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The concluding day of ‘Nataknama’, a three-day festival featuring select, contemporary Marathi experimental plays and hosted by Prithvi Theatre had Ramu Ramanathan making a visual presentation titled ‘Curtain Raisers’. The presentation screened excerpts of some of the plays that Ramu collected during his visit to the Kunsten festival in Brussels in 2007. The screening was guided by Ramu’s inputs and was easily one of the best parts of the festival. ‘Curtain Raisers’ is a sincere attempt to bring home the feeling of a live and lived experience of contemporary European theatre. But more importantly it reflects a deeper concern of reaching out to young, Indian theatre practitioners in the hope that they are able to see beyond the microcosms of their own experiences. Here Mumbai Theatre Guide talks to Ramu to find out more about the conception of ‘Curtain Raisers’ and of how it eventually connects with his disenchantment with contemporary Indian Theatre on the whole.- Deepa Punjani.
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Deepa Punjani
What led you to compile a presentation such as this? Who helped you put it together?
The compilation is thanks to the generosity of the Vlaams Theater Institute, which is a centre for performing arts in Brussels. It is also a hub for research, publications and workshops. The dvd compilation offers a blend of Flemish Performing arts productions with international quality. Its very simple, really. Everyone can do it. Rather everyone should do it.
But they don't…
Yes. Innumerable big shot Indian theatrewallahs travel overseas and pick up videos and dvds. Unfortunately, they are secretive about their knowledge. Some of our pre-eminent institutes have documented material. But they believe in hoarding their knowledge-bank. This generation should have access to the body of work of Alkazi or Chandralekha. But we never ever will have access to that material. If we do then all of us will realise how shoddy the rest of our theatre is!!!
What were the considerations you had in mind while choosing the plays you have focused on?
Whatever was available in the Vlaams library; plus the time factor. I was a visitor for a few days. I am hoping to procure more footage but that has not happened so far.
On the one hand it is easy to simply relegate this presentation to documentation on theatre but on the other it is evidently not only so. The visuals combined with your inputs were making more than one point. Can you elaborate?
Context is everything. One of the things that emerges in the dvds is the prodigious amount of work; the ability to use the constraints as a discipline however brutal that seems. Our theatre practitioners will have to stand up and understand where they stand. They (and we) have to be bit more patient. Since it takes a long time to develop a language and the technical proficiency to render a show like a Raghuvir Khedekar or a Naseeruddin Shah, you can't do it, overnight. It's taken years. No one dropped out of a tree, one day, and started to stage brilliant productions
Apart from the fascinating work you talked of, one could not help but feel that you heartfully wished to let young and upcoming theatre practitioners in Mumbai and Pune get a sense of the cutting-edge work that was being screened. Why do you feel the need to do that?
Young people are the future. Young people are the ONLY hope. This is a generation that watches world cinema on their dvd players at home. They have realised that Indian documentaries and short films and Vishal Bharadwaj are Wow. They read Amitava Ghosh and visit Atul Dodiya's art show and go Wow Wow. And by that quantum they want Indian theatre to be Wow Wow Wow. But that's not happening. Lets face it, at the moment, Indian theatre is most Un-Wow.
With the euphoria of the sixties and the seventies well behind us do you think Indian theatre today has the potential to think out of the box?
If you consider the recent 3-day Marathi plays fest at Prithvi Theatre: Nataknama, there are two aspects to it. One is the administrative and logistics, which was above average with young rangakarmis like Ashish Mehta, Irawati Karnik did a wonderful job. Then there was the quality of the plays. That was most distressing with the plays being staged in the most regressive, almost reactionary theatrical manner! They are deploying 19th century theatre techniques in playwriting and stagecraft - in the 21st century. I believe this trivialises and vulgarises theatre. If theatre has to survive, that has to change.
What factors according to you are limiting the vision of our theatre today?
Theatre policy. It has been mismanaged and we saw it coming and some of us warned the people in high places but nobody would listen. They still don't. You know theatrewallahs have been infantilised by the profession. There's a professional organisation in all countries that runs the theatre movement. Institutes in India like the NSD or the Natya Parishad in Maharashtra do the same. They protect their turf and are like an over-protective parent. NSD doles out subsidies to mediocre ex-students. Its like IIM or IIT paying for their students even when they are 40-50 years old. Now in hindsight I see that this overprotection marginalises one in the creative culture. Ideally you have to build up credibility before the support comes to you. But in our country that never happens. It is impossible for a Mohit Takalkar in Pune to compete in such an intensely warped market place where there is a bidding for your talent. So that's the system, that's gone wrong and yet the theatrewallah is always blamed.
Now that you have had a few screenings, what has been the response like?
The older generation say, this is not theatre. Some of them get into silly debates about nationalism and provincialism. There is no place for nationalism and provincialism in the Arts. Young people are beginning to realise that.
What are they realising?
When they watch William Forsythe's body of work, lots of things emerge about the mechanics of dance. The manner in which Forsythe is trying to evolve a kind of universal mathematics of the human body. His ballet is an extraordinary testament as to how we intuit the laws of physics that are everywhere. There's no space without it. We're designed because the world is such. Actors didn't develop as a species without physics. Actors grew up, or grew into this world with physics acting on our bodies the whole time. This requires style or technique, whatever you call it. And it is very complex- a series of distortions. All the relationship between the head, the hand and the foot, and the very prescribed turnings and counter-turnings and counter-twistings. And they realise it can be achieved ONLY through practise, practise, practise.
*The interviewer is Editor of this site, a theatre critic and an academic keenly interested in Theatre and Performance Studies.
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