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Conversations Season 3
a place for performance

performers, directors, educators, dramaturgs and entrepreneurs

Date: Saturdays & Sundays, August, 2021
Time: 04.30 pm

thevessel@designpendulum.com

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© 2020. Design Pendulum.

a place for performance

conversations3 with performance practitioners, educators, dramaturgs and entrepreneurs

What is it to be told, without being spoken with or to, that one’s primary calling isn’t an essential service to society? What is it for the sociable to be denied the opportunity to congregate? What is it for the embodied creative to not have the opportunity to create? Whether self-imposed or state-enforced, over the past year we have dealt with isolation of different kinds in different ways. I consider it invaluable to engage with performance practitioners to ask and know how they’ve been over the past year. Therefore, this conversation series with practitioners and entrepreneurs whom I’ve been in touch with or moved by.

This program is my attempt at furthering conversations on the questions and perspectives presented by Kolkata based dramaturge, Dr. Rustom Bharucha in his 9-episode speech act tilted, Theater and the CoronaVirus, published in January (’21). Here’s the link to Dr. Bharucha’s work which offers a comprehensive historical perspective on the pandemic, performing arts and communities:

https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/v/interweaving-performance-cultures/online-projects/index.html

Each session has a panel of three participants, comprised of a young practitioner, a veteran and an entrepreneur (who owns/ manages a place of performance). The conversations, initiated and interspersed with Qs and largely propelled by the participants, would last two hours each. The Qs are generic based on the participants’ performance/ performative/ spatial/ theoretical/ creative engagements. Questions (such as, How have you engaged in your art over the past year? Are there shifts in your perspective with respect to your art? What are your ideas about the space for practise and performance considering what the world has been through in the last one year?) are intended as catalysts to the conversations with and  between the participants.

The recordings of the five conversations will be edited and posted on this website – one episode every Saturday through the month of August.

I don’t consider it important for us to positively conclude conversations. Instead, it is perhaps far more important to simply congregate in whatever form possible and become responsive to the fireworks of ideas and insights lit up by the conversations.

Sidharth
June-July 2021

session 1

dr. rustom bharucha

dramaturg, Kolkata

Trained as a dramaturg at the Yale School of Drama, Rustom Bharucha is the author of several books, including Theatre and the World, The Politics of Cultural Practice, Terror and Performance, and the recently published Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments, co-edited with Paula Richman. He was the Project Director of Arna-Jharna: The Desert Museum of Rajasthan and the co-Artistic Director, along with the late Veenapani Chawla, for the Ramayana festival at Adishakti, Puducherry.  

At the moment Rustom is working in his capacity as a dramaturg on a new production of the Mahabharata produced at Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, Singapore. He is also completing a monograph on the pandemic in relation to performance based on his 9-episode video-lecture on Theatre and the Coronavirus. Watch the eight episode, New Paradigms of Theatre Architecture: A Search for a Post-Pandemic Ecology of Space here: https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/v/interweaving-performance-cultures/online-projects/Theater-and-the-Coronavirus/Episode-8/index.html

kirtana kumar

actor, director, film-maker, dramaturg

Little Jasmine Theatre Project & Infinite Souls Farm & Artists Retreat, Bangalore

With her company, Little Jasmine Theatre Project, Kirtana has created 15 original works of contemporary Indian theatre including Shakuntala (Bangalore/London), The Big Bolly Boo Hoo (Bangalore/Mannheim), The Retreating World/Last Tuesday and The Abhimanyu Project. Her focus has been on intersectional aesthetics, on taking the personal and deeply political into the performance sphere.
With 35 year stage experience, Kirtana teaches Theatre and Interculturality at various institutions in Germany, including the University in Dortmund. She developed and organised two national symposia on Dramaturgy (at Jagriti Theatre) and Theatre Pedagogy for Children (at Ranga Shankara), respectively. At the start of the pandemic, in June 2020, together with Little Jasmine and Theatre Lab (Youth) she organised a national symposium called Because the World is YOU on Theatre Pedagogies for Children in Times of Zoom. Inspired by the possibilities of the digital stage, she later initiated an aural theatre series based on Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, called In the Hour of God.

