A few days before their first show of their new play, ‘Hold Up the Sky’, the cast are
completely relaxed. They walk in to their rehearsal room at Don Bosco School,
Panjim in the evening, to be greeted by the founder of The Mustard Seed Art
Company, Isabel Santa Rita Vaz, with a loud ‘hello’ and wide bright smile.
Isabel has seen English theatre grow in Goa since the amateur theatre group
performed their first play, ‘All my Sons’ on November 10, 1987.
“When we first started, we were very small, like a mustard seed.
A seed contains life and a whole forest, and it is also a Biblical image that
the smallest of seeds can one day give shelter to the birds of the air. Also
another reference from the Bible is that if you have faith as small as a mustard
seed, you can move mountains. Faith in God, life, art, theatre brought together
Mustard Seed Art Company. We have always contained all kinds of people, as it’s
an open group,” says Isabel, an English Literature teacher.
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Their new play, ‘Hold Up the Sky’ is about to perform a
fictionalised dramatisation of the life of Madame Mao, the wife of Chairman Mao
Zedong, the Chairman of the Communist Party of China, who found her freedom in
theatre. “The writing and rehearsals took two months each but reading about it
took me years. I came across the figure of Madame Mao when I was reading for my
PhD. Part of my study was theatre in Asia, so I read about China too. I was
fascinated with her character. She was the wife of Chairman Mao and she was a
theatre person, and that’s how I got interested in her. She became powerful,
and then too powerful. One of the important themes in the play is freedom of
speech and the arts. If there is no freedom of expression and thought, there
cannot be abundance of life and growth. Another theme is the use and misuse of
power, which she did,” she explains.
The play is written and directed by Isabel Santa Rita, Vas with
original music by Rui Lobo with one song by Daphne P de Souza. The cast
includes Karishma Alvares, Ariedon Gomes, Sasha Pereira, Sushant Figueiredo,
Aryan Bhobe, Lester d’Souza, Melvin Anthony Gracias, Chione Ribeiro, Kimberly
Gomes Kiran Bhandari, Ann Barreto Sousa and Vibhav Sawant. The narrators are
Mario Coelho, Kimberly Noronha, Joshua Jaques and Suvarna Bandekar. The
choreography is by Annamarie Remedios and costumes by Ann Barreto Sousa.
The first play that was performed by The Mustard Seed Art
Company was Arthur Miller’s ‘All my Sons’, while the first original play
written by Isabel Vaz was ‘A Leaf in the Wind’ in 1992. “Dominic D’Souza was a
member of Mustard Seed and he was the first HIV positive activist from Goa. He
founded Positive People. We had this great idea that other people should be
saved from the agony that he went through and we had to make people conscious,
as there was hardly any awareness about the disease. This was 30 years ago and
that is when I wrote my first play,” reminisces Isabel who has completed over
65 plays in Goa.
To conclude, she says, “Arts are very creative and they help you
to channel your energy. If you don’t have any art as part of your life, chances
are you will become destructive. What I love about theatre the most is that it
includes many arts and collaborative arts.”
(‘Hold
Up the Sky’ will be performed on September 26, 2017 at Gomant Vidya Niketan,
Margao at 6.30pm and on September 28, 2017 at Institute Menezes Braganza,
Panjim at 6.30pm. Tickets are available at Magsons Super Stores in Miramar and
Fatorda.)
