll be easy maintenance for mummy to do your hair for school the next morning. These are the explorations that form the basis of theatre practitioner Deepika Arwind’s A Brief History of Your Hair.
Hair, an external marker of beauty and gender is something that’s entrenched in myth. Each of these stories draw upon historical, political and gender narratives surrounding hair to attempt at creating a dialogue on identity, androgyny, gendered beauty and the way that these ideas relate to each other across cultures. “I grew up in a Sikh family. As a kid, I’d plait my dad’s hair when he was sleeping and even put a bindi on his forehead,” recollects the young playwright who is all set to premiere the play next week, thanks to a grant by the India Foundation for the Arts. “I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair and at 18, when I chopped off my tresses, my parents were okay, but I got people doing a double take at me. As you grow up, there’s so much happening around hair. There’s fundamental pressure to get rid of facial hair, thread your eyebrows and upper lip and beautify it by colouring, perming or straightening, for instance,” says Deepika, drawing attention to how most of these ‘rules’ don’t just have to do with women, but also feed into the beauty myth and the male gaze.
The 29-year-old visualised these stories as a 15-minute performance Goethe-Institut and Sandbox Collective’s project titled Gender-Bender. “Now, it’s over an hour in duration and is in the process of constant evolution. The most challenging part about this devised production is that there was no script,” she tells us. A Brief History of Your Hair is her second production after Nobody Sleeps Alone in 2013-14. Even as she gets busy for the showcase, she has been invited to the Kennedy Center and the University of Maryland for her children’s play script One Dream Too Many in April/May 2016 for the New Voices/New Visions programme. “I studied journalism, but my heart was always in theatre,” she smiles, hoping that Bengaluru’s audiences are ‘affected’ by the experience that they are about to present.
Watch the play on March 24 and 25 at 7.30 pm at Ranga Shankara.
