Real estate is extremely expensive in Maximum City and therefore establishments don’t like to give up their venues for any performances.
The artistic community, on the other hand, is always on the look-out for new performance areas. Cajoling, convincing and bullying owners to lend their spaces for a “unique” performance is now part of an alternate theatre producers MO.
Jehan Manekshaw displayed this trait amiably, when he arm-twisted his chartered accountant into parting with his office for performances of Theatre Professionals’ site specific production Mountain Language.
Recently however, business establishments have suddenly begun to see the merits of hosting the performing arts. These are not branded events which talk about the product, but stand alone performances that respond to the space.
Theatre creators, Sheena Khalid and Yuki Ellias happened to be having a drink at the trendy Cool Chef Café, chatting to co-owner Tarun about what they do. Within the next few minutes a plan was hatched — Sheena and Yuki were conscripted to create a performance exclusively for the Café.
What followed was a wonderfully weird version of Alice in Wonderland. The aim was to take a story that everyone knows as children and make them engage with it as adults. The audience became Alice, and Cool Chef Café was converted into the Wonderland. Characters like the Cheshire Cat, Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, The Mad Hatter and the Queen of Hearts entertained the audience who wandered to any of the Café’s rooms where characters were either telling stories, playing games, dancing or singing songs. The extravagant costumes and constant interactivity made the whole performance extremely enjoyable.
So successful was the “adventure” that Sheena and Yuki have formed a new performance group called Dur Se Brothers that has already been commissioned to do another performance based on strange Superheroes.
Breaking the conventional audience experience seems to be the order of the day. Pushan Kriplani strived for precisely that when he staged a Stranger-Foolish-Wise, an evening of poetry and short stories commissioned by home furnishings store Bandit Queen. Inspired by the brand, the work was created specifically for the venue. Pushan settled on “desire” as the theme, because the high-end store contains not things that you “need”, but things that you “want”. What emerged was a collection of poems and writings from Murukami, Vikram Seth (from where the title comes), Manto, Wendy Cope and even old Prakrit poems in translation. The objective was to juxtapose the surroundings with the content, and the three women cast then took the audience on a journey accompanied by live music. The show was promenade in nature, where the audience was guided to different areas of the store for the performing of different sections.
However, unlike in conventional theatres where the audience is in darkness, here they were in just as much light as the performer. It was almost as if they were stripped of the safety of anonymity and became an active part of the performance. From the initial discomfort to the respectful calm to the actively participatory, this was a very unique audience experience. The Stranger is not likely to ever be staged in a conventional space. The piece was designed from responses to the space, and therefore there is a certain sanctity to that relationship.
To take the same piece and perform it in a regular theatre would debase the experience and reduce it to simply a collection of short pieces, as it would be devoid of the context that the store and its expensive merchandise automatically provided.
Context is an important factor when creating and watching work; a factor that “assemble line” theatres do not offer unfortunately. If you want that heightened live experience, then perhaps it’s time to start looking for places outside the proverbial “black box”.