In March 2021 Kirtana was invited to be artist-in-residence by the Kulturreferat der Landeshauptstadt München. During this period she curated Global Karnataka, a festival of theatre from Karnataka for TEAM Theater, Munich and co-hosted a series of conversations on Grotowski and post-pandemic ideas for theatre and the arts along with Axel Tangerding at Meta Theater, Moosach. Her latest work – developed at Villa Waldberta, Munich – is a digital archive of communiqués between two women called Nagamma’s Letters and a book of short stories titled Bangalore/ Blue Balls & Groovy Chicks.

She is a trustee of Women Artists Group and runs Little Jasmine Theatre Project, Theatre Lab (Youth) and Infinite Souls Farm & Artists Retreat. She currently serves as chairperson of the Board of Trustees at Visthar Institute of Development, an organisation that works on issues on peace and social justice among marginalised groups including urban and rural Dalit youth.

Infinite Souls is right now preparing to serve a forthcoming residency for students of the advanced course of Drama School Mumbai.

nikhil mehta

director

founder and artistic director, Black Box Okhla, New Delhi

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Nikhil’s theatre directing credits include Monsoon Wedding the Musical (Co-Directed with Mira Nair), For The Record (Winner of 6 Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards including Best Play and Best Director), The Shakuntala Project, Woyzeck and Katzelmacher. 

Previously Nikhil was the assistant director for Sunday in the Park with George starring Jake Gyllenhaal on Broadway. MFA: Theatre Directing, Columbia University.

As Artistic Director of BBO, he has curated work by Anuradha Kapur, Deepan Sivaraman, The Australia Council for the Arts, The Alkazi Theatre Archive, Katkatha, Vishal Dar, Aagaaz Theatre Trust and India Art Fair.

Black Box Okhla (BBO) is a performing arts initiative founded in 2017. BBO programs new work, intercultural explorations and alternative experiences through a residency program. BBO invites artists working across all artistic mediums to devise experiences, experiment with different interactions and envision performances they haven’t been able to create anywhere else.

session 2

Dr. Eilon Morris

percussionist, composer, actor & educator, Yorkshire

Based in West Yorkshire, Eilon Morris works as a percussionist, composer, actor and educator throughout the UK and internationally. He is a senior lecturer at Leeds Conservatoire and recent projects include his collaboration as a music producer with Zoe Katsilerou on project mάzoksi, working as a puppeteer and musician on The Wicker Husband at the Watermill Theatre, and composing for and performer in OBRA Theatre Co’s latest production IBIDEM.

In 2017, Eilon published his first book, Rhythm in Acting and Performance: Embodied Approaches and Understandings (Bloomsbury, Methuen Drama). In 2013, Eilon completed a PhD investigating the role of rhythm in actor training, at the University of Huddersfield, following on from a Masters in Ensemble Physical Theatre completed in 2008.

Eilon is a core member of Iceberg and OBRA Theatre Co, as well as an associate artist at Whitestone Arts. He was a founding member of the Quiddity Ensemble (2001-2004) and the Butterfly Club Pocket Theatre (1998-2002) in Melbourne Australia

since relocating to the UK in 2004, Eilon has worked on productions including Day of the Living (RSC), Lord of the Flies (BBC Radio Drama), These Trees are Made of Blood (Southwark Playhouse and Arcola Theatre), Gaudete (OBRA), Le Voyage dans la Lune (BFI), It’s Like He’s Knocking (Unfinished Business), Electric Field (IOU), Shattering Man (DUENDE), and Rhein (Royal Festival Hall), as well as touring and recording with music groups including Stems and Kelter.

