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In the middle of March 2012, theatre enthusiasts from across the country gathered for a seminar at Ninasam, the theatre institute in Heggodu, a tiny village in the very heart of Karnataka. Eleven kilometers away was the nearest municipal outpost, Sagara, where several of the delegates were put up in spartan but efficient lodgings, and the early morning shuttle would ferry them past a line of nondescript trading posts and the occasional drinking hovel (which was to become, over the course of the week, a late night watering-hole where conversation on theatre flowed with as much alacrity as anything else) and then, beyond the town limits, the wide expanses of areca nut plantations that drive the local economy. The seminar, which saw a hundred and fifty in attendance, had been organized by the India Theatre Forum (ITF) to examine spaces for theatre and spaces of theatre.
Sessions had been chalked up for panelists to hold forth on traditional spaces and new-age infrastructure, the political spheres inhabited by contemporary theatre, the facilities that practitioners have painstakingly built and nurtured, the space within a performer's body that feeds his craft, and the interstitial spaces--the spaces of confluence and the spaces of confrontation. A wide spectrum of ideas was open to exploration.
With the net spread wide thus, the five-day-long affair was intense and enervating and resulted in an over-saturation of ideas that appeared to swamp into insignificance the gains that such an exercise would ordinarily be expected to bring about. A fortnight later, the sound and fury has subsided, and the abiding memory of the event, slow-cooked in its own juices, is a succulent cut of prime idealism that theatre practice continues to attract despite the odds. As the ideas of some of the dramatis personae of the week come into focus, it becomes evident that it was perhaps time for this kind of collective soul-searching.
Initially, as delegates turned up at the venue, welcomed by cups of piping hot filter coffee and cardamon-flavored kashaya, there was a sense of having arrived at a kind of retreat far removed from the urban hubbub that most of us had escaped from. The institute's repertory group, the Tirugata, were in rehearsals, and the creative whir in the air added a distinctive character to the alternative hospice to whose tenets we now readily subscribed even if the languor inflicted by the hot weather (and soon, the relentless sessions themselves) had already started weighing upon us.
On the first day, theatre director Sankar Venkateswaran talked evocatively of discovering the 'secret' koothambalam within a temple, and imagining within the empty space--almost a sanctum santorum--a Koodiyattam performance in full flow. For the nascent practitioner in him it was a profound experience, if a tad vicarious. He was soon upbraided by members of the audience who felt that it was impossible to talk about 'temple theatre' without taking umbrage at their policies of exclusion--women and non-Hindus are barred to this day from several such traditional spaces. That interjection may have seemed like a curve ball, drawing away as it did from Mr Venkateswaran's attempt at breaking down the elements that make up the unique performing experience in a koothambalam, and that could perhaps be applied to contemporary performances that seem betrothed to the tyranny of the proscenium. But the agenda for the seminar had been set. Theatre practice cannot be divorced from the political context in which a performing space operates, at least not in this forum that had suddenly acquired an air of intransigence. The sessions continued in this spiel, much time being spent in reading between the lines and extrapolating than on matters more germane to the theme at hand.
This tendency again found echo later in the week, when the Brazilian cultural organization SESC presented a promotional video that illustrated how it has successfully inculcated a strong arts culture in Brazil. The acronym loosely translates as 'Social service with Commerce', a phrase particularly appealing to one of the core members of the ITF--Sameera Iyengar--who along with Sanjna Kapoor, is also co-founder of their new organization, Junoon. The SESC is a success story that Junoon, with its emphasis on a grassroots upheaval in theatre awareness, must be surely keeping tabs on. However, at the seminar, the promo was likened to cult-like propaganda and it was clear that any corporate-funded arts programme would continue to be looked upon with suspicion. While the shiny happy faces on the SESC video were cast in some dubious light, the ITF itself wasn't impervious to cheer-leading as the management style of choice. The seminar began with quaint initiation games that seemed akin to team-building exercises for employees at an office jamboree. Ms Iyengar carried herself with the air of a corporate manager, and her entrepreneurial zeal sat a little awkwardly with the ascetic notions of theatre that people at the seminar wanted to align themselves with.
