A triptych partition stands aslant across the space, below fabrics in various colours festooned from the ceiling. The audience, now seated, has been listening to a playlist for the ages, featuring Asha Bhosle’s dulcet disco, Alka Yagnik’s lovesick crooning, and Sunidhi Chauhan’s long notes that reach for the moon — classics that so often shape the soundtrack for dreams of desire and belonging in India. To Darling, the memorable track from Saat Khoon Maaf, the artist swoops in, resplendent in a pink sari frayed with gold. The stage is set for the story of Zizou and Zenia.
On December 13, Ahon Gooptu premiered his production Item on the premises of The Urban Theatre Project, a laboratory for research incubation and performance founded by Ninad Samadder. Ahon’s performance was followed by an informal conversation that invited the audience to engage with the artist and explore the motivations, influences and experiments that went into the making of this work.
The story of Zizou and Zenia
Item tells the story of a boy named Zizou (named after the famous French footballer Zinedine Zidane) who grew up in Kolkata. Zizou, no football fanatic, finds himself drawn to the glimmer of his mother’s wardrobe, the secrets of her dresser — in particular, the contents of the second drawer, which he later discovers — and the genius of Saroj Khan. When school ends, Zizou, Mukhorochak’s chanachur in hand, moves to the US for college, where he first encounters drag — a form that would go on to transform his understanding of queer worlds and world-making. It’s a gift that yields Zenia, who performs all across small-town America to a range of beloved Bollywood numbers, charming audiences wherever she goes: “The only desi diva on their white-washed lips.” As Zenia, Zizou can “love, feel loved, and love that love” in ways that one couldn’t have thought possible in Kolkata, where cross-dressing, as Ahon added later, was what everyone did in all-boys’ or all-girls’ schools’ annual theatre productions but never to be sexy.
Even as the US applauds Zenia, and even as Zizou discovers a community to come into his queerness, there is no escaping xenophobia. America either fetishises her brownness or sees her success as a byproduct of being ‘exotic’. This harsh encounter with ‘Zeenophobia’ plays on loop in Zizou’s mind, even as he leaves small-town America for bigger cities with “bigger dance floors”.
Accommodating humour, pathos, despair and the vicissitudes of queer longing
‘Item’ speaks to an authenticity of emotion and a devotion to skilful, experimental storytelling
In a particularly poignant scene, with lights spinning across the room, Zizou enacts the experience of letting loose in the bewitching hologram of the dance floor to Kal Ho Na Ho’s It’s the Time to Disco. Even as the gaze on his brown skin persists, he knows he can lose himself in the freedom, abandon and joy of dancing in ways that he couldn’t back home. He can now dance far beyond the burdens, bequests and dictates of gender.
The narrative ends with Zizou returning to Kolkata, looking to find ways of belonging, imagining, articulating and performing his queerness in a city that is so far away from Zenia’s place of birth, where “all the desire [I] fought so hard to feel fully” has to be freshly navigated. In the final scene, he wears the gold bangles that were locked safely in his mother’s dresser — an heirloom that was once promised to his wife (“and you can imagine how that plan is going”) — and spins away to Bole Chudiyaan.
Ahon’s performance is devised with the kind of generosity that is capable of accommodating humour, pathos, despair and the vicissitudes of queer longing. It speaks to an authenticity of emotion and a devotion to skilful, experimental storytelling. A sharp production design coupled with a series of costumes — that the performer changes in and out of, sometimes in a striptease and sometimes, more coquettishly, behind the partition — adds to Item’s punch and panache. Beloved Bollywood numbers, from Parineeta’s Kaisi Paheli Zindagaani to Tezaab’s Ek Do Teen, are strewn across the length of the show, taking the narrative forward in their wide, restless arms, as Ahon breaks into dance and drag, moving back and forth between Zizou and Zenia, between homes, cultures and communities.
‘I think ‘Item’ belongs in India but it remains to be seen whether Zenia does’
When it comes to drag, Ahon is intent on “pushing what is acceptable, appropriate, allowed”
The conversation after the performance was rich and insightful, with the audience and artist reflecting on the forms of fiction and testimony in drag, the shapes of the risque and the burlesque in Indian performing arts traditions, and the need to build audiences for these kinds of storytelling.
If India is home to nautanki, tamasha, launda naach and other forms that feature cross-dressing, it is also guilty of systematically disempowering and marginalising them. Are there ways in which drag may be contextualised within our milieu? Do we have vernacular histories that might allow for that exchange? Ahon remarked that he wants Item to be a true-blue drag performance, as opposed to a theatre production, but wondered if there was a place for that form of self-expression in the city today.
Is there room for drag when one is trying to make a living as an artist, performer, theatre practitioner in India? Making a solo work, according to Ahon, meant losing out on the joys of collaboration that shape so much of theatre-making. For now, even as he navigates the process of “putting a cost to the labour and desire” of drag, he is focussed on “pushing what is acceptable, appropriate, allowed”: “I think Item belongs in India but it remains to be seen whether Zenia does.”