A familiar plot mixed with impromptu acting and waggish dialogues, mostly performed by college students at intercollegiate fests and commonly known for parody of popular advertisements or movie scripts. If you haven’t guessed yet, these are the traits of Mad Ads — a creative, out-of-the-box and bardic on-stage interpretation of scripts mostly performed in college settings. It is this conformity, and the fear that Mad Ads is losing its sheen, that made a group of young engineers, students and entrepreneurs come together to resurrect it out of college campuses.
PunchTantraa was formed by nine keen performers a couple of months ago with the sole objective and vision to promote Mad Ads as an independent art form. “Mad Ads as an art form was comfortably confined to college fests as a competition. The main motive was to defeat this extinction and bring it in front of a non-college platform with a wider audience base. More than anything, we wanted to liberate the audience from their daily humdrum. We wanted them to get out of their mundane lives for 90 minutes and step into a different world,” says Avinash Meda, a senior software engineer and one of the founding members of PunchTantraa.
The members of this Mad Ads group come with prior on-stage experience ranging from 4-10 years. With an eye for experimenting in the comedy genre, PunchTantraa has performed thrice already. The group has several shows lined up in the future. PunchTantraa performs in a mix of Kannada, Hindi and English.
“Public performances will be the prime means of achieving our objective. The essence of the art form is best experienced when seen on stage. Apart from this, we plan to have workshops, corporate performances and the likes,” says Dr Sohan Raghavendra, a resident medical officer at a corporate hospital and another founding member.
The group has done its share of homework to promote Mad Ads, so much so that they had to overcome taunts by theatre professionals who would criticise Mad Ads.
While the exact advent of Mad Ads in colleges is not known, the art form became popular with the Ad Mad Show that was aired on Zee TV sometime in 1996.
According to Dr Raghavendra, the concept has evolved over the years. “Evolution in this concept happens very quickly. The trends of performances see seasonal changes with the wink of an eye. However, in a broader sense, the art form has changed a lot with respect to the creativity that goes in, with elements of other art forms slowly making their way into Mad Ads,” he says. ‘Laughter therapists’ as they would like to be known, PunchTantraa is a team formed by experienced elite Mad Ads teams in Bangalore.
According to Praveen Kumar, another founding member and an assistant director in the Kannada film industry, experience with theatre alone will not suffice for Mad Ads. “The skill set that is needed is different. For actors, a lot of energy and facial expressions are needed. For narrators, a lot of energy, voice modulation, mimicry skills are needed. Synchronisation between the actors and narrators and also the ability to improvise on-stage is a necessity,” Kumar says.
PunchTantraa is convinced that it will not be long before Mad Ads is elevated on to bigger platforms. “Now that we are already taking up Mad Ads at a professional level, and the pace at which this is going, I definitely see it move out of colleges. Having said that, a different perspective says you can take college out of Mad Ads, but you can’t take Mad Ads out of college,” simpers Meda.
Bharath@newindianexpress.com
