The Script           
The Script, December 2006. Thespo Special.

Dear Theatre Addict!

Its been seven long years and the journey is still on! Finally, we have sprinted into our eighth year, where 48 plays were screened in 5 different languages. 6 of these will be showcased in Bangalore and of those 5 will play in Bombay. 

As always there is tons happening at Thespo - workshops, platform performances and the Poster Design Competition. If you wish  to be part of the festivities, its not too late - you can either volunteer or design a poster for any one of the plays, before the 1st of December. 

This year we owe a huge debt of gratitude to a large number of people. All those who chipped in financially and otherwise to make the festival happen. We are very grateful to  the  Sponsors -  Radio Partner RADIO ONE 94.3,  Time Out Mumbai, T-shirt sponsor Haute Chilli and Judge Gifts sponsor Dhoop, for believing in Thespo and helping us to carve our  footprints and leave a mark behind.

In this edition, there is everything you wanted to know about Thespo 8. The histroy of the fest, the journey of Thespo 8, Bangalore and Bombay Schedules, a piece on the recipient of the Life-Time achievement award -  Girish Karnad and all that you want to know about the platforms, plays and workshops, etc. Besides there is also a listing of all the articles that are featured in the Thespo 8 magazine. Copies are available at the venue during the festival.

We hope to see your footmark at the festival. So come and break a leg!

 Happy reading.

Yours Sincerely,
On Behalf of Q Theatre Productions,

Quasar.
Editor, The Script.

Articles in this edition:
Evolution of Thespo: All you ever wanted to know. From birth to present day. It's been a long ride!
Footsteps to Thespo 8: The journey this year, from the Orientation Meeting to the Awards Nite!
Thespo Bangalore: Thespo livens up the Bangalore theatre scene at the Ranga Shankara!
Lifetime Achievement Award - Girish Karnad: Arshia Sattar on what makes Shri Girish Karnad a formidable force in the world of theatre.
Thespo Bombay: Workshops, platform performances, poster designs, plays and awards - All in all an exciting festival!!
Thespo Magazine: Contributions on the theatre from critics, musicians, playwrights, actors, directors, and theatre enthusiasts - A sneak preview. Get your copy at the festival!
 

The Evolution of Thespo : 1999-2005

“Behind the curtains mystic fold
The glowing future lies unrolled.”

Breathe Heart Opening of San Francisco in 19th January,1970.

Not too long ago, opportunities for serious young theatre enthusiasts were limited. There was a need to raise the bar and move away from the under-rehearsed one act plays on the college circuit. Theatre Group Bombay, seeing the latent talent being lost due to lack of opportunity, decided to “fill the void”. 

 Thus 1999 saw the birth of Thespo, aimed at recognizing, encouraging and promoting youth talent in the theatre.

 The festival got its name from the 6th Century BC Greek Poet “Thespis” who pioneered spoken dialogue, breaking the ancient tradition of chorus and verse. At the Great Dionysian in 534 BC he became the first recorded winner of a prize for tragedy. His followers since then have been called Thespians. 

Thespo only demands that all participants of the festival have to be 25 years old or under, be it directing, light operation, backstage or on stage!

Thespo has walked through the magical journey and proudly stands today as one of the premier youth festivals in the country. What started modestly as a one act play festival in 1999, Thespo has grown into a two city festival of full length theatre.

The Thespo Graph:

Thespo '99: The pilot programme. A one-evening event showcasing 3 English one-act  plays.

Thespo 2000: The transition to a 4-day festival of full length theatre.

Thespo III: Thespo Bangalore is born thanks to Harlequin Entertainment. Becomes a 9-day festival (3 in Bangalore, 6 in Bombay). 2 plays from Bangalore perform in Bombay.

Thespo 4: Daily workshops introduced for the first time to open up interaction opportunities with the theatre doyens of today.

Thespo 5: Thespo goes multi lingual. Plays performed in Hindi, English, Marathi and Urdu. Bangalore becomes a 5-day fest, with teams from Bombay performing there for the first time.

Thespo 6: A three city festival across three weeks. Thespo Delhi is created. Kannada makes its first appearance to join Hindi, English, Marathi and Marwari.

Thespo 7: Mentoring workshops introduced where the participating teams interacted with senior writers and directors.

Thespo 8: 48 plays in 5 languages from 6 cities were screened. For the first time screenings were held in Chennai, Calcutta and Mysore. Six plays are performing in Bangalore and Bombay. This year the Lifetime Achievement Award is being presented to Girish Karnad.

Thespo still has miles to go before the youth can become an integral part of India's theatre movement. The task at hand is to kindle the fire and light new sparks!

