KARACHI: Movement is life, life is movement. Death stops our progress in life. This means movement is freedom: the freedom to be wherever you want to be. But in the context of the contemporary world, and in the context of the world where morality weighs heavily on some people’s minds, movement can also land you in trouble.

This appeared to be the central theme of the music and dance performance by German and Pakistani artists titled Do Tone that took place at the National Academy of Performing Arts (Napa) on Wednesday night.

While there was live music throughout the hour-long piece, the dance that transpired on stage was not something that the audience in general perceive as dance. The artists relied heavily on moving from one place to another — hustling, jostling, scuffling, running, walking and, in some cases, pirouetting — to construct a sequence out of disparate events, without words, for the audience to weave a story of their own.

This required a strong interaction with those who had come to see the performance. So the performers began their act, you could also call them antics, 10 to 15 minutes before the scheduled time, outside the auditorium where everyone was waiting for the bell to ring indicating that today’s fixture was about to begin. Instead, there was live music, for example a flute player was making interesting sounds and an artist was mingling with the crowd without uttering any words, suddenly appearing in front of them, trying to make the men and women wonder what was happening.

Similarly, when the auditorium’s door opened for Do Tone to start, the artists requested members of the audience to sit on stage, on whose both sides chairs were placed, instead of watching their story from the front. One is not sure what that yielded for the artists. Perhaps they were trying to create a sense of proximity between themselves and the average theatre lover in order for the gap between the storyteller and the story listener (or viewer) to diminish.

It was interesting to see that not all of the artists were nimble-footed. A few of them looked a tad klutzy. It must have been intentional. After all, in life not everyone is light on their feet; some of us have two left feet. And this is a strong symbol of life’s vagaries and the surprises that it throws at us.

Do Tone, put together for the artists and audience by Katrin Schafitel and Sunil Shankar, was part of the academy’s ongoing international theatre and music festival.

Published in Dawn, March 23rd, 2018