In recent years Eilon has also taught and presented research at cultural and educational centres including Central School of Speech and Drama, Rose Bruford College, University of Kent (UK) the Duende School of Ensemble Physical Theatre (Greece, India), Au Brana Cultural Centre (France), Baratza Aretoa (Basque Country), Université Laval, Québec City (Canada), Taller de Investigación Teatral (Mexico) and Universidad Nacional de las Artes (Argentina).

Shambhavi Singh

professional coach 

co-founder, OddBird Theatre & Foundation, New Delhi

https://assets.gqindia.com/photos/5f5f19ec53e8ad2194a0d009/master/w_1600%2Cc_limit/bnw-e1522930630455.jpg

Shambhavi is a trained professional coach and the co-founder of the OddBird Theatre & Foundation, a New Delhi based performing arts nonprofit. Her work history over 15+ years has focused on communications and operations. Coaching amalgamates her academic background in sociology and theatre, with her job experience through the lens of people and their stories. She is currently researching the intersection of theatrical improv and coaching, as applicable to growth, leadership and culture. She is also experimenting with ways in which the coaching framework of inquiry and reflection can inform an audience’s experience. When she isn’t pondering the power of performance (and forcing alliterations) she can be found fantasising about lindy hop lessons.

Vaishnavi Mannava

contemporary dancer & performer

New Delhi

Vaishnavi is a performing artist with an early training in Bharatanatyam from the young age of 4. Her work is led by curious explorations at the intersection of human psychology, physiology & cultural imprint; often leaning towards creating large scale images made from accessible objects or material and movement. 

Vaishnavi enjoys mixing mediums and resists limitations set by forms or norms. Improvising with different forms of music, visuals, shadows, and poetry is another form of expression she engages in. These works are often performed in intimate spaces like boxes, drawing rooms or terraces, or unexpected spaces like bars/ cafes and public parks.

View Vaishanavi’s improvs here:
+ Flashbulb: Undiscovered Colours
+ Trippy Tales Chapter One

One of Vaishnavi’s current passions is a piece called Cat’s Cradle, which was created in 2018 through the course Body, Space & Time at Gati Dance Forum, with the help of mentors like Mandeep, Deepak, Ranjana, Navtej, Surjit, Preeti Attreya & Mini, and her co-performer, Greeny Francis. The piece, through a scaled-up and embodied game of the Cat’s Cradle, explores the complex interdependency of two entities in a given space and its Gestalten effects on the performers and audience alike. 

Cat’s Cradle has been graciously supported and hosted by many people and places over the last 3 years. Vaishnavi is currently working on expanding this piece and also exploring new concepts that have risen from solitary contemplations facilitated and forced upon by the lockdown.

Cat’s Cradle

session 3

Dr. Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry

director

The COMPANY, Chandigarh

Neelam Man Singh Chowdhry has a Master’s degree in the History of Arts as well as a diploma from the National School of Drama.  In 1979, she moved to Bhopal and was attached to The Rang Mandal, a theatre repertory attached to the Multi-arts Complex, Bharat Bhavan. In 1984, she moved to Chandigarh where she set up her own theatre company called ‘The Company.’ Parallely, she has also been teaching in the Department of Indian Theatre, Panjab University and was also the Chairperson.  

Dr. Chowdhry’s well-known plays include Kitchen Katha, The Suit, Yerma,  Nagamandala,  The Madwoman of Chaillot, Little Eyolf, Bitter Fruit and Naked Voices, Gumm Hai, and Black Box,  to name a few . The group has participated in major national and international festivals.

Dr. Chowdhry is the recipient of several awards including the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2003, and the  Padma Shri in 2011. She is presently Professor Emeritus at Panjab University.

Bitter Fruit

Naked Voices

Black Box

Amruta Mapuskar

Actor, theatre maker, clown, and performance artist 

Madman & Me, Mumbai

Amruta is a freelance artist, teacher and performer, currently based in Mumbai. She graduated from Mumbai University with an MA in Theatre Arts, and has since trained and practiced within various performance disciplines from around the world. She is also a graduate of The DUENDE School of Ensemble Physical Theatre.  