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Footsteps to Thespo 8!

» Orientation Meetings:

Bombay: 22nd July 2006 at Prithvi Theatre, the plans for the festival were unveiled. Dates announced and over 70 people crammed into the tiny room at Prithvi house to be part of the fest. Actors found directors, directors found writers and Thespo found volunteers.

Bangalore: 5th August 2006 at Alliance Francaise de Bangalore. A crowd of 30 turned up to join the Thespo 8 juggernaut.

Chennai: 11th August 2006 at Music Academy. 20 people heard about Thespo for the first time. A small step for the Thespo movement; a new city heard about the festival.

» Thespo Outreach Programme:

Following on from the success of the reactions in Chennai, Thespo spread its wings in the month of September, casting its net for new talent to untapped cities like Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkatta, Delhi and Ahmedabad. Workshops were also organised at Hyderabad and Chennai

» Screening Of The Plays:

The outreach programme proved successful when registrations from new cities like Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai and Mysore were received. From 12th - 30th October, the screening committee of Yuki Ellias, Arghya Lahiri and Shaizia Jifri saw 48 plays in Hindi, English, Bengali, Kannada and Marathi across 6 cities.

On the 31st of October, a marathon meeting finally unveiled the six plays that are now part of the festival.

»  Launch Of Thespo 8:

To announce the plays and activities for Thespo 8, a launch event was organised at Hotel Marine Plaza in Bombay. Theatre veterans Anupam Kher, Dalip Tahil, Alyque Padamsee and Amin Sayani shared their early theatre experiences and how they all began. The event was punctuated by Anupam Kher's wit, Dalip Tahil's voice, Amin Sayani's verse and Alyque Padamsee's innovation. The event also gave an opportunity for the theatre doyens of the present to interact with the heirs to their thrones.

» Poster Designing Competition:

For the second year in a row, budding artists and designers interpreted the short listed plays in graphic form. An exhibition of the posters is being held during the Bombay festival at the NCPA Experimental Foyer.

» Work It Out Workshops:

Each group performing at the festival interacted in a two day workshop with a professional writer and director. The aim of the exercise being to look at text and analysing the written word. The writer brought along a scene and the group worked through it over the two days. Theatre practioners such as Mahesh Dattani, Ramu Ramanathan, Arghya Lahiri, Divya Jagdale, Jehan Manekshaw, Manaswini L. R. and Chinmay Mandlekar interacted with the Thespo 8 performers.

» Mentoring Programme:

During the run up to the festival a member of team Thespo attended one rehearsal a week of each of the plays to address any technical problems or roadblocks that the teams might encounter.

» Magazine:

Conversations with journalists, enthusiasts and practitioners revealed the need for a forum to voice the multiple concerns of the theatre. So the Thespo 8 magazine compiles articles on a wide array of theatre related topics.

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LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD - GIRISH KARNAD

What's so great about Girish Karnad?
 

This year's Thespo Lifetime Achievement Award goes to Girish Karnad, the Kannada and English playwright who has been creating works for the stage for more than thirty years. Thespo is not the only one to recognise Karnad's contribution to the arts - he has received every conceivable national and state award for his work in theatre and film, including the prestigious literary award, the Jnanpith. But, it is particularly fitting that he receive the Thespo award because he wrote his first play, ‘Yayati’, when he was all of twenty one, exactly in the age group whose theatrical aspirations Thespo so carefully nurtures and encourages. Now, at sixty-eight, Karnad is more prolific than ever before: two new plays have opened in the last 18 months and another has just been written. At the moment, there are at least two of his other plays are in production in different parts of the country. It's always nice when a Lifetime Award goes to some one who is still working and making a difference in his or her arena of expertise and practice.

Go to any discussion on modern Indian theatre and Karnad's name is like punctuation - he appears on practically every page of scholarly works on Indian theatre and café conversations are liberally peppered with his name. You simply cannot speak of theatre in India after independence without referring to his plays, their numerous productions and the directors and actors that have brought his words to life, decade after decade. From Ebrahim Alkazi's monumental production of ‘Tughlaq’ on the ramparts of the Purana Qila in 1974, to Satyadev Dubey's dark and brooding ‘Hayavadana’ that provided a major counterpoint to BV Karanth's robust folk-based production of the same play in 1972, and most recently, Roysten Abel's challenging interpretation of ‘Flowers’, Karnad's works continue to attract the country's most talented and innovative directors.