Although non-plussed by the detours taken by his 'talk', Mr Venkateswaran found time to draw us into his staging of Chekhov's SEAGULL in Kannada, which featured students of the Tirugata, in which the space at his disposal was used in several organic ways. The play opened against the setting of Ninasam's own backyards, which shrouded in the village night, seemed like a forest of some foreboding, whence the entry and exit of characters acquired a primal glow. The buildings around were populated with bit characters and it seemed as if the theatre had permeated the entire campus. The raw earnestness on display cast the actors in a certain light. Actors in the city sometimes lack this guileless swagger. The action moved indoors in the third act, and as the audience clambered to their feet and rushed about to garner the prize seats that may have eluded them the first time round, there was an equality to the experience, a leveling. Modern theatre is much more stratified than this, constructed as it is around the reinforcement of social inequities. The actors, who died in character, respectfully didn't return for the curtain call. The back-to-basics feel and the harnessing of Ninasam somehow brought the institute into sharper focus; its universe was more clearly visible now. All around, were the signifiers of the subtle ways in which theatre was being kept alive au naturale.
The divide between practice and theory got more pronounced on the second day when Bombay theatre's blue-eyed boy Atul Kumar took the stage. He is known for having his audience feed off the palm of his hand. Here he confessed to having left his 'face' behind, and his style was cramped by the academic glibness on display. Mr Kumar would perhaps have been more at home discussing the brass tacks of actual performance. Here, the intellectuals were doing the scenery-chewing that he is often credited for. Sitting alongside was director Zuleikha Chaudhury, who was more at home with the language of theory and spent much time illuminating an oeuvre that seemed to be comprised entirely of tube-light installations. They engaged in some light-hearted on-stage sparring, exacerbated by Ms Chaudhury's hot potato about how actors can be entirely dispensable and sometimes it's the space that lends theatre its power.
While several delegates contributed to the m�lee with their considered opinions, the language of a college paper sometimes isn't suitable to describe the experience of theatre. If even speakers of English felt excluded, the alienation experienced by delegates more comfortable in other languages was absolute. The delegate from Assam, Shukracharya Rabha, who talked about nurturing a theatre space in his native Goalpara, had to pause between paragraphs, as his faltering Hindi was duly translated into acadamese. Despite the numbers in attendance, and despite there being a personality to the gathering, and a definite character, the diversity didn't come through. The quelling of the 'other' voices wasn't intentional. There are practical considerations that must be taken into account when organizing seminars on this scale, and really, English, stripped of its baggage, remains a pan-Indian language. Being truly representative of all kinds of theatre smacks of a kind of tokenism that could be dangerously self-defeating. There is a certain complexion to such gatherings that is a given and hopefully, over successive future editions, there will be forces in play that challenge the hegemony of a certain tongue.
For those who found the extended sessions increasingly cumbersome, there were hideaways, like a library that was a well-kept secret, and a green room in the main auditorium that was particularly airy. The ennui was disrupted only by distractions such as a fact-finding mission to the village to discover its sole fish eatery, which soon became a de rigueur gastronomical stop for delegates, with fried fish standing in sharp contrast more to the venue's obligatory discipline than to its own delectable vegetarian fare, served up daily on disarmingly faux banana leaves by friendly volunteers, who not only seemed to have a hand on generous serving sizes but also a good measure of the famed Kannada geniality.
The lassitude also afflicted the visiting theatre groups, like Sunil Shanbag's Arpana, whose actors, although indefatigable on stage while performing a late show of S*X, M*RALITY AND CENS*RSHIP, seemed rather done in by the slow passage of time. While Mr Shanbag himself had settled cheerily into his newly acquired role as resident raconteur of the week, his actors prepared for the 54th performance of the play woven around a staging of Vijay Tendulkar's SAKHARAM BINDER. In one scene, the actors recounted how most performing venues in Maharashtra has styled themselves as 'natya mandirs' to induce the notion that art was worship, but this led to a sanitization of folk tamasha traditions much to the detriment of cultural free expression in the country. This resonated with the conversations on the koothambalam that had raised a furore the previous day. The interlinking of thoughts, the interweaving of stray strands of conversation, and the permanent blurbs that the delegates walked around with, added much richness (and levity) to the Ninasam experience.
