Jyoti Dogra on her play The Black Hole, drawing connections between life and science on stage

A woman, a white sheet, and the idea of the universe. This is all it takes theatre practitioner Jyoti Dogra to explore ideas from theoretical physics, from the perspective of an ordinary person trying to find a greater engagement with the cosmos. Concepts from astrophysics entwine with personal narratives of love, loss, mortality and experiential limits in Dogra’s latest performance piece The Black Hole, which examines one’s thirst for knowledge, hunger for experience and how the two combine to create an understanding of the universe that one inhabits. The piece draws parallels between a black hole and life. It has singularity, central to a black hole and one’s selfhood, as the running theme of the piece. Scientifically speaking, gravitational singularity is the one-dimensional central point of a black hole which contains a huge mass in an infinitesimal amount of space, where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate. The piece explores singularity in terms of where one begins and where one ends, and the scientific concept of singularity inside a black hole, says Dogra in an interview with Firstpost. Dogra, who has always been attracted to astrophysics, says that for her, the idea of a black hole as an image or as a metaphor connects to the human condition more than other cosmic objects, which led her to explore the idea of death through it in her piece. “The idea of a black hole, [it is] a thing into which you keep putting things but it never fills up, a thing into which everything disappears. A little bit like life. You keep pouring things into it, but it is never filled. And nothing seems to come out from it. [Life is] like a vast sense of emptiness or a void, which is often connected to the idea of a black hole,” she says.

The Black Hole opened at Odd Bird Theatre in New Delhi in December last year, and made its debut in Mumbai at the Prithvi Theatre on 26 and 27 February. It has also been performed in smaller towns like Bareilly, Solan and Shimla. It is Dogra’s fourth solo devised piece, following the hugely popular Notes on Chai. In Dogra’s latest work, a woman talks about a recurring dream where she is standing at the precipice of a black hole. She is waiting to be sucked in, but the black hole does not pull her in. Instead, it is waiting for her to take the leap. The play has three characters in it – the protagonist, her mother who is terminally ill, and the protagonist’s male partner. When asked what made her explore death through science while devising the play, Dogra says, “One can’t say ‘what made you’. It is an organic process. Various topics come and there are some topics that interest you, so you stay with them while the others go away.” More than anything, Dogra feels death creates the ultimate boundary, and like a black hole, once one crosses its boundary, one can never return. It is also one of the reasons why the principal metaphor works in the piece. “Scientifically, the world inside a black hole and the world outside it never meet. Similarly, in the case of death, there is always a stark divide between those who are dead and those who are not. No one from the dead can bring information to the world of the living, and nobody from the living world can go into the world of the dead and tell them what it is like there. You need to be dead or alive, and depending on where you are, you belong there. I feel death is a great divide, the event horizon of a black hole is a great divide, [and] so those ideas connected,” she explains.

Influenced by Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski, Dogra has used the body and voice as the sole instruments in her work. There is the simplest possible use of staging, lighting, costumes and special effects. Grotowski’s technique forces the actor to transform empty spaces into imaginative worlds. “In my work, I don’t work with an idea. I simply start working with the process and as the process continues, the material starts to grow and organically move, which was also the case here,” she says. One of the things that motivated Dogra to devise The Black Hole was a desire to work with something other than her own body; her previous solo piece Notes on Chai featured just her on stage. This eventually took the form of a white sheet that she uses as a prop during her performance. But the sheet was not her first choice. “I worked with garbage bags. I also worked with a chair before I finally moved on to a sheet.” Dogra also uses scientific equations in her piece, such as the black hole equation 2GM/c2 (also known as the Schwarzschild radius) where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the object and c is the speed of light. “I also sing it at times,” she says, “I feel the piece uses science as a metaphor. While the science is very precise and scientifically correct, the focus of the piece is not that you understand the science. But, of course, you want people to understand the science so it has been put as simplistically as possible without actually taking away from the science.” For Dogra, the play lies in the connections between the science and the narrative. However, she makes it clear that her piece is not particularly about science but rather about the human condition. “So eventually, whether you are from a science background or a non-scientific background, you start to respond to the human condition, which is an inherent part of the piece. Ideas of death, love and loss are basically human ideas and are not segregated into the science and non-science,” she clarifies. Dogra devised The Black Hole over the last three years, but one of things that had a deep impact on the development of the piece was her visit to the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva as part of the Pro Helvatia Residency in June 2017. Conversations at CERN, which is home to the largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, revolved around quantum science, she shares. “But for me, it was just going to CERN, working with the large things they are working with, the kind of data they are working with, the huge amount of numbers and material and stuff, it had a deep impact on my relationship with science itself, more than anything,” she says. Following its premiere in New Delhi in December last year, The Black Hole found a sustained interest from unusual quarters: science departments from various colleges and universities. Dogra has had successful shows at institutional spaces for students and faculty of post-graduate courses, mostly connected to the sciences such as the Astrophysics department at Delhi University, the department of Physics at Guwahati University, IIT Delhi’s Physics department, Vishwa Bharati University in Shantiniketan etc. She also performed at the International Conference of Cosmology held at the International Centre of Theoretical Sciences, in Bengaluru.

Dogra says she did not expect such a warm reception in scientific circles. “I think that for a person coming from the science background, the science (in The Black Hole) is put very simply. So, I mostly thought that they (science students/teachers/ researchers) would be generally irritated, if nothing else. But what I found interesting is that these people are not so much interested in what scientific concepts I used, but how were the connections being made between science and the human condition, between life and science,” says Dogra. For her, life and science are not separate entities. This proved to be a challenge for the thespian while developing the piece, when she had to find a performance language to understand how to make those connections. For her, the piece lay in finding a place where science and life connect. During the process, there were times when she felt like abandoning the piece altogether. “Two or three times, as a matter of fact,” Dogra laughs, “because a lot of this piece was about reading science, which I was doing, and enjoying very much. But then you starting thinking, ‘Okay, now what do I do with this information? How does this information become a play?’ That was quite a struggle and continued to be. Also when you are working alone, over long periods of time, there are times when you think it’s all too difficult and too much for you.” Despite its challenges, Dogra likes to start with nothing, similar to how the universe began too. Unlike working with texts, there is no foundation upon which the play is made. It gets created in the process. “It is also a bit difficult because you don’t know which way to go,” says Dogra. “What is the material, what is the language of this material, do you want to work with sound, do you want to work with text, do you want to work with a body, do you want to work with visual images, everything is very open (in devising). I enjoyed it more because things, as they say, they show themselves as you go along.” Dogra says she has always felt a deeper connection with the larger idea of the universe and feels we are one with everything. If anything, the piece has strengthened that notion.