Although his plays (until a few years ago) were all written in Kannada and rooted primarily in specific histories, pan-Indian myths, local folk tales and performance traditions, Karnad's play scripts have always moved quickly across Indian languages and regional cultures, ensuring that stage-worthy translations are available to theatre people all over the country. From Punjabi to Marathi and Gujarati (apart from English and Kannada), Karnad's works have found cultural and emotional resonances and audiences literally all over India. The fact that they are produced with such ease and enthusiasm here as well as outside the country indicates that Karnad is able to tap into something universal about the human spirit and human dilemmas, no matter how locally rooted his inspirations may be.

Karnad's historical plays have usually been a response to a political event or a social phenomenon, and to that extent, they can be understood as having an automatic nation-wide context and appeal. For example, ‘Tughlaq’ has often been read as a poignant critique of Prime Minister Nehru's grand plans and magnificent idealism that could not be supported by the nation he was trying to build, ‘Tale Danda’ was written during the dangerous rise of the Hindu right as India's secular fabric began to fray at the seams and ‘The Dreams of Tipu Sultan’ began as a radio play commissioned by the BBC to celebrate fifty years of Indian independence. Despite these plays being located in the past, Karnad's characters are infused with a modern spirit and a contemporary idiom of internal debate that allows us to see the human beings behind the enormous events - like moving the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad, or the massacre of the sharanas in the city of Kalyana, or the Tiger's courageous last stand at the Srirangapatnam fort. In these plays, Karnad's skill lies not simply in making our heroes human but in the fact that he makes the past a polished mirror that refracts the present and which allows us to look beyond the surface of the real events that we are witnessing.

At the same time, when Karnad places mythological kings and powerful priests on stage to work through the implications of curses and boons, we are still mesmerised by their predicaments, for the curses and boons, even as they remain magical, also become vehicles and metaphors for the more human emotions of guilt and shame, destructive anger and bitter, jealous rivalries that lead to murder and suicide. The men and women who carry the terrible weight of these emotions are, in the end, just like us. But what of horse-headed men and nocturnal snake lovers who are patently not like us and who are redeemed by miracles and the timely interventions of gods and goddesses? Why do modern audiences take them so seriously, set as they are within folk frames of suspended disbelief? Because even these unlikely beings are used to explore the eternal questions of love and betrayal, of wanting more and getting less, of the search for meaning, the quest for perfection and the striving for completeness within the human condition.

It would appear that the real well-spring of Karnad's inspiration remains the human heart and the place of the human being in a confused and confusing world. He chooses to explore these private and public selves through myth and history and folk tale, but these are the costumes that clothe his true concerns. When the Tipus and the Tughlaqs, the Yayatis and the Paravasus, the Hayavadanas and the Nagas return to the green room, the faces that emerge as they take off their make up and their shimmering stage garments are yours and mine.

Thank you, Girish, for showing us who we are.

- Arshia Sattar

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Tickets are available at the NCPA (22824567).
Tickets = Rs. 100/- only (50% discount for students upon display of valid id card).
To register for the workshops, please contact Levrante on +91 98195 84458.
For further details, and to join the poster design workshop contact Akanksha on 91 98208 85569
For more details on the plays or to book tickets call Reema on 9820453015 or email thespo@gmail.com

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Thespo Magazine

The following are a list of articles that are featured in the Thespo 8 magazine this year, it is a comprehensive collection of articles and points of view on the latest that is happening in Indian theatre and the world at the present time. So just come to the NCPA and pick up your copy!

The Direction Of Time - Abhishek Talapatra shares how one monologue changed his perception on acting.

The Role Of Media In Promoting Theatre - Deepa Gahlot highlights the need for better media coverage for theatre.

Trends In Indian English Playwriting - Pragya Tiwari traces the coming of age playwriting in English.

Video On Stage - Subuhi Jiwani comments on the increasing use of multi-media in the recent theatre productions.

Solving A Problem Like Maria - Priscilla Mehta-Roxburgh describes Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest casting experiment.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 2006 - Ruchika Channana samples the world's biggest theatre festival.

Pop Goes Shakespeare - Vrushali Haldipur writes about the Bard's longstanding relationship with Bollywood.

Reeling In The Talent - Rachel Lopez explores the presence of the playwright in Hollywood.

Atheistic Altar Egos - Avinash D'souza explains why theatre is his religion.

The Theatre's (In)ability To Resist Censorship - Ramu Ramanathan traces the continual presence of political control in the arts.

Theatre Costs Go Sky High - Tejaswani Tirta discusses the economics of theatre.

The Evolution Of The Back foot Cover Drive - Arghya Lahiri shares his passion for theatre lighting.

Indian Music Theatre : Where Is It? - Chris Williams discusses the phenomena of the Western Musical in Bangalore.

Remains Of The Play - Jaideep VG enlightens us about the immortal quality of works of art.

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