When a group of cultural enthusiasts launched a yearly theatre festival named after the Malayalee actor and playwright Surasu five years ago in Kozhikode, people like me were skeptical about its future. We had our reasons: the customary big names — city-based ministers, politicians, bureaucrats, business magnates and cultural commissars — were not there on the organising committee. And the organisers claimed that they didn’t have any government support or corporate sponsorship. All this was unheard of because even in a school day celebration, there are some permanent names often heard associated with it as patrons, etc; and nowadays the first thing a festival committee applies itself to is how to find funding.
Besides this, experience had taught us that amateur cultural and literary initiatives are destined for premature deaths. So, we thought it was just another instance of cultural adventurism, or a few idealists’ wishful thinking. Hence we didn’t give it much importance.
But the festival organisers under the leadership of writer and social critic Civic Chandran, have disproved our mistrust. Against all odds, unmindful of the belittling cynicism they, through organising the festival every year and each year improving on the previous year’s success, have proved that their offbeat
approach works. This year’s festival, from September 23 to 30, renamed, as Kozhikodan Natakotsavam (The Theatre Festival of Kozhikode), was its sixth edition. The plays staged this year were mainly from three streams — the professional or commercial, the experimental or amateur and the ‘big’ that combines elements of both and produced as part of international cultural exchange programmes.
Why professional plays and big plays? There were people who asked this. But Civic Chandran has his own answer. Festivals, be it film, music, literary or theatre, are huge claims that all often turn out to be a fuss about nothing. But this festival is organised with a view to providing the audience with a holistic view on contemporary theatre and opening a cultural dialogue between various practitioners of the stage. This is a festival of the audience, by the audience and for the audience, he says, setting an example to other curators.
Civic’s position is clearer if we compare the festival with the amateur drama festival organised by the Kerala government-controlled Sangeeta Nataka Akademi at Valancherry, in Malappuram, recently. Theatre was pushed to the background there, and the might of the ruling party was showcased rather than the artistes’ creativity.
A medium for propagating the renaissance ethos and egalitarian politics, theatre has had a pivotal role in forming the modern Malayalee mind. How many villages the early playwrights and stage artistes wandered in, in their costumes, without sleep, food, or adequate remuneration, spreading the ideology of socialism and communism? Those actors were not just enacting the role of labourers and the downtrodden. They actually were labourers, theatre labourers. Through a dialogue or a twist of their facial muscles, they conveyed to the people ideas that great books and long political speeches failed to. It was not only the revolutionary struggle and the strategies of the leadership that brought about the historical victory of the Communist movement in Kerala. Theatre activism played a sterling role as well.
As writer and editor of the festival book, Kalpetta Narayanan observed, it may be the nostalgic remembrance of a past collective, or an inner calling either for disquiet or quietude that drives people even from faraway places to this city during the days of this festival.