​Born in Ratnagiri, a small town in the belt of Konkan Region of Maharashtra, India, Amruta began her theatre studies at home with her father, who was involved in folk and regional theatre. Since then, she has never doubted what she wants to do with her life.

​Amruta’s focus lies in exploring the integration of Body and Mind,  on creating body-mind awareness and mindfulness through interdisciplinary practices, including Tai-Chi, Kalari, Clowning, Dance. From such foundations, she finds the freedom to (create) work that respects the complexity of expressions in the body, and how to shape expression into performance.

As an interdisciplinary teacher/facilitator,  Amruta aims to create strong physical awareness and presence, not only with actors but also youngsters. Her work explores existing social/cultural paradigms and discourses concerning relationships between body and mind, seeking to bridge the gap between body and mind created by dominant structures in society.​ Her clown work, by spreading laughter, aims to improve mental health of underpreviliged kids, including children of sex workers or those in juvenile home and for women rescued from trafficking.

In 2019 Amruta was the first (and only one yet) to be awarded the Julie Goell Eccentric Woman Scholarship. She was recently awarded Maharashtra Cultural Center’s RANGSETU fellowship for her work in Clowning.

Amba Suhasini

performer/director

artistic co-director, GUILD OF THE GOAT, New Delhi

Amba is an alumnus of LAMDA (The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, London UK). She is a theatre maker, performer, teacher, workshop facilitator and director. 

She hopes to create theatre that challenges and investigates our times. ‘What is the world and what is our place within it?’, is the question she aims to continue to explore, with and through her work.

Amba continues her overseas collaborations in the UK and US. Her recent work during the pandemic in 2020 includes a virtual theatre experiment – What you will – a devised show in collaboration with The Shakespeare Ensemble, UK. And more recently in 2021, Interwebs, a project built in collaboration with Walkabout Theatre, Chicago with whom she has been working regularly in the US over the last 4 years.

For close to a decade now Amba has been conducting workshops for both adults and children and has also been a regular visiting faculty at DSM, Mumbai, where she taught Shakespeare in Performance.

Amba founded the Guild of the Goat in 2017 with RUDY to create work that is exciting, relevant, contemporary and makes us all question ourselves and the world we inhabit. The company chooses not to have a unifying artistic vision or trademark aesthetic. The guild of practitioners with diverse training, experiences and approaches, the company finds strength in its diversity and aspires to create work and build audiences which are also diverse.

session 4

Max Windholz

artist, performer and teacher

Atelier i42, Wasserburg am Inn, Germany

Max is an artist, performer and teacher from Wasserburg am Inn (Germany). He dedicated himself to improv theatre following extended experience in classical theatre, performing both with his own group as well as with different ensembles. In addition, Max has trained as a clown, learned mask play and construction in Canada and has worked with teachers from all over the world. 

For the last few years he has been devoting himself mainly to performance and teaching. He is also active, including in India, with Clowns Without Borders.

Max’s focus is on the individual performer. He is aware, from experience, of how important it is to find one’s own style. As an artist, he feels it is crucial not to be pressed or place oneself into a prefabricated scheme and that one has to find one’s own way.

Max believes that it is important to not segregate art forms; that experiences in diverse disciplines, even seemingly unrelated ones, make up the complete artist. For him, while everyone is unique in their own way, there is no such thing as the clown, the performer or the dancer. Training as a clown, in bodywork or dance has an impact on the artist  and thus on every performance.

As a teacher, Max emphasizes on basic skills, while also supporting each learner individually in their development. This approach, he believes, helps everyone find  pleasure in their work and inner peace. 

Max set up – atelier i42 – his own artist studio with workshop space – in the beginning of 2021.

