Editor’s Note: India has a rich history in theatre, but our knowledge about the work our contemporaries and older groups have and are doing, is often limited to the geographies we live in. Driven by a curiosity to know about the work being created across the country, over the next couple of months, we will publish interviews and stories with different theatre groups and personalities from around the country.
“My father has this saying – paani apni satah par aa kar rukta hai (water stops moving only when it reaches its optimum level),” says Sapan Saran, as she and I sit in the Studio Tamaasha office in Mumbai’s Andheri. “Till you don’t find what that level is for you, paani hilta rahega (the water won’t be calm). You’ll be unsettled and you’ll keep searching and searching – till you somehow, somewhere find that level, finally – at least for the time being.”
It’s been almost an hour since we began our conversation. We’ve meandered through Sapan’s formative years in Jodhpur where she grew up listening to her loving grandmother’s passionate and animated renditions of Rajasthani folktales. Her family – her father particularly; a first-generation migrant from a nearby village, and a teacher, academic, and life-long lover of literature – would often host literary stalwarts like Namvar Singh, Ashok Vajpeyi, Nagarjun and Kashinath Singh. “These names, their writings and anecdotes would be in the air around us – like mythology almost. You would feel like you’ve read about it all but actually, you had just heard it.”
“But I also grew up with a lot of restrictions,” she adds, almost as soon as you start envying such a culturally vibrant upbringing. “It was like growing up in a boarding school. We weren’t allowed to watch television. I didn’t know comic books were a thing till I heard other kids talk about them. For the longest time, I didn’t know that anything beyond what was necessary — which was food on your plate — could be bought,” she recounts. “For kids from lower-middle class families like ours, education becomes primary. It’s seen as our only way out.”
“In hindsight,” she admits, as we go deeper into memories of her childhood, “I realise I had become isolated at a very young age. I retreated into my study and created a world of my own. Because I didn’t have any source of entertainment, I would just imagine stories all day long. I was a daydreamer.”
******
For anyone who knows Sapan, she’s hardly ever just one thing. Even if one only knows her professionally, they still know her as an actor, poet, writer, director, arts curator, teacher…the list is as exhaustive as the number of plays she’s written and directed under the banner of Tamaasha Theatre, which she co-founded and has been running with director Sunil Shanbag. This year, Tamaasha completes a decade of its journey.
In this time Sapan and Tamaasha have not just made theatre, they’ve also been an integral part of a movement of sorts that was taking place in Mumbai, starting somewhere in the late 2010s, when many diverse, alternative performance arts spaces began sprouting in the city. After successfully running their own curated performance venue, Studio Tamaasha (initially in Aram Nagar then in Andheri Lokhandwala), a year ago the team set up a vibrant performing arts residency, UsPaar, away from Mumbai’s familiar shores, by the laidback waters of Kashid, a sleepy town further down the coastline of Maharashtra.
******
My reasons for agreeing to write this profile were fairly straightforward (and a tab bit selfish too, maybe). I’ve just set out to direct my first play. In 2018, fresh out of college, I joined Tamaasha Theatre and worked with Sapan and Sunil for over a year. It was my theatre school. I thought writing this profile would work as a refresher course. That I would get to sit in Sapan’s rehearsal room, watch her direct, talk about her process, and perhaps some (or a lot) of it could come in handy for my own work. My expectations weren’t too off the mark, but were they an oversimplification? Yes, I would concur wholeheartedly.
A few days before Be-Loved – Tamaasha Theatre’s latest production was to be performed at Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in January this year, I attended some of the rehearsals. Sapan has directed the play, and incidentally, I’ve written a small portion of it. I reached rehearsals a few minutes late and was looking for a quiet corner, when I realised that the scene being done was the one I’d written. As I tried to talk myself out of the impulse of opening my script to compare it to what was playing out in front of me, I wondered – if this is how difficult it is to leave the writer outside the door when you’re simply observing, how hard does one fight to do this when entering the rehearsal room as a director of their own script? As I was grappling with these questions, Sapan’s clear voice cut the air.
“Anything that isn’t supported by thought looks forced,” Sapan told an actor, while asking her to repeat her lines.
But whose thought is it, anyway? The writer’s? Or is it the director’s? What about the actor’s thought? Must all these thoughts be the same, or similar? What if the director’s thought is in conflict with the writer’s? Are we all just “finding” meaning then, even though we come to the theatre to “create”? If the thought is primary, where does that leave the “act”? Is the act seeped in the thought, then? As usual, I walked out of that rehearsal room with more questions than answers.
******
“I’m interested in the overall puzzle”, Sapan says, unknowingly touching upon the questions I had been thinking about. “I’m interested as much in the background, as the forefront.”
