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As this too-close allegory unfolded in the Manipuri language, the audience enjoyed glimpses of the floating Ras Lilas dance tradition and the sinuous, more earthy form of matei jagoi from the shamaness rituals predating Hinduization of this Mongolian people. Sprinkled throughout were the repetitive gestures common to both forms and to the expressiveness of seven elders or Maithous who figured prominently. These also marked the mothers’ gestures as they inaugurated the allegory with ritual propitiation. Gestures and body postures moved or swayed to an almost constant drum beat, with fire cast hand cymbals accents, a horn, a flute and occasional raucous contemporary refrains; all explain the unique fusion of dance, theater and music intrinsic to the Chorus Repertory Theater’s thirty-year existence. A further raison d’etre is that Thiyam, a son of dancers, is the grandson of the late Amobi Singh, the grand old man of Manipuri dance, one time teacher at Uday Shankar’s enclave in Almora, and inaugurating director of the Manipur Dance Academy at Imphal.

The audience saw seven women dressed in white shifts and turbans shuffling in to center front stage. The pace was deliberate, the movement labored, the impression one of gauntness and great effort. The central woman laid an oblong tray on the floor; another placed a water jar near by. The drums beat, lights revealing poles of folded white paper, some illumined by red jells. Exhaustion, dejection dominated their postures. The sub-titles informed us the women sought to exorcize the dark spirits apparently devastating the valley surrounded by its nine hills. The undulating, figure-eight based gestures were a keen approximation of aging, care-worn women, though the line from the gesture through the body was firm, an unencumbered flow of chi.

After the ceremony, with water sprinkled on the tray’s objects and over the hands and shoulders of the women, stage lights revealed men running profile horizontally center stage, a Marcel Marceau exercise de style, accelerated, going nowhere. Exhorting their sons, the women reached out, unable to break through. In black Western garments, the men belonged to the rat pace, a treadmill of varying,if unrelenting, speeds. The women call upon the wise men to lead the people out of this dilemma.

Segue to where seven bodies lie prone, feet to the audience, an upright spear near each head and shoulder. The wise men, asleep for centuries, enveloped in shawls of white with large black designs, awoke; they sat, gestured or rose to their knees. Returning to their slumber desiring to avoid the changes, Ras Lilas dancers floated through their dreams. The lilting serpentines were challenged by the grotesque figure of Time, looking like the death figure from David Bintley’s ballet about AIDS. The Ras Lilas’ dancers beat a skittish retreat, then returned briefly, swaying, their gentle hands evoking the ancestral spirits.

The elders, attempting sleep, see a steady stream of modern types in Western business garb, suits, dresses, hats with glasses, briefcases, newspapers line up across the stage, shrilly reciting the world wide daily news, effectively blasting the seven from any prayer of peaceful slumber.

The elders undertake to write new laws, which the audience learned via the script panel approximate the UN’s declarations of the rights of man. This allowed for expositions of Manipuri martial arts, and movement probably based on long-held Manipuri rituals and the continued, haunting effectiveness of the lighting plot. The actors, acknowledging a mostly standing ovation, came forward, one by one, prostrating themselves. What a reinforcement of Ratan Thiyam’s vision!