A Ballerina in a Mask: Artistic Dilemmas in Pandemics. Image Courtesy: AtlasObscura

UNREHEARSED FUTURES 

Discussing questions facing drama schools, teachers and students of theatre in the Post-COVID world

Unrehearsed Futures is a series of public conversations between heads of drama schools and leading performance trainers from across the globe to discuss and address the new realities of teaching drama. Thus far, Unrehearsed Futures has featured Drew Mulligan, Head of Acting and Programme Leader BA (Hons) Acting at Institute of the Arts in Barcelona, Dr Felipe Cervera, Lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts (Singapore) and Sita Mani, Lecturer in Theatre at the Columbia University, School of the Arts in conversation with Jehan Manekshaw, Co-founder and Head of School at Drama School Mumbai.

Phalguni Rao reports on the second talk in the series that took place on the 23rd of July.

Unrehearsed Futures: Jehan Manekshaw in Conversation with Dr Felipe Cervera

It has been four months since people around the world have been locked up in their homes due to the novel coronavirus taking residence in our midst. As it affected all other disciplines, this situation threw up a whole new challenge for theatre-makers who were now told to say goodbye to physical performing spaces, an integral part of their livelihoods.

Several practitioners took this up as a challenge and responded to the situation with exploring performances and workshops on Zoom, an audio-visual, online chat services platform that is used for teleconferencing, telecommuting, distance education and social relations. A spate of free (and some ticketed) performances followed on Zoom, hoping to answer the critical question: How do we capture the immediacy and live-ness of theatre in a virtual space? Is Zoom the answer?

The current situation has become a challenging space for drama schools to exist in. If students and teachers can’t congregate in the same physical space, how do we teach theatre in such a scenario?

Answering this and more, Dr Felipe Cervera, a Mexican theatre and performance maker and lecturer at the Lasalle College of Arts, Singapore, said it is crucial to understand what this pandemic-driven disruption means, to begin owning it and meeting the moment at this point in time.

“In this moment of the pandemic, in theatre and performance, it is precisely important that we take a moment to breathe in and to realize, ‘Right, where are we?’ We have all been reacting to a global scale emergency, to a global scale pandemic and we have been thinking on our feet, which as theatre-makers, we are very good at. We have been improvising the moment and the play hasn’t collapsed yet. The show has gone on.

But what next? Especially for theatre schools?” he asked, at a recently-held Unrehearsed Futures talk, a series of webinars discussing questions facing drama schools, teachers and students of theatre in the post-COVID world.

The way he sees it, theatre schools have very specific challenges. One of them is the disciplinary format theatre teachers have adhered to for much of the 20^th century i.e. somatic, live synchronous teaching, which is exactly the thing we, including DSM, can’t do now.

Furthermore, how can drama schools deal with this without having to sacrifice livelihoods, without sacrificing theatre? How do we deal with it without falling prey to, ‘Let’s just do Zoom’?

Theatre-makers and schools need to stop and think. While there have been numerous Zoom performances, that is not what the platform is meant for. “We have been misusing tech. That is important to realize, and continue to do” says Cervera.

What the theatre community is currently experiencing is “planetised”, i.e. in space and time everywhere. At the moment, nobody has a template to how to respond to such a situation but Cervera believes this means there is a great opportunity for creativity. “I don’t mean to say this in the corporate sense of ‘innovation, disruption, so let’s bring on new tech’, but really take a moment to think about theatre: think about things we have taken for granted, many of them collapsed and cancelled at the moment, but will return. How do we return?”

The current scenario for higher education is frightening. The enrolment rate is expected to drop drastically worldwide and several universities are expected to close.

Speaking of Lasalle’s response to the pandemic, Cervera says the country heard about the virus in early January and by February, and 30% per cent classes went online as the initial measure. They had begun planning for what would eventually turn into a massive disruption. By April-May, productions, which were in tech week and due to open in a week, went online. While he acknowledges that they went with the moment and did well, it doesn’t guarantee their success for the next academic year. It doesn’t guarantee there will not be a drop in recruitment because if they can’t teach theatre the way they used to, so why even bother enrolling and paying a fee?

Reflections in Hindsight

Looking back, there are four key questions for Cervera that theatre-trainers, teachers and schools must think about before deciding how to move forward with drama education today:

1. How does theatre meet history?
2. What was performance pedagogy in historical times?
3. How does theatre training make history?
4. What is the social contract of the drama school and how is that changing?

Sharing some of his reflections prompted from Lasalle’s response to the pandemic, Cervera believes theatre isn’t dead. Principles of theatre and teaching theatre are under pressure. The following thoughts are an attempt to reflect upon how theatre and theatre pedagogy can adapt to these changing times.

1. Stop thinking of how to apply technology to performance

In Cervera’s opinion, performance is technology. “It is a technology of social construction. It is a technology of social evolution. The point is not, ‘How do we begin to hybridize?’ It is, ‘What can we do with the kind of performance technology we have?’”

In reaction to the pandemic, Cervera believes the community suddenly forgot about the public space. Everything became about immediacy and live-ness. “ We became so focused on liveness of somatic and embodied learning that we forgot about the other dimensions of theatre,” he says.

2. An actor today needs media skills

To speak of media skills in actor training has also become a name-holder, in a way. What exactly are these media skills? Does it mean schools should now teach editing, filmmaking, video and sound recording, video art etc.? It is important to think about the specificity. Does this mean theatre schools have to reconsider a curriculum of theatre and theatre training?

3. Auto-didactism

 In traditional face-to-face performance pedagogy, the time of the teacher is equivalent to the time of the student. That means the time of teaching is equivalent to the time of learning. In distance learning, that is not quite the case. The time of the teaching may be asynchronous to the time and experience of learning.

“As theatre educators, we have a lot of issues grasping that. How do I observe my student is doing what I’m doing? We need to be thinking about these things. A key point here is that a lot of the people we study, Stanislavski to begin with, did not go to a school to study theatre. They were autodidacts. They taught themselves how to do theatre. It is not the first time that theatre realizes that teaching oneself is a way of training,” says Cervera.

While there is a lot of discussion on what the future of theatre pedagogy must be, it is interesting to note the etymological roots of the word “pedagogue” itself. Derived from the Greek paidagōgos, it means ‘a slave who escorted children to school.’ “It refers to the experience of walking and reporting knowledge. Etymologically speaking, the pedagogue is a companion,” he asserts emphasizing on the need to de-construct the authority of the teacher as the central bearer of knowledge in an education system.

“One of the reasons we hold on to synchronicity and body-to-body contact is because we keep holding on to the teacher as the verifier of knowledge. But the knowledge a student can access or experience in the room asynchronously is not any less valid than the one they are experiencing with the teacher inside the room. It is different.

Now how do we deal with that difference? How do we accommodate that difference into the curriculum, into the rigours of teaching, into the rigours of technique? The question is not how to teach but how do you measure the encounter? Where is the encounter? Teaching can happen.”