More time has passed. We have been talking about many things – why she doesn’t act as often anymore, what made her realise (or decide) that theatre is what she wants to do in the long run. I ask her if there was a particular moment when she realised that theatre meant more to her than she thought it did. She pauses and then starts recounting an incident from a few years ago…
In her initial years of working in Mumbai, Sapan, like a lot of other young people who move to the city from smaller towns in order to pursue the performing arts and whose understanding of that is limited by their exposure only to cinema and television, wanted to be a part of the entertainment industry as an actor. She went to watch a few plays with friends and then, theatre “happened”, as it often does.
She did a lighting workshop at Prithvi which was taught by Sunil Shanbag. Thereafter, she began working with him on other things too, starting with a project for the legendary dancer, Astad Deboo.
A few months later, while assisting Sunil for an acting workshop, she got a call from Yashraj Films. She was told she’d been selected for a part which required her to travel to Delhi the next day, for the shoot. The news reached her only a few hours after she’d told Sunil Sir that she wanted to imagine and write a scene between Mitra and Nama of Tendulkar’s Mitrachi Goshta, for the workshop. She wrote as she packed for her trip, and in the flight, and while her hair and make-up was being done on-set. It was only once she walked onto the floor, saw the crowd (no, I didn’t add that for dramatic effect; it really was a crowd scene), and hit send on the script that she asked herself – “What are my lines?” That is when the penny dropped. That point onwards, it was all theatre.
******
“The writer, I think, is often unable to imagine what actors can do with words. The writer’s main preoccupation is ki yeh mere shabd hain aur innmein sab samaaya hai (these are my words and they hold everything in them)…” Sapan opines, when I finally ask her about how she manages the duality of directing plays she herself has written.
She says she leaves her writer self outside the rehearsal room when she goes in to direct, “If the writer was to see the actors’ process of embodying her words, in front of her eyes – she would go crazy! Actors use various tools and techniques to reach an emotion. The director helps them get there. This isn’t a linear process. The writer witnessing this would constantly be thinking, ‘but that’s not what I mean!’”
I don’t disagree with her. I’ve co-written the play I’m directing. Everyday I struggle to find a meaning that’s different from the one the writer has given to her words. “Can directing your own writing be a problem, then?” I ask myself, and Sapan.
“The writer creates from scratch. She needs to take the big leap, a flight of imagination. Direction tools are completely different. Ultimately, the director’s job is to take the intention of the writer and go beyond that. For this the director needs to unravel the layered and often hidden ideas in the text, and give them a tangible form on stage with the help of actors,” she responds. “What I depend on the writer in me for, while directing, is knowledge of the subject matter. When I’m in doubt, that’s what I lean upon. Other than that, I ask the writer to stay out when I’m directing.”
******
“The writer in Sapan grasps the nitty gritties of the script, the director in her has a certain vision of a larger picture, and the actor in her empowers her own actors to deliver that vision on stage,” says Kalyanee Mulay, one of the actors in Be-Loved, when asked about how working with Sapan is different from working with other theatre-makers. “I feel her mind works simultaneously on all these planes and that’s how she doesn’t skip a beat while directing.”
But as we’ve noted – writing, directing, and acting aren’t the only things Sapan does in her theatre work. She’s also an arts manager and curator. There is always something new and exciting happening at Tamaasha, and in Sapan’s world. So where, in all these myriad things, does her heart lie?
“I tend to feel trapped very easily. Maybe it has to do with my growing up years. I need to be and feel free. Free reh kar kya karna hai (what do I want to do when I’m free)? I might not always know that in the moment, I’ll figure it out. But I don’t want to be trapped in patterns,” she says. “I’m interested in many different things. Theatre has allowed me to engage with life in a way that I didn’t get to do earlier. It has given me a solid anchor, but it has also freed me.”
I tell her this conversation is making me think about Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, only that her room is…theatre.
“Yeah. It’s almost like the idea of the daydreaming girl in her room, in my room…it got realised here in the theatre. I was finally able to find the freedom I was looking for. Paani ko thoda seteh mila hai shayad…rukkega to zindagi bhar nahi (the water has found some level…even though it might never be absolutely still).” she admits.
I know what she means. In my brief theatre journey, I too have had encounters with the kind of freedom that she speaks of. Incidentally, the last time I felt that was recently at UsPaar, in its airy workspace, with beautiful sunlight falling on actors who were reading lines I wrote, moving in ways I imagined them to move. Everything came to a standstill, and I thought about the room I was in. A (rehearsal) room I had only imagined and dreamed of, became a reality because somewhere in Jodhpur, many years before I was even born, another young girl dreamed those dreams.
I smile and Sapan smiles at me. Has the conversation been too heavy, she asks me. Au contraire, it was quite liberating, I tell her.
Nikhita Singh is a playwright, screenwriter, and researcher based in Mumbai. She works around themes of gender and culture. She’s currently directing and producing her first full-length play.