Preeti BirlaNair

applied theater facilitator, personal growth coach

Mumbai Playbackers, Mumbai

Preeti started her career working with hotels after her graduation in Hotel Management from WGSHA Manipal. Being intrigued by the people management aspect of business she soon moved to further studies and did her M.A. in Personnel Management and Industrial Relations from TISS. She then worked in different aspects of HR Operations in the Pharmaceutical and the Oil and Gas sector in India and SouthEast Asia for over 15 years.

Preeti has trained in Bharatnatyam in her early years and pursued theatre with Ekjute Group, while working a day job in Mumbai. This new experience as an actor, inspired her to explore the role that theatre and other expressive art forms could play towards personal and group transformation. In 2015 she moved on from her corporate role to delve further into this realm. 

Preeti has explored different forms of expression to deepen her learning as an artist and a facilitator. Playback theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed, Psycho-physical theatre, Movement therapy, Eurythmy, Human Process Work and Professional Co-Active Coaching are key areas she spent time learning and integrating in her work. She believes that exploratory media, such as theatre, art and movement, help to make the process of diagnosis, explorations and creative resolutions holistic.

In 2016, Preeti created a playback theatre ensemble, Mumbai Playbackers with her workshop participants. They have performed in art festivals & public places, with corporates & NGOs, at homes & educational institutions, and, over the past year, have been creating online experiences. 

In 2019, Preeti founded empurple as an umbrella organization offering interactive performances, group facilitation and individual coaching. She is now in her final year of training in Eurythmy, a unique movement form that makes speech and music visible while working on self development. 

Preeti, through her work, now aspires to facilitate access to spontaneous energy and resonant listening spaces through art. Her endeavour is for people to integrate art into business and everyday life to provide the much needed nourishment and sensitivity towards self and others. She is also seeding intentions for an interdisciplinary project to manifest space for exchange of personal stories to work with healing the wounds of history – personal and collective. This “third career” phase, while still nascent, has been the most exciting, unnerving and satisfying and Preeti looks forward to the journey ahead.

Abhishek Krishnan

performer

founder & director, The Misfits Co. 

As an actor, Abhishek’s work includes Netflix’s ‘Feels Like Ishq’, 2-time Oscar winner, Claude Lelouch’s ‘Un + Une’, Shoojit Sircar’s ’Stupid Cupid’, NCPA’s ‘Gandhi- The Musical’, Aadyam’s ’Sing India Sing’ & ‘Mother Courage and her Children’, Akvarious’ ‘One Night Only’, to name a few. 

As a creative agency, The Misfits Co. has worked in the space of marketing communications and HR solutions for organisations like Bajaj Finance Ltd, Aditya Birla Capital, Pinnacle Life Science, Oxford University, Krea University, Udaan India Foundation, to name a few. 

Abhishek’s mottos in life are ‘Hakuna Matata’ and ‘Jayus’ (Indonesian for a joke told so poorly, that one cannot help but laugh).

session 5

Maya Krishna Rao

performer/ maker/ teacher

Vismayah, Delhi

Maya is a theatre maker and teacher. She devises performances that range from dance theatre to comedy and live media. Her teaching practice focuses on the areas of performance making and applied theatre. Her long training in Kathakali in her childhood continues to be an inspiration in making contemporary performances.

Maya’s shows have travelled the world and she has been commissioned to create performances for prestigious theatre festivals at home and abroad. Some of her celebrated shows are, ‘Khol Do’, ‘The Job’, ‘A Deep Fried Jam’, ‘Heads Are Meant for Walking Into’, ‘The Non – Stop Feel Good Show’, ‘Are You Home, Lady Macbeth?’, ‘Ravanama’, ‘Loose Woman’ and ‘Walk’ that was created in response to the horrific gang rape and eventual tragic death of Jyoti Singh. The performance went viral on social network sites.