4. Distance

So far, according to Cervera, we have been thinking of distance in terms of digital remoteness. When thinking about auto-didactism, there is also the distance between what the teacher says to what the student does. “The distance between learning and teaching, the distance between thinking and doing. Re-evaluating distance in theatre education is also something important to think about,” he says. He further adds that drama schools are not training actors to make theatre, but training them to enact the world.

“So how they understand the world, that is important,” he explains, “It is not just about Tadashi Suzuki. It is about what Suzuki does to the world.”

Drawing from his own research, Cervera also talks about the need to let go of geographical binaries of East and West, North and South and instead focus on multi-polarity. Inviting collaborations with teachers across the planet is a way to enforce the planet as a learning environment, not just the physical classrooms one teaches in.

5. The Digital Medium is only an Interface

Cervera says if we haven’t realized this by now, we haven’t really been listening. Online theatre training does not necessarily mean interacting only with screens. It is an interface but the experience of making theatre can continue to happen offline. “Of course, it is about a lot of documentation but it is also about how the student reports the experience of making. It is also about how the student creates impact on the immediacy of their environment.”

6. Synchronous + Asynchronous Teaching

In terms of performance pedagogy, this translates into that distance learning is based on the binary between synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous refers to understanding two bodies in the same space, experiencing the same thing. On the other hand, asynchronous is about two bodies experiencing the same thing at different times.

“If you think about it, we’re all synchronous in as much as living on the planet. What is asynchronous, if anything,” opines Cervera, “is day and night.” This means somebody can be teaching at night and somebody can be learning during the day. That is the experience of asynchronicity.

“Once you’re there, it is not a huge leap to think that the planet is a classroom. It is a re-evaluation of the sense of co-presence. We are always co-present. Presence and co-presence don’t happen only when we are in the same room. It happens when we experience the planet at the same time: as living beings with other living beings.”

7. Social Contract of a Drama School

In such a tumultuous time, it is critical to examine what is the agreement of drama schools with their students. If physical teaching is hampered or limited, and being in a time where there are going to be fewer jobs, fewer theatres and a changed practice, what skills will schools be teaching their drama students? Are we expecting theatre to go back to what it was?  What will be the vocabulary for such teaching: presence/absence and co-presence; virtual, virtual reality; media and mediation. When one is online, is one absent?

In response to these questions, Cervera says by enforcing co-presence into Zoom, we have forgotten about other possibilities: slow work pedagogies, smaller classrooms, which will not be profitable immediately but they exist.

“For me to think that Zoom sacrifices the embodied learning and embodied teacher is not really the case. But learning will always be embodied. It is about how you translate that to the student,” he emphasizes.

He goes on to use the example of The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, a book by the philosopher Jacques Rancière (1987) which is about a teacher who taught French to a group of students without knowing French. Posing peer learning as an important part of learning, Cervera believes learning of any form is always embodied. “It is provocative to think how do I teach my students any technique without leaving the room? What other encounters can I facilitate? How many people can be in the room?”

Theatre is not dying, nor is it going to. At present, it is crucial for theatre-makers to reflect on the past and see what they want to bring through the conduit of the present situation and into the future.

About the Speakers:

Dr Felipe Cervera: 

Felipe Cervera is a Lecturer in Theatre at LASALLE College of the Arts (Singapore) and Graduate Faculty at the Centre for Drama, Theatre, & Performance Studies of the University of Toronto. His research interests are collaborative academia (teaching and research), and in the interplays between performance, science, and technology. His current research develops two lines of inquiry within what he defines as planetary performance studies: understanding the planet as a critical metaphor for collaborative methods and practices in the context of theatre and performance studies, and as a material condition for theatre and performance on earth and outer space in the 21st century. He serves as associate editor and co-editor of the international peer-reviewed journals Performance Research and Global Performance Studies, respectively.

Jehan Manekshaw:

Jehan Manekshaw is the Co-Founder and Head of School at Drama School Mumbai. He is also the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Theatre Professionals Education. He completed his Masters in Theatre Direction from Birkbeck, University of London. He is a recipient of the Sangeet Natak Akademi Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar. Jehan has taught at Ninasam, Attakkalari Centre for Movement Arts, St. Xavier’s as well as Shinshu University, Japan, and NSD’s T.I.E division in Agartala.

August brings Ellen Lauren and J. Ed Araiza from SITI Company, New York to DSM! Apply now for this truly unique opportunity to work with Suzuki Method and Viewpoints training.

17th August to 28th August | 6 sessions | 7 pm – 9 pm IST

Workshop Fees: Rs 7000/-

Apply for the Workshop: https://forms.gle/WpPHMkKR2nfnyg4Y9

WORKSHOP TAKEAWAYS

Week 1: Suzuki Method
– Understanding fundamental theories and vocabulary of the Suzuki Method of Training Actors
– Focussing on restoring the wholeness of the human body and voice to the theatrical context
– Uncovering the actor’s innate expressive abilities
– Training in a rigorous physical discipline that seeks to heighten the actor’s emotional and physical power
– Cultivating a sharper awareness of one’s own strength, stamina and concentration.

Week 2: Viewpoints Training
– Understanding Viewpoints, training that breaks the field of awareness into individual subjects, dealing with the actor/director’s tools of Time and Space, all of which overlap
– Looking at one’s environment through the noticing of spatial and temporal phenomena to widen the artist’s field of awareness and attention
– Practising being and noticing one thing at a time

Introduction to the Suzuki Method of Actor Training

Ellen Lauren training with SCOT in winter of 2016

The workshop will introduce fundamental theories and vocabulary of the Suzuki Method of Training Actors. Developed by internationally acclaimed director, Tadashi Suzuki and the Suzuki Company of Toga, the Suzuki Training’s principal concern is with restoring the wholeness of the human body and voice to the theatrical context and uncovering the actor’s innate expressive abilities. It is a foundational training for any creative endeavour an artist wishes to undertake and does not dictate a style of acting. It is a rigorous physical discipline that seeks to heighten the actor’s emotional and physical power and commitment to each moment on the stage. Attention is on the centre of gravity and a vocabulary of footwork. Attention is on the specificity of movement, speed, balance and the ability to apply ’the brakes’.

The training is also designed as a metaphysical check into the invisible world of the artist. Focus, concentration, rich inner fiction and energy are measured and made visible. It is a training in presence, deepening one’s relationship to the sensation of performance. Rigorous or deeply meditative, this training seeks to restore sensation to the art of performance.

Introduction to Viewpoints:

J. Ed Araiza training actors in Beijing

The workshop will introduce fundamental theories and vocabulary of Viewpoints.

A technique of movement improvisation, the Viewpoints grew out of the postmodern dance world. The Viewpoints were first articulated by choreographer Mary Overlie; who broke down the two dominant issues performers deal with—Time and Space—into six categories;

SPACE-SHAPE-TIME-EMOTION-MOVEMENT-STORY (SSTEMS).

