In the opening act of the Short + Sweet (S + S) Theatre Festival in Chennai last year, Pooja Balu, a city-based actor and part of a theatre collaborative called Stray Factory, was a member of the audience. In Act Two of S + S, last month—that showcased 32 plays across twelve shows and featured 14 city-based theatre groups in addition to individual directors—Pooja’s earnest and rather poignant performance as a young girl called Cine-Ma, won her the Best Actor Award (in the women’s category).
“I remember, how, almost the day after I watched the plays last year at S + S, I began nagging my director and one of the founding members of Stray Factory, Mathivanan Rajendran, to write a script,” says Pooja. He did, and interestingly so. On the first day of the second edition of S + S on July 11, at the Alliance Francaise of Madras, My Name is Cine-Ma unfolded to a full and crammed house. The gratification was instant, applauses aplenty, appeal, universal. Already, the play has performed at the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Youth Festival and the buzz is it has been shortlisted for S + S in Mumbai and Malaysia. “The latter, we are keeping our fingers crossed,” Rajendran says, over a chat conversation, “We are trying to raise funds for the performance. Else, we’ll make it a holiday.”
It’s 6pm and Pooja is wrapping up rehearsal for Ganga at Rishikesh, a 25-minute act that will premiere on August 12. Aside from being an actor with potential, Pooja, who just turned 21, is a graduate of Visual Communication, has rowed at the Nationals, played soccer for the district, held two solo painting exhibitions, modelled for 20 advertisements—both print and TV—acted in a film, and is slowly walking her way to the ramp. “Oh, and I train in Silambam (martial arts) for three hours, daily,” she says, reaching out for a sandwich, her first real meal for the day: “I like to put my foot only into things I love,” she says, “A corporate job is certainly not on that list.”
In 2007, while transitioning into his fourth year in an engineering programme at the Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering (SVCE), Chennai, Bhargav Ramakrishnan, got an offer to run Evam Entertainment from its founding members, Karthik Kumar and Sunil Vishnu K. All through college, Ramakrishnan was learning the ropes of theatre, entertainment and management, both on and off stage, with Evam. “It seemed like fun and it helped I hadn’t really figured out what I wanted to do next, either,” Ramakrishnan says. At 25, and easily among the youngest executive heads in this business, you can believe Ramakrishnan when he says, “I can tell you that today, people (in Chennai) are a little less surprised than they were, say two years ago if you tell them you are a full-time theatre person.”
If there was ever a fabula on Chennai theatre, now, would be a very exciting moment. The dress rehearsal is over, finally; the green room is bustling with excitement, and the curtains are up for an act that will possibly and hopefully change the course of theatre. Suddenly, drama is the mood of the moment; theatre and plays are being considered cool subjects of coffee-table conversations; they are also emerging as occasions for wholesome evening-outs and romantic dates, and in some sense, a space where many (read youngsters) want to be seen and spotted in one way or the other - participants or rooters.
As we speak, across venues in the city, every day, under the umbrella of Live in August, 30 plays are being performed. Conceived as a Chennai Theatre Month and curated by a group of interested individuals with a singular objective of making theatre both happen and happening in Chennai, the initiative is an attempt to provide avenues and arenas for a diverse set of performances. “It is in platforms like these that you can witness all the new stuff that is happening,” pronounces Ranvir Shah of the Prakriti Foundation who introduced S + S to Chennai with Rajiv Rajendra as the festival’s artistic director, “It is here that you can spot talent for future.”
He is right. In the Wildcards’ section of S + S 2012, Sunanda Raghunathan, a full-time actor and teacher of drama, transitioned from taking directions to giving directions. Her Slick Dame, an adaptation of Keisha Piero’s play, went up on stage in English and Tamil, and won four awards.
In the fabula that is unfolding, almost all the protagonists are youngsters. And that, Ramakrishnan notes, is going to be a “game-changer” for theatre and entertainment at large. Within that pool of “raw talent and youthful energy”, as acclaimed writer and director, Gowri Ramnarayan refers to the new wave, experimentation is key. Within two years of its existence, Stray Factory, that calls itself a collaborative, has 12 productions to its credit, and has worked with 100 artistes from across the globe. The idea is “to offer customised experiences. Be it performing at midnight for 300 people in a hostel foyer or creating a social media platform for college students to pen their own script for our production at their fest, we are constantly doing things with the end-user in mind,” says Rajendran, who quit a full-time career in IT to live his dream life in entertainment.
He is. So is Dushyanth Gunashekar. At 24, his resume is enviably impressive. As the co-founder of the Masquerade Youth Theatre (MYT) in the city, Gunashekar has acted in 30 plays, directed two and produced 15 plays that have had 64 shows primarily in Chennai and a handful in Hyderabad and Bangalore. The cast for the shows is between the age group of eight and 25. Dushyanth is also a chartered accountant and with some five accounting buddies, owns and manages Crea Shakthi (CS), a firm that funds MYT. “Crea Shakthi is in the pilot year of its operations and the results are showing,” he says, “What is really important is the discipline and professionalism with which CS has created that fund, has had a positive effect in the artistic space.”
Swinging freely between his role as financier and an artiste, he is committed towards realising MYT’s vision: “Our plan is to initiate youngsters into the craft of theatre and thereby create a community of culture with a focus on training and ensure the learning is enduring and sustained.” Last Wednesday, on August 8, at the Goethe- Institut, as part of Live in August, MYT presented three shows of three full-length plays by three colleges in the city. “If you ask me, the only people experimenting in Chennai, are the youngsters,” he says, “They are not afraid of falling flat on their faces.”
The learnings from these experimentations and innovations have been great, too. “The most productive synergy in my plays is generated,” Gowri says, “when musicians, actors and dancers have shared their knowledge with each other. For example, musician Savita Narasimhan made Andrea Jeremiah and R Sundar (both are in films now), bring a new dimension into their acting. Working with veteran actor, Dhritiman Chaterji, Savita, in turn learnt how to interweave her singing with dialogue to heighten the emotional import of a scene.” That seamless coming together of sound and visual along with the text and narrative is a characteristic of Gowri’s JustUs Repertory. Live in August kickstarted with Gowri ’s Water Lilies, a trilogy that unfolds “three chance meetings between strangers, a man and a woman each from a different culture, played by Vivek Hariharan and Akhila Ramnarayan”.
Aside the generation of platforms for performance, theatre groups in the city are also cracking and brainstorming ideas for innovative acts. Look at Yog Japee whose Theatre Y is rolling out its first set of plays that are based on “simple storytelling” and are “flexible in their formats. Basically, there is no elaborate set design or props,” Japee explains, “I’m saying, just give me a 10 X 10 space and we’ll perform.” Theatre Y is rehearsing and showing ItsY BitsY ChaddYs, a mix of adaptations of short stories from across the world. “Next, we are hoping to head to the gated communities in the suburbs and explore if we can take our plays there,” says Japee. That sounds like fun no doubt. But wait, what about quality? Will too many cooks end up spoiling the broth? Well, that’s another story. And certainly,not short!