Actor And Creative Director Atul Kumar Speaks On The Necessity To Experiment With ‘form’ To Make Theatre Extra Participating
A lady haunted by insomnia, a djinn and a hallucinatory thoughts throughout the COVID-19 lockdown; a failed social media influencer’s journey down the rabbit gap of infinite scrolling; a 2020 model of The Mahabharata’s “warrior princess-turned-mute doll”, Chitrangada. Ranging from Marathi to Hindi and English, these are just a few of the various tales being informed at The Company Theatre’s TheatreFILMTheatre — A Festival of Shorts.
The competition, at the moment underway, was conceptualised as a communion of up-and-coming filmmakers taking a look at theatre by way of a renewed kind — by lending play scripts a cinematic outlook. And that’s not all.
With the intermittent COVID-19 lockdowns, forcing theatres to shut doorways for an extended time than anticipated, Mumbai-based The Company Theatre needed to catch in control.
“When the lockdown started, we all thought we could use this time to get back to reading, introspecting and ideating, but it just went on and on,” recollects creative director Atul Kumar, with over 30 years of expertise within the area of theatre. Performers had been understandably beginning to really feel demotivated. It was right now that filmed theatre started gaining recognition — full with multi-camera setups and shoots. “We found that very boring,” says Atul.
Trying to have interaction everybody and encourage any form of inventive expression, The Company Theatre resorted to 2 initiatives. For the primary, “We got filmmakers to make films on theatre scripts so that the connection remains. For this, we sent out a feeler to theatre actors around India and more than 600 actors applied. We connected them with these directors.” The script and actors’ background had been the one conditions for TheatreFILMTheatre: creative freedom was the filmmakers’ personal. While this initiative marked the cinematic facet, there was extra to experiment with.
With the second initiative, “We wanted to explore the third dimension of this medium: an experience we can give the audience which is neither cinema or theatre, but derives from both. This threw us into the world of new media — gaming, artificial intelligence and websites,” Atul continues.
For the final three months, the workforce had been engaged on two initiatives which is able to roll out on-line, within the kind of interactive interfaces. Audiences will enter a digital room or museum which is interactive; someinstances dwell and at others, with a video element. “Another thing we are trying to do is to use media like WhatsApp and Facebook to create theatre.”
Atul offers an instance: Mumbai’s famed society WhatsApp teams are theatres in itself. “They are full of emotions and very dramatic — there are fights and at the same time people who recover from COVID-19 and return, are welcomed with much cheer and applause,” says Atul.
Inspired by this, Atul is planning a ticketed, 24-hour-long present on WhatsApp — with movies, memes, sound bytes. “So, the WhatsApp group becomes a stage. Similarly, on Facebook, actors could create accounts as characters in a play,” provides Atul.
When open air theatres had been allowed to operate in Mumbai, The Company Theatre didn’t miss the chance. At their artists’ residency in Kamshet on September 21, they carried out a promenade piece the place the viewers moved together with the motion. “It was a big high. We had an audience, finally!” says Atul, concluding, “I think, ultimately, the times do push you in new directions.”
Find TheatreMovie Theatre at www.youtube.com/user/TheGuildenstern until Saturday, October 3.