Mary Overlie’s Viewpoint work deeply influenced the SITI Company’s and its productions, primarily directed by Anne Bogart. For over 28 years the SITI Company has trained together and continued to explore Mary’s original concepts. As practised by SITI the Viewpoints allows a group of actors, performers and artists to form vibrant ensembles that function together spontaneously and intuitively, and to generate bold, theatrical work quickly. It develops flexibility, articulation, and strength in movement and makes staging more efficient as well as broadening the range of dynamic possibilities.

The Viewpoints were invented to deconstruct theatre, dance, and the concept of performance within the western cultural framework; as such it supports and encourages both individual impulses as well as the ensemble and does not dictate a style of acting or performance. The SITI company continues to teach an evolving form of Viewpoints, inspired and informed by Mary’s work and thought.

The Viewpoints and the Suzuki Method do not constitute a style but a foundation on which to build a responsive, holistic instrument prepared to work in a wide range of performance styles and media.

The Viewpoints allow a group of actors, performers and artists to form vibrant ensembles that function together spontaneously and intuitively, and to generate bold, theatrical work quickly. It develops flexibility, articulation, and strength in movement and makes staging more efficient as well as broadening the range of dynamic possibilities. It supports and encourages both individual impulses as well as the ensemble.

The training is also a philosophical approach to rehearsal and performance.

About the Instructors:

J. Ed Araiza

J.Ed Araiza has a long and varied history working on multicultural, cross-disciplinary projects as a writer, director and performer. Mr. Araiza is a principal actor and original member of the SITI Company, founded by Tadashi Suzuki and Anne Bogart. SITI Company is one of the most important experimental theatre ensembles in the world. He is a proponent of The Suzuki Method and Viewpoints training and for over 28 years has performed in productions in major national and international venues. These include the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; the Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta; The Getty Villa in Malibu; the Brooklyn Academy of Music; Actors Theatre of Louisville; Los Angeles Theater Center; Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center; Harvard University’s American Repertory Theater; Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival; Germany’s Biennale Bonn festival; Japan’s Toga Festival; Ireland’s Dublin Theatre Festival; and Festival Le Standard Ideal, MC 93 Bobigny, in Paris.

SITI credits include: The Bacchae, The Persians and Trojan Women, Under Construction, Who Do You Think You Are, Hotel Cassiopeia, Midsummer Night’s Dream, bobrauschenbergamerica, Culture of Desire, The Medium, Small Lives/Big Dreams, War of the Worlds, The Radio Play, and Nicolas and Alexandra, RADIO MACBETH and LOST IN THE STARS

As a playwright with seven original full-length plays produced, Araiza is a member of the Dramatist Guild of America, Austin Script Works and NoPE (No Passport Required). He has directed sections of 365 Days/365 Plays at the New York Public Theatre; Voluspa for the National Theatre of Iceland; Savitri, Dancing in the Forest of Death for the META Theatre Festival in Delhi (nominated for best production and best director) and MEDEAstories, his original adaptation of the Euripides has been performed at TEAK in Helsinki, Finland and also with an international cast for the SITI Studio Theatre in New York.  His bilingual adaptation Miss Julia, based on Strindberg’ Miss Julie has been presented in several international venues including LA MAMA ETC in New York and the LATC’s Encuentro Festival in Los Angeles. 

Professor Araiza has been a guest teacher at many universities including at the Juilliard School, Yale School of Drama, SUNY Purchase, Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Columbia University, NYU, Stanford University, National Theater Institute, Harvard University, University of Chicago, Pomona College, Vassar College and the University of Denver. He was artist-in-residence/guest faculty for three semesters over three years at St. Edward’s University in Austin Texas; and artist-in-residence/Coastal Studies Chair at Bowdoin College in Maine. He was also guest lecturer in acting and performance at Ontario’s University of Windsor. Other international workshops include those at the Singapore International Theatre Festival; South Korea’s Seoul Factory Theatre; the Norwegian Theatre Academy; the Icelandic Academy of the Arts; Festival Iberoamericano in Bogota, Columbia; Teatro Vertigo in Spain, and most recently at the National Theatre Academy in Warsaw, Poland.

Since 2013 Professor Araiza has served as head of the MFA Acting program at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, leading an interdisciplinary program based on collaboration and ensemble training. Ellen Lauren

Ellen Lauren:

Ellen Lauren is a founding member and co-artistic director of the SITI Company along with Anne Bogart, based in New York City. For thirty years, she has been an actor, choreographer, writer and director in the company. She also is the head of all of SITI’s training and educational programming including the New York studios and intensives, domestic and international residencies and SITI’s bi-annual Conservatory. 

She has been an associate artist with the SCOT Company (Suzuki Company of Toga) led by world-acclaimed director, Tadashi Suzuki for 40 years. She has taught and performed with SCOT, including running SCOT’s Summer Training program for 10 years. Touring over 35 countries over the decades in SCOT’s repertory, she has played Agave, Clytemnestra, Juliet, Jocasta and Goneril, and led workshops on behalf of SCOT. 

She is a founding member of the International Consortium on Suzuki Training for Actors and produced “Transformation through Training: 2017 International Symposium on SCOT and the Suzuki Training” at Skidmore College in New York where she produced SCOT’s last US tour of their renowned Trojan Women.

She has been an ongoing faculty member at the Juilliard School of Drama at Lincoln Center for over 20 years where she has also directed Iphigenia and Other Daughters and Trojan Women. Representative guest faculty positions include TEAC National Academy, Helsinki, Ecole Jacques Lecoq, Paris, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Carlos Universidad and Vertiço in Madrid, Soif Compagnie Paris, Maastricht School of the Arts, Windsor University, Banff Center for Arts and Creativity, Moscow Art Theatre and Beijing Academy. She was the first recipient of the Theatre Communications Group Fox Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement in the United States and is published in American Theatre Magazine (In Search of Stillness). Scott Cumming released a chapter in his book, Actor’s Actors, on her career and practice. 

She is currently working on her book, The Invisible Body.

Amy Russell was a pedagogic student of M. Jacques Lecoq in the nineties. Since then she has gone on to found not one, not two but three internationally recognized training programmes in physical theatre. She is also an award-winning playwright. And this month, the Global Faculty Programme offers you the chance to devise and write your own piece of performance art with her.

Rediscover boundless imagination within your living room from the facilitator who trained theatre-makers and actors like Yuki Ellias, Puja Sarup, Sheena Khalid, Gerish Khemani, Kallirroi Tziafeta and Tushar Pandey!