Since 2012 Maya has also been making performances at short notice – sometimes just a day – around issues of public concern, ranging from the threat to the RTI Act to mob lynching.

Maya taught in the National School of Drama for several years. Subsequently, she was professor in the Department of Arts, Design and Theatre at the Shiv Nadar University where she designed and taught a post-graduate Diploma TEST – Theatre for Education and Social Transformation. Currently, she is visiting faculty at Ashoka University where she teaches performance skills. 

Maya was given the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for Acting in 2010 which she returned in 2015, in response to the government’s indifference to rising intolerance in the country.

Since the lockdown Maya’s work has moved in new directions. She has created a pandemic character, Paru, who gives us her unique, sharply political (and funny) perspective on this changed world we find ourselves in through short podcasts. Maya has also created, along with a visual designer, a series of short videos on themes of current concern. Over the past year she has been invited by universities and other arts related institutions across the world to teach and give online talks.

LOCKDOWN STORIES: PARU

LOCKDOWN STORIES II

Manjari Kaul

performer, director and teacher 

Artistic Director, Improper Fractions, Delhi 

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Manjari Kaul is a performer, director, teacher and Artistic Director of Improper Fractions, a Delhi based Theatre group. She is a graduate of the DUENDE School of Ensemble Physical Theatre (Athens) and has a Masters’ degree from The School of Arts Aesthetics (JNU). She has taught at the DUENDE School 2018. 

Some of Manjari’s latest directorial work includes Plan D, a Physical Theatre piece about death and absence (performed at the Sanatkada Festival 2019), The Two-Headed Lore, a piece examining the play of gender in mythology and fairy tales (performed at several venues in Delhi and Gurgaon), 00101010, an ensemble piece about identity in cyberspace (performed by the students of Srishti School of Art, Design & Technology, Bengaluru), UpRoute, a Devised piece about home and exile (commissioned by Instituto Cervantes) and a solo show, Chronicle of a Death Foretold; based on the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez which has been performed in London, Athens, Delhi, Bangalore and Lucknow.

Improper Fractions came into being in the summer of 2012 as a group dedicated to exploring the incongruous, fragmentary, disruptive, off-key and awkward in theatre. It pursues the creation of possibilities for intersections and/ or parallel co-existence of different forms, patterns, languages of movement and speech; experimenting and playing with the strange as well as familiar concurrence and conjoining of imagination and reality. It is equally committed to introducing and nurturing theatre for the young – organizing workshops on storytelling, movement and improvisation for children.

Breathe: A movement poetry piece

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Internal Skyline

Thommen Ollapally

entrepreneur

Director, Shoonya Center for Art & Somatic Practices, Bengaluru

Thommen Ollapally is the Director of Shoonya – Centre for Art and Somatic Practices. He is also in the family property development business which builds apartment communities in Bangalore.

Thommen feels strongly about finding ways to help Bangalore’s artistic and cultural growth keep pace with its financial and technological growth. Thommen has dabbled in various art forms including metal sculpture, the classical guitar and theater. Some day he hopes to start a line of contemporized veshtis for the young urban Indian.

Founded in 2014 by the Ollapally family in memory of Joseph Ollapally, Shoonya is a non-profit, multi-arts centre in the heart of Bangalore on Lalbagh Road. A light-filled space surrounded by beautiful palm trees, Shoonya is envisioned to be a platform for art and somatic practices.

The center has been thoughtfully designed for people of different artistic disciplines and somatic practices to create, connect and collaborate. Shoonya offers a space for artists and the community to engage; an open and nourishing environment for people from diverse cultures and ages to impart knowledge and share experiences around creativity, performance, holistic health and education.

A space to learn, explore and experience, Shoonya seeks to further the growth of the arts and somatic practices through carefully curated programmes as well as by supporting practitioners and artists in meaningful ways. The center’s vision is to increase community participation in these areas and enable collaborations on a national and international level.


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© 2020. Design Pendulum.