It’s a pleasant surprise to see Sanjana Kapoor open her office door and invite you with exceedingly infectious warmth. The lady who literally charted the way for Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai comes across as genuine and down to earth without the starry airs of belonging to the Kapoor khandaan.
Sanjana, who doesn’t need an introduction to theatrewallahs and theatre enthusiasts, has moved ahead and looked beyond Prithvi, the baby she nurtured for years. It’s rare to have women who have a vision and even rarer to have them execute it. Sanjana belongs to that rare breed which dares to have a vision and thinks beyond the known without creating a fuss of who-I-am and how-important-is-my-work syndromes. Her latest project and brainchild Junoon along with Sameera Iyengar, another passionate theatre lover and braveheart, has already started to set trends with its baby steps.
Their dream of making arts an integral part of our lives comes across with passion as Sanjana and Sameera both dive into talking about how Junoon is an effort to let arts grow, nurture, and engage minds creatively to build a more harmonious, generous, joyful and sensitive world.
“Cultural engagement of a mind is healthy for it to create a better environment, one that is sensitive and harmonious with the cross sections of the society. With Junoon we want to raise the value of arts and create an environment where arts won’t be considered as luxury,” says Sanjana. She rues about the short-sighted vision that India has when it comes to treating arts and culture as an important part of the society. “If you look around, there really has been no planning in the field of culture. What Junoon strives to do is make arts accessible and seed engagement in arts in neighbourhoods through a structured process,” says Sanjana adding, “Prithvi developed an audience for theatre and it gave them the ability to discern.” She says it was important to move on and develop a larger vision for arts.
Co-founder Sameera steps in and elaborates the sheer joy of working in arts. Armed with a graduate degree from MIT in Mathematics and a Ph.D in theatre from University of Chicago, Sameera says the challenge of creating a vision with Junoon and make it happen is exciting. As the summer workshops known as “Junoon Arts at play” for children are in progress at various venues across the city, Sameera says it is fascinating to see children grow with imagination and vision in their minds through the workshop. “It’s all about making friends with the medium. While it is challenging and rigorous at the same time, it is magical to see what happens to the kids at the workshop. The fact that they can articulate in their own words and express themselves freely is a drastic change we’re observing in them,” says Sameera.
Spread over more than eight weeks, the workshops have been engaging the young minds in theatre, dance, music and lots more. Sameera cites an example of a kid who was extremely shy and couldn’t express himself when the workshop just began, and barely few days later he held his own and spoke in front of an entire audience, articulating how he felt about the workshop. “That was phenomenal since he came up on his own and said what he felt like. It’s not something that could have happened overnight, but nonetheless it made an impact and that was important,” says Sameera. “It sets the ball rolling for some sort of communication and then impacts their minds greatly and each child just drowns himself deeply into the process without even realising it,” adds Sanjana.
Since making arts accessible is what they are setting out to achieve, it is interesting to see the locations they’ve chosen to start off with. From the southern parts of Mumbai to northern suburbs, often considered the ignored child of Mumbai, Junoon is spreading the buzz. “We realised we had to reach out to people living in areas which are not so familiar with arts and theatre. For example we have workshops in Kandivali east, where you usually wouldn’t find theatre activities in the midst of growing upper middle class urbane population and overflowing markets and malls,” says Sameera.
The formidable pair of founders, Sanjana and Sameera both articulate upon how there really is no right or wrong in the entire process and kids just learn to be themselves. “It is to tell them to trust themselves and have that sense of conviction. We want to take the process forward by creating a network with schools, harbouring theatre activities and cultivate interest and passion for arts. We want to create a habit in schools for embracing arts,” says Sanjana.
Considering arts and culture has been given step-motherly treatment in this country, accumulating funds and resources is a major challenge. With a business model in place without dropping any business jargons (courtesy MBA), Sanjana says there are three basic avenues from where the income is generated. We don’t want to repeat the same thing of sponsorships again and solely depend on them. The idea is to enhance our own environment and create a revenue generating sustainable model,” says Sanjana who is also looking at shared owners whereby individuals can contribute and be a part of the process. “While doing this we don’t want to lose out on the economically-disadvantaged section of the society and right now we have about 110 kids who are paying a minimal fee, which is hugely subsidised, “ says Sanjana.
They are confident about the way things are going. “We just want to bring in more quality and room for talent. It’s also about creating a forum where people come and share ideas and simply engage in fun, imagination and creativity. There’s a lot coming up at Junoon and we’re also going to bring back the travelling theatre companies back in action with a caravan-like set-up,” says Sanjana with that gleam of excitement in her eye.