APPLY NOW: https://forms.gle/7a6yChnD1UPBBMKHA

WORKSHOP TAKEAWAYS:
Rediscover imaginative capacity within the constraints of lockdown
Write for performance by building a relationship with your environment
Deepen your performance capabilities with Lecoq and Viewpoints training
Create new performance material individually and with other performer-writers

ABOUT THE FACILITATOR: AMY RUSSELL
Amy Russell is a senior teacher in the pedagogy of Jacques Copeau -Suzanne Bing and Jacques Lecoq. She is also an award-winning playwright. She was a pedagogic student of M. Lecoq in 1997-98 and created the Naropa MFA in Actor Created Physical Theatre based on this pedagogy. She was Pedagogic Co-Founder of the London International School of Performing Arts (LISPA) in 2003, and lead teacher at this school in London and Berlin until 2017.

Amy is also a qualified and accredited Gestalt psychotherapist, a facilitator of group process for devising ensembles and an academic researcher. She is currently the Founder and Pedagogic Director of Embodied Poetics, a school for intensive training In Devised Physical Theatre.

Contextualizing Continued Training in Performance-making

“We turn to the arts when we are joyful; we turn to the arts when we grieve. And in times of uncertainty and despair, we turn to the arts again for sustaining our hopes. The arts enable us to forge solidarities, make sense of the present, and come together to imagine collective futures. This is especially true of now when the Coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt and alter our lives.”

– India Foundation for the Arts

A lot of us are thinking about the future even as we do our best to take it one day at a time. Catastrophes of a global scale will do that to you. What does it mean to be a performing artist in these times? What does the theatre of the future look like? How can we imagine it together? 

These questions came later of course. What concerned DSM at the moment of this thought’s inception was, as co-founder and school head Jehan Manekshaw puts “how to survive the year financially while keeping our community of faculty, alumni, and followers (many of whom aspire to attend our courses) engaged during their time under lockdown.”

And as sometimes happens, in the attempt to solve a personal question, you arrive at a universal answer. And for DSM, this answer was the Global Faculty Programme. 

What is the Global Faculty Programme?

Screenshots from Vik Sivalingam’s ongoing workshop in the Global Faculty Programme

The Global Faculty Programme is a series of workshops for practising theatre-makers, actors, writers, directors and even filmmakers. The Faculty for these workshops comes from drama schools, companies and performance traditions across the world. Each month a Global facilitator will take a group of 15 participants on a deep-dive learning journey into a particular area of theatrical expertise. Designed for remote teaching, the course will comprise of six sessions via video-conferencing and 6-12 hours of coursework that participants will have to do individually or with each other. 

The journey is designed to build deeper awareness and provide new tools for further refining their performance and practice. Workshops in this programme will look not just at acting and performance-making, but also at design, lighting, technical aspects of theatre, and in today’s world, also explore the use of theatre tools and methods to bring stories in other mediums to life. 

This, we hope will to just open up the door for deepening skills and understanding, but give birth to cross-border collaborations that celebrate what brings us together instead of the <social> distance that keeps us apart. 

Why this Programme?

“…accessibility. Across nations, cultures, economic brackets and even individual disciplines. The fact that this pandemic has thrown us into a global melting pot (by virtue of commonality) is forcing us to all find a collective way out of it which is truly very.. unique. The fact we can have conversations with theatre makers in Chicago and Wales and London and they are facing almost exactly our challenges is in itself singular. Nothing else has forced us to hunker down together like this. And that’s what “global theatre” makes me think about.” 

As Amba – Suhasini K Jhala, LAMDA Alumnus and DSM Faculty member, identifies, we are truly at the threshold of true global connectivity. Space and time have become amorphous concepts, more so than they had consciously been in the past. In practical terms this means, learning together no longer needs to be restricted to a single physical space or even time-zone. It means that the intersection of digital pedagogy and live theatre training need to be examined and experimented with more rigour and focus because the stakes are higher and in some cases, urgent and irreversible. 

With Covid-19 situation, lockdowns and restrictions across the country, we are all waiting for live performances and public gatherings to restart. It’s important for us to recognize the anxiety born of this wait. But it is equally important to hold firm to the belief that the future of theatre still lies within our hands. That we can use these months of isolation and invest them in to global solidarity. That we can take values and tools from Peru, Singapore, London and New York and apply them to local practice, developing new work for this brave new world. 

Deshik Vansadia, faculty member and Stella Adler Studio alumnus says, “It comes down to truth.  If there is truth it works globally, if not then doesn’t even work for someone seated two feet away.” So as we look at theatre on the promenades and footpaths, in living rooms and empty stadiums, we need to learn from diverse traditions, diverse techniques that lead to a shared experience of this truth. 

Side-note: Do read these hopeful and articulate articles on the future of the arts:

1. exeunt MAGAZINE: What could socially distanced theatre look like? by Alice Saville
2. Medium: What should we expect from art in the next few years/decades? And what is art, anyway? by Carmen Salas

How is it being designed?

DSM’s strength has been it’s highly trained faculty which boasts of alumni from leading universities and actor training programmes. Moreover, over the years, DSM alumni and faculty have further made connections across the globe, through training and collaboration. 

The process of designing this programme is essentially leveraging this network. Which means the Global Faculty Programme could see facilitators from drama schools and companies in UK, New York, Germany, Singapore, Denmark, South Africa, Peru, Argentina, Columbia, Paraguay and Russia. 

What do we hope to achieve: Exposure to Global Theatre for Indian Theatremakers

Here is a small anecdote from DSM advisor and extended faculty member, playwright and director Ramu Ramanathan. 

“While in school I used to travel to Chandigarh or Amritsar for my vacations. My maternal grandfather was a professor and a linguist. He was proficient in six languages: Punjabi, English, Hindi, Haryanvi, Urdu, Sanskrit, etc. He knew his Ghalib and Tulsi and Shakespeare and Bulleh Shah by heart. At that time I realised that he not only could read the original version of the text but he could travel from one language to the other. Also, he could translate and interpret excerpts.

Also, I began to realise that while he was translating or lecturing, he was part of two traditions. And every theatrewallah should be so. Why? Because new worlds open up and new answers can be sought. In this day and age of homogenisation, I think this is important. More importantly, translations help you have access to so many languages: Mandarin, Italian, Japanese, German, French, Spanish, ancient Greek, ancient Sanskrit, Kikuyu, Khasi, Tulu, Norwegian, Russian. You begin to realise that there are innumerable outstanding works that have not been translated, and therefore innumerable writers and their voices to whom we don’t have access to. In a recent online session, the Argentine playwright Rafael Spregelburd spoke about Daniel Veronese, Lola Arias, Mariano Pensotti, Claudio Tolcachir, Santiago Loza, Javier Daulte, Alejandro Tantanian. It’s a matter of concern that theatrewallahs in India have not heard about our contemporaries nor their plays. For me this is the meaning of global.” 

What this little tale highlights is the somewhat distressing need for exposure to global practices in the Indian performing arts sector. If we are being honest, every sector – architecture, engineering, medicine, the humanities – actively seeks to learn about approaches and developments across the world. We hope that ultimately, this programme fulfils that same need for performing artists in India. That while our practices emerge from local experience, they are also tempered by global exposure. 

