Adapted from ‘Bluets’ by Maggie Nelson.
What do you mean when you say I’m feeling blue?
Does it mean that you’re sad and lonely, if it is 50 then why don’t we say I’m feeling fonely? What exactly is this feeling of being Blue? Blue and the zillion emotions associated with it.
In 1975, William Glass wrote a book titled “On Being Blue A Philosophical Inquiry
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published his Theory of Colors in 1810. He wrote “We love to contemplate blue “Goethe wrote, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it
Exactly a century after Goethe, the great Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky examined the psychological and spiritual dimensions of art through the lens of form and color. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky devotes an especially impassioned section to the color blue and writes the power of profound meaning is found in blue. The inclination of blue to depth is so strong that its inner appeal is stronger when its shade is deeper. Blue is the typical heavenly calour… The ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest…
In 2009 Maggie Nelson wrote an unusual book called Bluets.
Sometime in the final years of WWIl, the trailblazing Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd began composing what would become The Living Mountain-her poelic inquiry into the interconnectedness of nature and human nature. “Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered, Shepherd wrote. She found the most powerful transmutation agent of that alchemy in the singular blue of the mountain air.
To bring Blue through Literature. Poetry, Music, Arts, and in life is the attempt of this performance plece/
But what exactly is this piece Bluets?
Philosophy, philology, monologue, prosody, a mere performance? All of these? None of these?
To put it simply, Bluets is a panegyric to the splendor of language, an obsession of the playwright/director Omkar Bhatkar, and is his acuity for metaphor.
Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen, Andy Warhol, Virginia Woolf, Titian. Bluets is a spatial experience Though it is largely based on Maggie Nelson’s obsession with and love for, the color blue; it is also about a love affair that has ended, it is also about Nelson’s life, in a jumping in and out way. It is also about the director Omkar Bhatkar and his longing for the color Blue. Of the several plays that he has written, three of the plays include the word Blue in their title, such as Desires Blue, Song of the Blue Sea, and Blue Storm Blue Storm was also selected for the Asia Playwrights Festival 2020 held in Incheon, South Korea
Bluets is a delicately crafted experience of the color blue. In short, it is about pain and loss, and always about blue.
PERFORMANCES:
17th May 2023, Godrej Dance Theatre, NCPA.
20th May 2023, SAPP Bandra (W).
21st May 2023, SAPP Bandra (W).
A SAPP, NCPA LIBRARY & METAMORPHOSIS THEATRE INC. PRODUCTION