Approximately 20 minutes before curtain time, men and women in blue jeans and work shirts began walking slowly, slowly onto the curtainless stage of Paris' Theatre National Populaire. There they stood or sat, meditatively waiting. At 8:30, Indian Musician Nageswara Rao appeared, carrying his vina a long, gourd-based stringed instrument, much like the sitar popularized by Ravi Shankar and Beatle George Harrison. For a quarter of an hour, the vina mewed and whinnied while no one moved. Then things began to come to life.
During the two unbroken hours of action that...
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