The Global Faculty Programme is a series of workshops for practising theatre-makers, actors, writers, directors and even filmmakers. The Faculty for these workshops comes from drama schools, companies and performance traditions across the world. Each month a Global facilitator will lead six sessions over video-conferencing for a group of about fifteen Indian participants seeking new perspectives, awareness and specific tools for further refining their performance and practice. Workshops will look not just at acting and performance-making, but also at design, lighting and technical aspects of theatre. This, we hope will not just open up the door for deepening skills and understanding, but give birth to cross-border collaborations that celebrate what brings us together instead of the <social> distance that keeps us apart. 

Here are the details of the first workshop in this series:

Shakespeare in Practice with Vik Sivalingam

Workshop Takeaways:

– Further your ability to access the language of Shakespeare

– Develop a deeper understanding of how to use rhythm and meter to inform your work

– Interrogate and reinforce methodology by working on material from chosen plays

– Explore and celebrate the adaptability of Shakespeare’s work to cultures across the world

– Explore the formation of an ensemble of players and create an online sharing of the work 

Facilitator: Vik Sivalingam

Royal Shakespeare Company/ Warwick University (Postgraduate Award in Teaching Shakespeare) |

Arts Council/ Birkbeck, University of London (MFA in Theatre Directing) 

Vik Sivalingam is a Theatre Director based in London. In the UK, Vik has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Almeida Theatre, the Old Vic Theatre, Royal Court, and Tricycle Theatre. Internationally, he has directed performances in New York, Brazil and the Netherlands. Vik is currently a Senior Tutor at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) and is an Industry Advisory Panel member for Taylor’s University School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Malaysia.

He has also directed in other UK and US Actor Training programmes including Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Syracuse University (for Shakespeare’s Globe), Brooklyn College, Temple University, Arts Educational Schools, East 15 Acting School and WacArts.

His directing credits include: 

The Ice Cream Boys (World Premiere, Jermyn Street Theatre)

There of Here (London Premiere, Park Theatre)

Home (London Premiere, The Last Refuge)

The Drunken City (London Premiere, Tabard Theatre) 

Half and Half- the Curry Musical (Welsh Millennium Centre, Cardiff)

The Bullet (Royal Shakespeare Company @ The Hampstead Theatre)

Invisible Man (Royal Shakespeare Company @ Park Avenue Armory, NY)

The Tempest (Rio Olympics)

Twelfth Night (Iris Theatre)

Radio Serenade (Medicine Show Theatre, NY) 

Blue/ Orange (The New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich)

To apply for this workshop, please fill in the following form.

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

– Socrates

The Covid pandemic and the ensuing lockdown have changed the way we do a lot of things. It has given us time and reason to introspect and examine our commitments to things we believe in. Organizations big and small have used the past two months to make tough decisions for their future. 

In the arts and cultural sector, data indicates that almost every creative worker has lost income and opportunities. But the sector itself will weather the changes and emerge in forms old and new. With that in mind, Drama School Mumbai has made some changes too. Here is a snapshot of how the rest of 2020 and 2021 will look for us:

Pausing the PG Course: Back to the Beginning

The one year Post-graduate Course in Acting and Theatre-making is DSM’s flagship programme. Since 2013, nearly a hundred new actors and theatre-makers have emerged from this programme. Our alumni have gone on to found theatre companies, work in film and television and win awards. The admissions call this year had 128 people from nearly fifty different cities applying for the course, despite lockdown. 

We had originally hoped to bring in not one, but two batches for the year 2020-2021. But Covid 19 presents us with uncertainties that cannot be ignored. Mumbai, our home base, is still under the Red Zone status. Intercity and interstate travel is being heavily controlled to prevent the spread of infection. Though WHO and the Ministry of Home Affairs have issued guidelines for resuming work and education post the lockdown, the sector still needs to come up with rigorous health and safety policies and protocols. In light of this situation, though tough, the most practical decision at the moment is to pause the PG Course. Thus, DSM will not be delivering a one year programme in acting and theatre-making in 2020 in the same manner as it has in the past years. We will instead proceed with this as a TRANSITION YEAR using the time between now and October to reimagine and begin offering programmes of study that will continue to represent our best intentions in forging a new generation of theatre-makers. More information on that in the next section.

Screenshots from Ben Samuels’ ongoing module with Batch 2019-20: Theatre: Transference and Transposition 

TRANSITION AND BEYOND: New Models for Theatre-makers of the Future

While solving for the completion of the PG Course for the current batch, three key strands of thought emerged:

1. Training for Acting and Performance-making in online and digital formats
2. Global faculty and programmes becoming a serious possibility instead of a stop-gap measure
3. Theatre as a conceptual model with principles that transcend the live medium

With these thoughts guiding our organizational development, several pathways emerged. Let’s look at them one by one:

Training in Acting and Performance-making:

As a training organization, in addition to the one-year course, DSM also offered Foundation Workshops for beginners and Advanced Workshops for mid-career professionals. In fact, intensive workshops were where DSM began its journey. In the TRANSITION YEAR, we are looking at diversifying short-format courses to include both in-person and online models. The in-person programmes being developed include

• Five Week training blocks that can be adapted to any physical space and style, thus becoming a travelling model of training that can be set-up in any city or rehearsal space
• Three and Six Month Programmes to be launched when the Pandemic restriction allow
• Short Performance and Theatre-making courses that work with scripts or devising as a methodology

In the online space, we imagine courses that can be offered synchronously, that is facilitator-trainee interaction happening in real-time as well as blended formats where students can access a video library and have live interactions with facilitators. The focus of these workshops would be similar to our Foundation Skills Workshops. Blended long-format courses that focus on playwriting and direction are also under development. 

In addition, we are exploring how these modules can add up using a credit system towards a combined qualification like the PG Course. 

The Global Faculty Programme

In lockdown, space and time became amorphous concepts, more so than they had consciously been in the past. In practical terms this means, learning together no longer needs to be restricted to a single physical space or even time-zone. And thus, advanced workshops with the best theatre has to offer globally are a very real windfall of our times. 

The Global Faculty Programme is a series of workshops for mid-career practitioners that focus on advanced skills in theatre, acting and performance-making. Leveraging the international network DSM has cultivated through faculty and alumni, this programme will offer week-long workshops, offered through Zoom, for practitioners from everywhere. 

DSM’s primary goal has always been to bring the best practices from across the world to theatre practice in India as well as create conduits that take Indian Theatre practices – traditional and contemporary to the world. Applying the same principles, we also hope to develop an online India Theatre Programme with leading practitioners and traditional masters of performance. 

Transference and Transposition

The lockdown spawned a new generation of digital content almost overnight, with everyone from cultural behemoths like the Bolshoi and the London Symphony Orchestra to local acting aspirants putting work up online for consumption. The unprecedented creative wave led to reactions and responses from within and outside the community. But at DSM, it also brought to the fore questions regarding theatre as a medium itself. The most important of these was: How does theatre transpose into other mediums (and the digital space specifically) in a way that honours both the original medium and the medium in which it will newly function? 

