Salt, a one-woman play, makes it way to the Segal Centre Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2022

The online play is a solo performance by Pallavi who essays three roles - a mother and two daughters who are facing acute food shortage due to the imposition of the lockdown
MD Pallavi
MD Pallavi

If the pandemic opened our eyes to the biggest health crisis so far, it also exposed how the after-effects of the pandemic and the subsequent actions led to the forgotten ‘epidemic’ in India – hunger. Inspired by true events, theatre artiste MD Pallavi and playwright Abhishek Majumdar’s online performance Salt has been selected to be screened at the Segal Centre Film Festival on Theatre and Performance 2022, beginning in March. “It’s an incredible opportunity to have been selected among the thousands of entries that are part of the film festival,” says Pallavi. 

The online play is a solo performance by Pallavi who essays three roles - a mother and two daughters who are facing acute food shortage due to the imposition of the lockdown. Pallavi explains that the play was initially performed in Sweden in English and was later translated into Kannada. The play is about a family of three women who tell each other stories and fake the food on their plate, in order to walk the hard line between hunger and dignity. 

“I set up the camera and the play was shot and recorded on a Zoom call. The story is about hunger and the right to live in dignity even if you are in poverty. Moreover, salt in the movie symbolises the basic ingredient that is common on a poor and rich man’s plate. The mother is actually mixing more salt into the food and narrating a story to the daughters to keep them in the dark about the food shortage at home,” says Pallavi.

 The play also emphasises how the government ‘failed’ to address the hunger issues that millions in India were suffering, whilst solving the larger health challenge through a lockdown. The online solo performance was a challenge in itself. Unlike conventional theatre productions, online plays demand the artiste to introspect their performance all by themselves. “Usually, we rehearse a play with the whole crew. But during an online production, I was all by myself. It was very challenging and there was no mirror that could tell me where I went wrong. But all of us understood the plight of migrants during the lockdown because overnight a lot of them were unemployed. The script also reflected these emotions,” says Pallavi. 

Majumdar, who was thinking of writing a play centred around the pandemic when it began, started getting involved in Covid-19 relief work in Bengaluru by distributing rations to the poor household. “This actually pushed me to write many plays around the food crisis, including one in Hindi called Ration. This simultaneously also led me to write Salt. I am very excited that it has now been officially selected for the film festival.”

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