Within and without
DEEPA
GANESH
The core
team of India Theatre Forum: Pralayan, K.V. Akshara, Sudhanwa Deshpande,
Sanjana Kapoor, Sameera Iyengar and others. Photo: Special Arrangement
The
seminar on “Spaces”, organised by the India Theatre Forum, threw up diverse
ideas from practitioners across the world
Even when
you have something as organised as a “seminar”, the idea of “space” fails to
conjure up a same, uniform thought. Not even when it involves a single,
cohesive community, pursuing the common passion of theatre. The idea could be
far more dynamic, and highly evolved, trespassing into areas most
unanticipated. Languages, histories, memories, cultures bring meaning to a
space – emotional as well as intellectual. It is the site of performance and at
once an expression of a range of views — from political to philosophical.
“Spaces
of Theatre, Spaces for Theatre” — the five-day seminar at Heggodu, Sagara Taluk
— organised by the India Theatre Forum, brought together practitioners,
critics, architects, stage designers, and academicians, each laying on the
table diverse thoughts.
Can space
be independent of time? Or time of space? Are time and space one-dimensional –
do they locate themselves only in the physical? If one regards them as
processes and identifies it as a relationship between space and body, then as
India Theatre Forum set out to define, “the act of theatre is always more than
simply the act of theatre”. The act is connected to “real” spaces (time
intrinsic), not always necessarily contemporary.
It's
certainly beyond the physical, argued well-known theatre director Veenapani
Chawla. Tracing the notions of space in science and philosophy, as envisioned
by Einstein and Aurobindo, she recognised three kinds of spaces in theatre.
“There is the inner psychological space of the performer, the external ‘real'
space, which she shares with the audience and a larger cosmic space. And all
these spaces are fluid, without sharp dividing lines between them; anticipating
the aesthetic space of hereness,” she explained. The three states flow into
each other like water, with a force of its own. “The conscious energised
performer will bring to her performance a concentrated consciousness of her
multiple inner spaces and to her external space: her body,” she added. Preeti
Athreya shared a similar viewpoint: she took it back to Bharatha's Natyashastra
and said, “The body of the performer is the primary space of theatre.”
“Space
should trigger imagination,” said theatre director Sankaran Venkateshwaran.
Theatre, he said, was a series of impulses for him, and hence the entire act of
putting a piece of theatre together was keeping the first impulse connected to
the last, and these impulses came from both the inner and outer space. Culture
critic Sadanand Menon called it the “jeeva” of a place. The place may be ridden
with imperfections, but the play goes on. “There is, I believe, an invisible
centre to a space, its soul,” he observed, and “technology certainly cannot
pretend to be superior.”
Taking it
beyond the “inner” and “outer” regions of space, the debate moved to the
recognition of a value system, and deep faith in the community. Playwright and
theatre person Satish Alekar's Lalita Kala Academy, or Prithiviraj Kapoor's
“Prithvi Theatre” or K.V. Subbanna's “Ninasam” – they were originally beliefs
that later assumed a physical space. Alekar said, “It was to create an audience
for Marathi performers.” “It grew out of a context. An impulse that tried to
find a way in which it could deal with art and society, with community as its
centre,” said K.V. Akshara, speaking of his father's dream. “It was with the
belief that theatre mattered,” said Sanjana Kapoor, speaking of the Prithvi
vision. “We wanted a space that fed the world of the actor and the world of the
audiences.”
When
Sudhanwa Deshpande, core member of the India Theatre Forum, recalled how SRC
Basement, Chhabildas, Padatik, and Sudarshan in Mumbai played an “enormously
important role in nurturing non-commercial theatre in cities, because they
brought about, fostered, nurtured ‘the most vivid relationships between
people'”, it seemed an extension of the Prithvi and Ninasam endeavour. He spoke
of an energy that “flowed between performers and audiences.” Though they had
not been specifically designed for performances, “they filled a lacuna, they
responded to the times,” he explained. For someone who believes in minimal
stage design, director Sunil Shanbhag averred that his theatre is never
divorced from its social context. “For me text is extremely important. I use
theatre as a canvas to tackle larger issues.”
For Peter
Brook's stage designer Jean Guy Lecat and Pralayan, who has been doing Street
Theatre for nearly four decades, “space” is a tool of defiance. For Jean, who
turned garages and quarries into grand theatre spaces, it was aesthetic
defiance, but for Pralayan, seeking space between Brooks' “no space is neutral”
and Badal Sircar's struggle for “non-commodified and people-friendly
performance-spaces”, intervention into exclusive spaces was political defiance.
As
theatre critic Samik Bandhopadhyay put it, “cultural spaces are geo-political
spaces.” Hence, there can be no standardised theatre spaces that will create
standard theatre responses. Language nurtures histories and memories, and it is
impossible to blur all spaces into one Indian general reality. “Space” may be a
crucial issue, but it's not the primary impulse in theatre. The stimulus comes
from a hundred different locations.