Ben Samuels; LISPA Alumnus and Artistic Director of Limbik Theatre, UK, Irawati Karnik; writer and playwright and Jehan Manekshaw; DSM School Head and are leading a joint collaborative exploration of this question. Though in its initial stages, the desired outcome from this exploration is the conceptualization of a global programme that brings practitioners together to explore the zeitgeist of our times through various mediums that exploit theatricality. 

Groundwork for this course is already taking shape through a module being run with the current batch of students. 

WRAPPING UP: Batch 2019-2020

Internally, with the current batch, we continued online classes through the lockdown. The annual production which was a week and a half from opening when the school shut amidst the Covid 19 pandemic. Director Kirtana Kumar worked with the students to put the Rhinoceros production “into a box” with the potential for an unboxing in September or October. The students meanwhile conceptualized, scripted and designed their final presentation pieces, remotely working in small groups. They explored themes of death, happiness and grief, discrimination and of course living the virtual life. Irawati Karnik; Lead Faculty: Research Strand, Neeraja Patwardhan; Costume Design Mentor and Saatvika Kantamneni; Production and Stage Management Mentor guided the students through this process. In any other year, these pieces would be staged publicly at the DSM year-end showcase Aadyant. At this point, the students may stage the pieces virtually. They will also use these pieces to make Production and Entrepreneurship Pitches to mentor Niloufer Sagar. 

Additionally, an international faculty came together to support their learning with Benjamin Samuels, Daniel Goldman, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Abhishek Majumdar, Amy Russell (LISPA), Sophia Stepf (Berlin), Amitesh Grover leading sessions with the students. With Ben Samuels, the students are working on a module called Theatre-Making: Transference and Transposition. This module is focussed on discovering what makes theatre “theatre”, to identify and explore the awarenesses, skills and sensibilities of performance and theatre-making can be carried into other mediums and is step one in developing a global programme on the same topic. 

DSM is also doing its best to provide for the mental health and welfare of the students with weekly check-ins, access to counsellors and office hours with school head Jehan Manekshaw and Faculty members Kallirroi Tziafeta and Irawati Karnik. Based on how the situation unfolds, Batch 2019-2020 will return for a Secondment between October this year and July 2021 with a functioning theatre organization. We hope that this secondment will give them a formal pedagogical mentorship and an opportunity to create a new piece of work with the organization. 

We are also in the process of putting together a course for upskilling faculty members as we move further into the realm of digital pedagogy.

Proposed Timeline for Batch 2019-2020

THROUGH THE PIPE: Possibilities for the Future

As DSM consolidates the current processes, ensuring that our funds, programmes and health tide us over, we are also cognizant of the role we play in the performing arts sector. After all that has taken place over the past couple of months, we believe, now more than ever that access to training and exposure to the arts should not be dictated by financial, language and geographic barriers.

As this article goes up, DSM is leading a collaboration to create a range of theatre training programmes that can be accessed by everyone who wants to learn. Please do watch this space for more on Project Eklavya, where you can drive your learning no matter how far away your guru is. 

The global Covid-19 crisis has forced a new way of thinking, of imagining a no-contact creative-economy. There are a lot of thoughts at this time – some from digital pedagogy experts and some from those who have just started experiments within the online learning environment. We’ve put together some links and resources for you to check out at the end of the article. 

We’ve also had to change the way we do things at DSM. Here is a snapshot elaborating our immediate responses. 

What we are doing: 

The first move was to put the annual production on hold. The annual production is a 6 week module, where students rehearse, stage and tour a full-length performance, directed by a professional from the industry. In the past directors like Mahesh Dattani, Sunil Shanbag, Sheena Khalid and Puja Sarup have worked with the students on everything from Shakespeare to Karnad. Read more about our productions here. 

The students were supposed to open their annual production this week – Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros under the direction of Bangalore-based theatre-maker Kirtana Kumar (we recommend watching her TED talk about the vertality of theatre.) The production is currently on simmer as students share materials and insights on their WhatsApp group with the director. Kirtana also designed a reflection pack – that allows students to sit back and think about their personal growth – moments of discovery, vulnerabilities, shifts in thought patterns. It also challenges the students to definitively articulate their learning about staging nuances, technical design, form and genre – to literally extract themselves from the process and embed themselves in the learning. Each student answers these questions individually and then Kirtana sits with smaller groups going through the reflection to shape the theatre-maker within each student. 

In the normal course of the year, post the annual production, students take on modules in Production & Entrepreneurship as well as Research & Praxis. This process is now also being driven by critical questions about what theatre-making means in digital times. What is theatrical? What is a shared live experience? Ultimately, as Head of School Jehan Manekshaw puts it, “Everything can be reconsidered (in this new situation). There are no parameters, no axioms. Everything is up for grabs. And the challenge really is how can we get the students to think about these things differently.”  

The unexpected windfall from the whole situation has been the ease of access to experts from across the globe. The students have had online sessions with global practitioners like Ben Samuels, LISPA alumnus and director of DSM’s student production The Curious Climb of Cutter Chee; Daniel Goldman, alumnus of École de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq who directed Molière’s Tartuffe at DSM; Sophia Steph, German dramaturge and pedagogue; as well as NCPA’s Head of Theatre and Film, Bruce Guthrie. And many more such sessions are planned. 

Kirtana also plans an online rehearsal this week – a run-through, followed by focus-group discussions and scene-work. The final objective will be for students to create original choreographies to music and bits from the text. 

How the Students have responded:

Our students have gone back home and for the most part are glad to be home, glad to be safe. Initially, there was disappointment of course, but theatre is nothing if not the art of resilience and students bounced back quickly. They regularly attend sessions. DSM’s work at giving them as much exposure is commensurate with their hunger to take in as much as they can during this as yet un-understood moment of our history. They look forward to new learning and have also teamed up in pairs to do yoga, voice work/singing daily. 

The students have also formed smaller groups to start work on their final pieces for the end of the year showcase – Aadyant – scheduled as of now for June/July. They focus on staying connected – ideating, brainstorming and conceptualizing together. They are being guided through this by Kallirroi Tziafeta and Irawati Karnik who mentor them remotely and have laid out a dramaturgical roadmap for them to refer. 

There are difficulties of course, technical glitches, and broadband woes, but by and large, DSM faculty and students alike are taking on this new journey with positivity and enthusiasm. 

Even the alumni have taken the initiative to collaborate despite social distancing. Please do check these videos they made of Indian language translations of Irish priest Richard Hendricks poem, Lockdown. 

Check out the Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Konkani and Hindi versions of this verse full of hope on DSM’s YouTube.

What questions are we asking about the Future?  

As Kirtana put in, “The situation forces us to be introspective, almost to a molecular level.” 

