How a Marathi play was built from unrecorded grindmill songs of women

Mayuri Ravindra’s route into the material was not academic, though the research, once it began, was extensive

MUMBAI: There is a moment in ‘Bhirrr...’, staged at The Tamaasha Studio recently, when the lights fade out and two saris, suspended in the air above the actors, seem to hold the entire weight of the play. Mayuri Ravindra, the deviser and performer behind the work, says she saw those saris long before she had a script, a cast, or even a title. “I kept seeing two saris suspended in space,” she recalls. “I knew they belonged to this world.”

How a Marathi play was built from unrecorded grindmill songs of women