ABOUT THE PLAY
The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects is a solo play about a human animal, fragmented by colonization, who journeys through memoir and myth to confront fear and reclaim lost poetry and myth, indigenous to her spirit, collective to the species. Written, directed and performed by Shebana Coelho, who is originally from India, once based in New Mexico, now in Spain. The play interweaves poetry, monologues, storytelling and dance inspired by flamenco and Indian classical dance and theater. Duration: 75 minutes. The play was first presented in 2018 at the Santa Fe Women’s Club, and since then, at The ARTS at Marks (Honolulu), American Samoa Community College, Pan Asian Repertory Theater’s 2019 NuWorks festival, Navarasa Theater Summer Intensive (Los Angeles) and Maple Street Dance (New Mexico). (Read my bio and my other plays here.)
In scenes of sound song movement, the play evokes cultural and emotional colonizations – first in the history of British and Portuguse colonized India, in the life of one individual who grew up as part of an English speaking “created class” within the Catholic & Muslim communities of Bombay – and then, the colonization comes closer – it lands in the United States – with narratives about her as a South Asian-American immigrant and encounters with Indian-ness in New Mexico where she now lives, one of the only U.S states that was also a colony of Spain, with a mix of Native, Hispanic and Anglo inhabitants and complicated histories/views of cultural identity and oppression.
And just when you think this is a story about one kind of colonization, it arrives at another: the core conflict between art and fear. The performer invites fear in for tea – and then is frozen, unable to leave (because she’s a good mannered subject) even when the dancers call....till a dark ant of the earth bites fear and liberates her — into healing voyages to remote landscapes, and most of all, dance, especially Indian classical dance and flamenco “made by gitanos who were made, a long time ago, in the pani, the water of India.” The dance becomes ecstasy, returning to our common incandescent experience in the prehistoric cave of art and shadows (caves from the Upper Paleolithic era, like Altamira in northern Spain).
Mera Nam, an excerpt from the play
first published in Salamander Magazine
inviting fear in for tea
an excerpt from the first performance of the play, August 2018
A girl looked up - alta mira - and found the first images
lions horses bison.Do you remember?
One human animal walked into a cave, another held a torch
a hand reached out from the TADAAP the longing of the heart
and drew the feeling OUT
And I went faraway and close
me fui al taal de Mongolia idhar gayi udhar gayi
and all the rivers ran again in me..
I went to the end of the world
el principio do todo, the beginning of everything
And such a dance rose made by gitanos who were made a long time ago
in the pani of India
Listen - TADAAP - in the cave that lives idhar
the bones remember sound