But before we microscope in, let us not kid ourselves – a virus may have forced us to take stock of it, but the situation for the arts, especially theatre in economies like India has always been precarious. The lack of funding, global economic slowdowns and the lack of government support – none of this is new. What is new is the inability to congregate – physically at least. Conversely though, at this moment, there is a high consumption of art – books, films, series, video games, virtual tours of museums and live streams from the Bolshoi and National Theatre, UK. And we don’t know how permanent these two sides of the curve are. 

Questions Ragini Singh-Khushwaha, DSM Executive Head, is considering at the moment “How does art respond to this change? How does the live experience evolve? How does an audience-dependent cultural economy evolve? Do we, (in theatre) rethink the way we distribute our work in order for audiences to consume?” 

“The Apocalypse,” she says, “has captivated the imagination for a while.” (Since the 1950’s release of Richard Matheson’s post-apocalyptic horror novel I Am Legend, actually.) “And now, it’s a bunch of people sitting at home doing zhadu-pocha. In such a scenario, what does audience experience mean?” Interestingly, Ragini mentions Journalism as the new art. And case in point is the recent podcast episode that literally blew-up the internet, Reply All’s The Case of the Missing Hit. Give it a listen and perhaps we can have a conversation about new formats for dramatic experiences. 

In her recent newsletter, Manojna Yeluri, founder of Artistik License, a legal and business consultancy for artists and creative professionals, speaks about the need to “get clear as to why we’re creators and creative professionals, so we can figure out how and what to leverage, in a market that’s going to value things a little differently.” So the question here is, 

What are we going to sell, who will buy and how can we get the creative economy flowing again? 

Conclusion:

Theatre is a public artform that relies on physical, mental and emotional collaboration and synergy – first between performers in a rehearsal room and then between the ensemble and the audience in a performance space. And now that the physical has been taken out of the equation, is the mental and emotional possible? Is theatre, an art that has been dying for centuries, finally dead? Will it rise on the 22nd day as a droid projecting images of actors separated by space but united by intention?  Or will this lead to the genesis of a new theatre of access; where language, ability, capacity, even space and time are no longer barriers? 

The truth is, no one knows. We know that theatre has survived wars, genocides and pandemics in the past. We believe that it will survive this. And though sometimes anxiety overwhelms us with thoughts of economic instability and uncertainties of this new reality, we are hopeful, that as theatre-makers and audiences, one way or the other, we will return to the stage. 

Resources and Further Reading:

On Teaching Online:

• Teaching Drama Online / Remotely: A Growing List of FREE Tools & Resources for Distance Learning
• Distance Learning with Theatrefolk
• Resources For Teaching Online: Open-source resources for performance-related disciplines
• Virtual Theatre Education Resources: Crowdsourced List of lesson plans, digital resources, videos, and virtual content for any age group
• Digital Theatre+: Productions from across the world, unique backstage insights, practitioner interviews and written analysis

Arts and Culture:

• Bolshoi Theatre Live-stream
• National Theatre Podcasts
• National Theatre Live-stream
• Hampstead Theatre Live-stream
• Theatre-making in Virtual Spaces: WTF’s Virtual Plays Club
• The Guardian’s List of Top shows online
• Immersive Theatre Live Stream
• London Symphony Orchestra: Streaming from the Archives
• Visiting Museums and Galleries online
• Global Folk Music Archive
• Window to the Virtual World: Goethe India’s Curated List of Online Events
• Arts, Culture and Histories of India: Sahapedia’s YouTube Channel

Corona: Impact & Strategies

• London Business School’s Pandemic Webinars
• Boston Consulting Group’s Insights in to the Covid Crisis
• Coronavirus: Resources: Arts, Culture and Cultural Mobility
• The Economic Impact Of Coronavirus On The Arts And Culture Sector
• Artists’ Literacies Institute Covid 19 Economic Impacts Project 
• Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance: What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time
• Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus

The term dramaturgy first appears in the work Hamburg Dramaturgy (1767–69) by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who is also credited with first creating and practicing this discipline. Although every production inherently has its own dramaturgy by virtue of the artists working on the context of the play, a dramaturg is a dedicated person on the creative team whose primary task is to support the production’s development by asking key questions, researching, providing context, and helping the artists to create the intended performance. 

Sophia Stepf is the Artistic Director of Flinn Works (Berlin/Kassel). She was recently in India to run the Using Dramaturgy workshop that she designed in collaboration with Jehan Manekshaw of Drama School Mumbai. Our writer Pranita Pandurangi caught up with her to discuss what dramaturgy was all about. 

“Dramaturgy is not an approach to theatre-making but it’s an inherent process in every performance. It has two meanings: Firstly it refers to the sequencing of events, the aesthetic choices and the distribution of information through time. Secondly can also mean the process of a dramaturg accompanying the production. The dramaturg acts as a proxy for the audience and helps the director or the creative team achieve their vision.”

When asked what are the different roles that a dramaturg performs, Sophia continued, “A dramaturg performs a combination of roles such as being a  sounding board, outside eye, working from concept to rehearsal to running shows, keeping the big picture in mind and making sure the production team stays on track, curating the experience for the audience including publicity texts, program brochures, background texts, etc. Dramaturgs can also act as creative producers. The role can also involve research, creating a historical road map for the production, finding material – both visual and text that correlates to the vision of the director and the team.” However, what if someone else involved in the production could perform these roles? Affirming this, Sophia says, “You can eliminate the dramaturg from the production, but you can’t eliminate dramaturgy.” 

The need for dramaturgs and an interest in dramaturgy as a profession has been widely discussed in the Indian theatre scene in the last decade. What is still needed is a formal understanding and framework of the profession plus learning and practicing dramaturgical tools. Speaking about the experience of conducting the recent dramaturgy workshops, Sophia said, “ I really enjoyed creating the workshop. I did not want to replicate the way I studied dramaturgy, which was purely knowledge based, I wanted to created an empowering, experiential and contextual room of learning. The point of the workshop is to enable experienced theatre practitioners to work as each other’s dramaturgs in the future. We had a really diverse and dedicated group in both Kolkata and Bangalore with a great work ethic. We worked up to 11 hours a day plus homework and I am happy to say that all 24 participants finished this first part of the project. We have given them as many useful tools as we could without a strict definition of what dramaturgy is – every creation process is different and part of being a dramaturg means being flexible, being able to adapt to various artistic visions. Also not every dramaturg is the same. Someone might be good at historical research, someone else might be good with scripts and script analysis and someone else is an expert of devised forms. The participants are all working on someone else’s play as a dramaturg in the next six months and when we meet them in September 2020, at a 3-day- seminar, we will find out how useful the learning of the workshop were in real life. 