Although he did not speak at length about his own spanking new theatre facility at Kamshet, what Atul Kumar did was point out the elephant in the room--the future of Prithvi Theatre--now that Sanjna Kapoor had left the premises. Ms Kapoor was one of the panelists, and when she got to it, there was an almost poignant bitterness in her voice as she talked about how Prithvi may have failed in many ways because it never quite managed to extricate itself from the culture of arts subsidy, funded as it was by a corpus for several years. The sustenance of the kind of theatre we believe in, in purely rupee terms, was perhaps not voiced adequately at the forum. Money as an extension of the space debate didn't come up, except tangentially in the Prithvi story. Ms Kapoor described how Prithvi ran on a kind of madness, and how it was a child who refused to leave home. To several theatre practitioners, who consider the salubrious climes of Prithvi Theatre their second home, Ms Kapoor and her team have engendered an institution that appears remarkably solid and so absolute in its artistic munificence that it is difficult to think of it as floundering to market forces.
Ms Kapoor's brand of idealism may have come a cropper elsewhere, but here in Heggodu, she appeared to have been delivered, in a rustle of Fabindia chic, to her kind of people, to a contingent of strident idealists who seemed committed to the performing arts not in some vague uncertain manner, but with a thrust of emotion that was made suddenly palpable despite the overarching exhaustion at the exchanges, and the deadening of the senses. The fuel that feeds theatre practice in the country seemed to be in abundant supply, and informed by an integrity of purpose that may yet rescue Indian theatre from the morass it finds itself in. Because people came from such scattered points of view, the easy answers were not quite forthcoming, but it was a clarion call that was certainly more purposeful than mere cheer-leading.
Two of the more enlightening sessions were addressed by Iain Mackintosh and Jean Guy Lecat, as they brought tenets of theatre architecture to the fore as never before. Mr Mackintosh, who has authored the book, 'Architecture, Actor, and Audience', while rooted in pragmatism in his approach towards building for theatre, also allowed within the discussion of those designs and structures, a space for imagination to fly. A theatre space cannot simply be functional, it must incite and inspire the craft of performance. Mr Lecat has worked with theatre auteur Peter Brooks on several of his productions, some of which have been mounted on a very grand scale, giving the impression sometimes of whole forts and entire cities, as projected onto the white screen in the seminar room. For theatre practice in India, constrained to be bijou enterprises struggling with minimalism, these was vistas of much grandness, even far-fetched to an extent but nonetheless, the horizon of where theatre can be taken, whether that should be the case in these 'altruistic' times, was visible in several awe-inspiring ways.
We do not allow ourselves to believe that theatre sometimes needs that decadence, or that a vision of a spectacle isn't necessarily a bad thing. In an interjection, Ms Iyengar remembered a play which consisted entirely of actors walking in and out of a wardrobe, and the power wielded by that tiny performing space they inhabited was boundless. By contrast, a lavish production by the National Theatre of Scotland in an industrial warehouse, seemed like a colossal waste of resources. Maybe there is a space for an economy of expression, alongside Mr Lecat's universe of dreams. These sessions on architecture appeared to drive the forum, being the most detailed and well thought out expositions. Theatre almost took a backseat, but really it was there all along in the charts, and projections, and the droll anecdotes that both men peppered their presentations with.
Jehan Manekshaw, one of the delegates, reminisced about the fresh-faced enthusiasm of the previous seminar a few years ago, which has now been replaced by a kind of jadedness. The jadedness is probably the baggage that theatre practitioners carry because it is an inordinately unforgiving profession but there is always a sense that theatre gives us our life-blood, and draws us out of our complacency. The life-blood may not be reflected in the urban theatre of Mumbai, which wallows in self-afflicted mediocrity, so a shake-up is absolutely necessary. Looking back, the Ninasam seminar could be termed as significant, or wonderful, or eye-opening, with a few more glittering generalities thrown in for good effect. Or it could be seen primarily as a shot in the arm. There is no denying that the inevitable churning in our heads will crystallize into something definite soon enough, and for that the seeds have been sown.
*Vikram Phukan runs the theatre appreciation website, Stage Impressions- http://www.filmimpressions.com/stage/
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