“I feel the wind on my face, blowing my hair wild.” – Stella from Star Struck
This storytelling performance was special for more reasons than one. It was the first offline performance after months of lockdown. Online fatigue had started to set in, compounded by an acute performer’s itch to connect with a live audience. So much so that The Junction only had to whisper the magic word “LIVE” for me to say yes to a spooky storytelling show on Halloween night. Almost immediately after the initial elation subsided I realized I had a tiny problem. I didn’t have any spine-chilling stories in my repertoire.
That’s when the face (voice actually) of Raman Iyer flashed in my mind. This Mumbai based musician and storyteller is the creator of Midnight Musings & The Mandolin – an online storytelling show that has been running since April 2020. Every night at 12AM IST, he appears on his Instagram LIVE, cuts out the video and does a Podcast simply for the listening pleasure of whoever cares to join him from wherever.
But that was not what made me think of him. It was “Face Your Fears” – an audio-visual horror storytelling show that Raman & co had cooked up in September 2020, which online murmurs confirmed was a runaway hit. So, I reached out to Raman to see if he had any spooktacular stories I could borrow.
We however went several notches higher and ended up collaborating to create an original 10min story for “Tales in the Spotlight” at The Junction on 31 Oct 2020. I wanted the tale to be written from the perspective of the spirit so he wove for me the yarn of a water spirit in the search of a victim.
Click here to read Star Struck as he wrote it for me. I made it my own by improvising and adapting the story for stage by integrating dance, music (an eerie tune composed by Raman) and theatrical elements to bring my character to life. A “Stella”-r experience end-to-end. Thanks, Raman.
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