Dramaturgy being essentially a German theatre practice, we asked Sophia if it’s really needed in Indian theatre scene today. She responded, “I’ve seen a lot of theatre in India for the last 18 years. There’s incredible creative potential and skill in terms of  script-writing, acting, dancing, singing, music plus rich traditions in various art forms to draw from. But there are a lot of projects I have seen in the urban scenario that haven’t reached their full potential. So dramaturgy makes sense all the more. Also many urban theatre makers are experimenting with new forms – from devised to documentary theatre to social gaming to working with marginalized groups – these new forms can develop much better with the help of dramaturgs. As theatre makers we all need professional help from time to time – dramaturgs provide that help. This can take many forms, one important tool for example is feedback. Feedback can be harmful and useless if egos, opinions and hierarchies get in the way. There is a need for a structured, affirmative feedback, that focuses at what works as opposed to what doesn’t work. Feedback can be a supportive and constructive process if done right. another tool I find very important is performance analysis, which means to understand and to describe how meaning is made on stage (through semiotics) and how emotions are created. That is a tedious exercise which we did in the workshop a lot and which is immensely helpful if practised regularly. It helps you understand why something works or doesn’t work because you distance yourself from your immediate reactions while watching. It is a bit like Vipassana meditation – instead of reacting to  your physical sensations and emotions, you watch them and understand them. This is not new to the Indian context of course, the Natyashastra is one of the most extensive texts on dramaturgy ever written. I just see that the practice of contemporary performance analysis is not used in the urban context enough – and this is one of the dramaturgical tools that can really help make performances better.

On being asked if there would be more such dramaturgy workshops in India in the future, Sophia commented, “Yes, it would be great to have more workshops to heighten the impact on the theatre scene and to create a sustainable practice. At the moment we have created a ripple in the ocean. We want to create a wave. The workshop is ready to go, we just need to find more funding. We received over 100 applications for the 24-seat workshop that we had, so we already know there’s a demand for it.”

Chandradasan (born December 1958) is a theatre director, actor and writer from Kerala, India. He has directed 35 plays in Malayalam, English, Sanskrit, Kannada, Lithuanian, Finnish and Tamil. Chandradasan won the National award for the best play at Mahindra Theatre Festival for his play Karnabharam, New Delhi in 2008. He has achieved many awards for best play, direction, acting at theatre festivals all over India, apart from being a resource person in many theatre institutes, and universities. Chandradasan received the State Award of Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Academy for his outstanding contribution in theatre. He was awarded with the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship 2014 to visit USA and do research on the social connectivity of theatre in multiple contexts. He is the founder of Lokadharmi Theatre Group and Mazhavillu (rainbow), a children’s theatre group, both based in Kochi, Kerala, India. He is the director board member of RRC, Bangalore of NSD. DSM writer Pranita Pandurangi caught up with him to chat about his session at the recent dramaturgy workshops conducted in Bangalore.

What was it that you specifically spoke to students about?

It was just one hour guest lecture so I didn’t pack too much in. I spoke about my approach to dramaturgy when I do my own productions. We don’t have a dramaturg as such but the director does it himself. I explained what I am using and doing as a dramaturg using the example of my latest production, Shakuntala. I asked them to watch the video recording of my play on YouTube, asked them to read the text as well. They discussed it later and they asked me about their own issues.

Going forward, are you open to the idea of having a dramaturg?

In the future, I don’t know what will happen in the theatre. We already have technicians to help the writers and directors to help understand the sociological context. As time passes, the relevance of dramaturgy is seeping in even if the director does it himself. Thought goes behind it. Travels in different levels – sometimes, it’s a classic, sometimes it’s a text of your own, sometimes, it’s a post-dramatic text so dramaturgy has its different functions and purposes. Study, research, reading of material, art material – paintings, music, history, news, incidents, which can be collected when you’re devising a production. This search is going on so as theatre becomes more and more professional, this gets hardened. The dramaturg, according to me, could be the director or someone who assists him. Depends on the group and if they have the potential to appoint someone as a dramaturg and the director also has a mind to do so.

Supposing it wasn’t a budget constraint, then would you employ a dramaturg?

I wouldn’t mind getting a person to do it, but I generally like doing the research myself. I always get suggestions from friends. Before I enter into production, I talk about the play and do my own readings based on it and talk to a host of people but I don’t know if someone can really spend so much time and do this for me. An amount of the work I would do anyway. Partly I would do it myself and partly open to introducing a dramaturg. The amount of dramaturgy clarifies my position taken in the play. My perspective deepens. Dramaturgy can go in many different directions. That’s what I feel.

Abhishek Thapar (1985, Moga) is a theatre maker, performer, puppeteer and artist based in Amsterdam. He holds a post-graduate diploma in Physical Theatre from LISPA, London and a Master in Theatre degree from DAS Theatre, Amsterdam. Currently, he is building an artistic research and practice in post-colonial epistemologies, historiographic metafiction and storytelling. DSM writer Pranita Pandurangi caught up with him to chat about his experience of building his latest work, My Home at an intersection. 

What was the experience and process like of working with a dramaturg?

I met my dramaturg, Maria, in Amsterdam. She’s also a writer and editor. Her role was very much was to look at the material from a distance – reflecting on it and looking at how it relates to the Western audience. She also became a critical eye and was helpful in looking at histories which are being represented and performed not in the place where they belong. She answered questions like how much of history does one need to know to reach the core of the work. She was also looking at creating logics within the work and what it means in the the larger context of globalization. She would have studio visits where I would show her part of the work. She would ask me informative questions. She would also describe how she experienced the work and ask probing questions about things which she could see but I couldn’t see. There were a lot of roles put on my shoulder as a solo performer so she helped me break them down and look at it from a strategic, organized way and also shape the timeline of the work. I was talking about a very specific time in the play. There was the question of what to share and what not to share as well as so much of theoretical referencing and conceptual ideas like – what this word or colour could mean, etc.

Could you take us through the step-by-step process?

She was there right from the start – within the work, there are various elements – one is storytelling and then there is film and there is 400 kgs of what seeds of the floor which becomes the landscape of Punjab. Then there is the lemon pickle which is 27 years old at the start of the performance shared with the audience. There was a lot of writing – film material of the reconstruction of the house so she helped me dig more into the references, and what the lemon pickle could mean (could also be the last memory of my grandfather) . We looked at the performativity of the lemon pickle, thinking more about food as a way to access memory. It was a difficult choice for the audience to consume it as it’s black in colour but it’s the natural aging process which makes it so. At some point I would refuse to let anyone enter if they did not eat the lemom pickle. But then those choices changed over the course of time though. We looked at how the pickle could be a motor that drives the entire one hour of the performance. From there to working on how the text which I had written could be boiled down to the questions which I wanted to address. She also helped me sharpen those questions. I was too caught up in my studio so she became an outsider/ collaborator / conversation partner who helped me draw those linkages and connections.

What was the experience like of working in Europe? 

I had to learn a lot when I moved to Europe in terms of learning the language, understanding contemporary art, etc. 

Going forward, would you use a dramaturg for other productions? 

Maria and I work very closely so we’re working on two more productions.