Rency Philip and Sharanya Ramprakash, past Inlaks Theatre awardees, curated and directed the 2024 showcase ever so gently but also sharply, lending a listening ear, a critical eye, and an open heart to the undertakings the 6 artists chose for themselves. They introduced the evening with the idea of exploring the idea of nonsense, immediately putting the audience and performers at ease with their imagination of it.

The showcase hoped to bring alive this fundamental playfulness that is a big part of being an artist - to make new meaning from the old. The  presentations were well-thought-out, with some being fully imagined shows, others excerpts from a pre-existing work. Some  sharings, a few are movement pieces, and some perhaps best described as staged wonderings. The audience were asked to watch, respond and even get involved in the performances.

Rency Philip and Sharanya Ramprakash

Abhay Mahajan, Anklesh H, Laya Kumar, Meera Sitaraman, Shravan Baliga and Sachin Ravindran, all theatre practitioners recently supported by Inlaks, spent the last year elevating their craft as well as their understanding of theatre and its applications. The showcase was a beautiful reflection of their journey, their passion and the varied ways in which they express their thoughts on life around them.

Read on for a peek into their wonderful performances and presentations.

To see the highlights of the performance, click here and the full performance here

Abhay Mahajan

Abhay Mahajan

Abhay’s piece ‘Asymptomatic’, told the story of an artist who is trying to find the symptoms of feeling like a true artist. He knows he is an artist but doesn’t feel artistic. He applies for grants and scholarships diligently every year with his ideas, as he firmly believes that appreciation and acknowledgment from the esteemed jury will give this sense of satisfaction. The scene he performed was a solo piece of an artist who feels affected but is not showing any symptoms.

Anklesh H

Syed Sadiq and Anklesh H

Trained under Guru Sri Vasanth Kumar, Anklesh created a piece for the showcase which served as an introduction to the art form of leather puppetry and his efforts at keeping it alive. With the support of past Theatre Awardees Sahana Pinjar and Syed Sadiq, he took the audience through a recording of his performance to share about the art and his own experience, and the learnings and challenges he continues to face while pursuing and reviving this form.

Laya Kumar

Laya Kumar

For the showcase, Laya was keen on exploring the inherent heteronormativity in language. While researching women and their participation in public spaces in India, it was evident that there were specific words and phrases that spoke about women and their bodies. It was as if language limited our imagination of what the public space is and can be.

Her presentation was an attempt to look at the following question: if we could find and create words that reimagine public spaces, what might that be like? The hope was to create an archive of these words and phrases from across the country. Can redefining and relooking at language help us reimagine our world?

Meera Sitaraman

Meera Sitaraman

Meera performed a snippet from her latest Devarattam solo performance. Mathemagician, written by Gowri Ramnarayan, interweaves dialogue and poetry to take you to Babylon 500 BC, the commercial centre of the ancient world. Castrated and sold into slavery by his father, Nikor is apprenticed to Plautus, the Chief Economist of Babylon. The excerpt Meera performed showed the point at which Nikor enters Babylon for the first time with Balaashi, his Master, and is stunned at its beauty and expanse. Devarattam, as a Tamil Nadu folk form, is far removed from Babylon, but its embodiment in the play stands testament to its adaptability.

Shravan Baliga

Shravan Baliga

Shravan’s piece for the showcase was titled 'Walls & Wounds', and featured a character Ashwin who looks back on their complicated relationship with their father, whose high expectations shaped who they are today. Over time, Ashwin grew tired of always obeying and wanted to assert their independence. When they finally stood up to their father, it led to a rift that lasted years. Now that their father is gone, Ashwin reflects on the past and considers their own dreams, exploring how class, societal pressures, masculinity, and generational conflict have influenced their life. Against the backdrop of today's expensive real estate, they ponder the true cost of pursuing their aspirations. The stories were drawn from the performers’ personal experiences.

Sachin Ravindran

Sachin Ravindran

Sachin’s piece in the showcase had aspects derived from Thullal, including its rhythm, movement and speech patterns. It drew from two source texts, the classic Malayalam novels Khasakinte Ithihasam by O. V. Vijayan and Govardhante Yathrakal written by Anand.

With the Inlaks Theatre Award, Sachin has been training in the Kerala art form Thullal with Kalamandalam Suresh Kaliyath, and working towards creating a performance piece with his other mentor Vivek Vijayakumaran. He is trying to internalize the art form and research with the body to find a performance language that is emerging from his Thullal training.

An extremely engaged audience had interesting questions they posed to each awardee - from further nudging the idea of what is the inner voice which is heard, to widening the idea of gendered spaces, to understanding the depiction of death and horses or what does feeling artistic mean! Meera even invited a few members of the audience to join her on the stage and taught them a few steps of Devarattam.

Anmol Vellani, the Foundation's senior-most scholar from 1977, Founder Director of the India Foundation for the Arts, and an eminent theatre director and writer himself, took the audience through the Foundation's history and the founder's vision to support promising young Indians who would become leaders in the field they chose to work in. His observations were rooted in his own life-changing and transformative experience of studying overseas.

He spoke about the journey that the Foundation itself had traversed, from supporting education only at Oxbridge institutions, to now universities across UK, U.S.A and Europe, also extending support across a wide range of fields including the under-supported field of Arts in India, especially for the 'Individual' in the Arts.

Highlight Video of the performance available here

Full Video of the performance available here

Photo credit: Virginia Rodrigues