Power of one

In theatre, a solo performance is a tightrope walk without a safety net. Stripped of the usual trappings — elaborate sets, co-actors — the solo performer relies solely on body, voice and the intangible thread of connection with the audience. There’s no “outside eye” of a director offering checks and balances, no one to share the creative load. It is a lonely journey. Despite these impediments, the solo form is today experiencing a ferocious resurgence, and the reasons are varied and urgent.

Solo performance requires minimal resources — often just a performer, a space, and an idea — making it a compelling medium for artistes grappling with economic constraints. Unlike large-scale productions, it bypasses the need for funding, crews, or complex logistics.

During the pandemic, as physical proximity became dangerous and budgets shrank, many artistes turned to digital platforms or solo performances. The ‘solo’ became a survival strategy — portable, flexible and adaptable to unconventional venues.

During the lockdown, I collaborated on two solo performances with actor Vansh Bhardwaj — ‘Black Box’ and ‘Trunk Tales’. The former was created as a response to the pandemic, where the actor explored themes of incarceration, loneliness and his desire to be ‘visible’. The play focused on the existential angst that most of us were experiencing. The storyline followed the life of an actor cut off from work and community. He spent his days raging at his confinement, haunted by the drone of death count, while enacting stories to an audience that comprised a dog and a squirrel.

‘Trunk Tales’ explored themes like the politics of gender, water and food, with a non-linear narrative woven from poems, texts and personal observation. Both the plays were adapted for a virtual presentation as part of a Ranga Shankara project to help artistes during the pandemic.

Minimalist on the surface, solo theatre demands maximal emotional intensity. The performer becomes the playwright, director, chorus and antagonist, morphing from character to character, holding an entire emotional universe in a single body. From Delhi’s black-box venues to temple courtyards in Kerala, solo performers are pushing theatrical boundaries — and often their own physical limits — to speak, sing, shout and whisper to a world that rarely pauses to listen.

India’s solo performance legacy didn’t evolve from western dramaturgy. It’s rooted in the ritual and oral storytelling traditions, community acts of memory, culture and, often, resistance. For instance, ‘Pandavani’. A solo form from Chhattisgarh, it blends song, chant, narration and theatre to recount tales from the ‘Mahabharata’. The performer, playing an ektara (a one-stringed instrument), shape-shifts between characters, switching voices and moods in a heartbeat. Inherently political, it finds its fiercest voice in the magnificent performer Teejan Bai.

Watching her perform under a tree in a school courtyard in Bhopal was a magical moment of my life. Strong and robust, her singing broke the caste and gender norms in a male-dominated tradition. Teejan Bai stood tall — literally — at a time when women performers were expected to sit demurely. She belted out Draupadi’s humiliation and Bhima’s fury with a fire that made the audience confront patriarchy and reconsider mythic archetypes. She used minimal tools to summon epic imagery — myth made urgent, political and deeply personal.

Then there is ‘Theyyam’, a ritual performance from Kerala that blurs the line between theatre and divinity. The performer, adorned in ornate costume and elaborate makeup, channels gods and ancestral spirits, often entering into a trance. In its local context, ‘Theyyam’ is sacred and is performed before shrines in rural communities. But outside that context, it risks becoming a cultural spectacle emptied of its soul. When stripped of place, the same performer, the same ritual shifts entirely, reminding that performance, community and space are deeply intertwined.

If ‘Pandavani’ is myth and ‘Theyyam’ fire, ‘Dastangoi’ is language and imagination. This 13th-century Urdu storytelling tradition — born from the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza — was originally performed solo or in duet, with nothing but voice and gesture. No sets, no props. Just linguistic virtuosity, with the performer clad in a white angrakha and a burning candle. Revived in the early 2000s by Mahmood Farooqui, ‘Dastangoi’ was reimagined for a contemporary audience. His ‘Dastan-e-Karn Az Mahabharata’ fuses classical epics with modern politics, weaving sources like the ‘Razmnama’, a Persian translation of the ‘Mahabharata’, Dinkar’s ‘Rashmirathi’, and Dharamvir Bharati’s ‘Andha Yug’. And Karna becomes not just a tragic hero, but a symbol of existential disenfranchisement.

The minimalism in ‘Dastangoi’ is potent. Every pause, every word is weighted with intent. Farooqui’s ability to weave divergent texts into a coherent, multifaceted narrative is a masterclass in intellect and craft.

Few solo performers command the stage like Maya Krishna Rao. Trained in Kathakali, with a modern sensibility, Rao brings a ferociously political alertness to her performances. Her 2023 solo, ‘You Really Want to Know My Story?’, staged at the India International Centre, was a visceral indictment of violence. Based on real-life accounts of death row inmates — a Dalit bus driver and a Muslim migrant — Rao transformed her body into battlefield and altar. Through sparse choreography, raw silences and a voice charged with urgency, she deconstructed the illusion of justice, brick by brick.

This wasn’t mere theatre, it was a ritual, a wake-up call. The audience didn’t just applaud, they exhaled, shaken. Some, like me, didn’t realise we’d been holding our breath the entire time. The performance made theatre visceral, almost unbearable, and absolutely unforgettable.

Rao’s earlier piece, ‘Walk’ — created after the 2012 Delhi gang rape — was equally searing. Performed in public spaces, with minimal dialogue, it turned sidewalks into protest zones and the female body into an instrument of reclamation.

If Rao wields a hammer, Jyoti Dogra handles a scalpel. Her minimalist, experimental solo works are piercing, profound and humourous, holding an absurd mirror to our foibles. In ‘Notes on Chai’ (2013), she excavates the sacred from the mundane: a chai break, nervous laughter, a domestic argument. Using throat singing, vocal distortion and physical theatre, she transforms everyday banality into existential inquiry. We laugh. We flinch. We recognise ourselves. Her 2019 piece, ‘Black Hole’, is a haunting exploration of mortality, grief and astrophysics. A dying woman speaks to her daughter about black holes and time. A simple white bedsheet becomes cosmos, memory and vanishing point. It’s intimate and immense at once.

Dogra’s latest work, ‘Maas’ (2024), probes the politics of beauty. It unpacks the female body’s public life — its digital surveillance and brutal objectification. Grotesque, fantastical, vulnerable, it’s theatre as exorcism. Dogra doesn’t hand you a takeaway, she invites you to wrestle meaning into existence.

Artistes like Teejan Bai, Maya Rao, Jyoti Dogra and Mahmood Farooqui are not just performers, they are cultural insurgents, carriers of memory. They remind us that a single body can explode into a thousand stories.

Today, the solo form is no longer a fallback. It’s a declaration — a bold assertion of creative autonomy. Whether confronting violence, invoking mythology, or exploring inner doubt, these artistes show us that a bare stage is not empty — it’s infinite.

— The writer is a Chandigarh-based theatre director