Festival Archives

Curated by Atul Kumar

Meet Shilpa- an attractive, interactive, user-friendly, and the most popular mobile phone app of 2018. Created using the latest technology, Shilpa will sing for you– in the flesh. She will hum the songs you want to hear in her sugary and husky voice, and shake her hips when you want her to as she dances to your favourite tune. Best of all, she behaves exactly the way women are supposed to behave in the eyes of  men; that is, until the next update is released.

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Curated by Arundhati Nag

Among all the Bhasa plays, Urubhangam has an eternal relevance cutting across centuries. In this play, the hero is Duryodhana, usually regarded as the anti-hero or the villain in all the traditional renderings of Mahabharata. The plot maintains a unique objective perspective while approaching the great battle of Mahabharata, which almost criticises the whole exercise of the war.

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Curated by Arundhati Nag

There are many layers of marginalization that have stemmed since time immemorial owing to stereotypes and stigmas. Its time for the paradigms  to change and allow for voices to be heard and to shed light on issues that need social awareness. The intent is to create a platform that showcases creative performances which will reflect the realities of marginalized people and issues.

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Curated by Atul Kumar

Saket, a self-proclaimed ‘anti-national’ has called an Uber to reach home at midnight. Saket gives directions to the Uber driver, but the driver is understanding what he is saying. Meanwhile, Suna, a self-proclaimed ‘urban Naxal’ is caught watching pornography at Saket’s house, and the Narcotics Department has discovered the marijuana plants at Saket’s house.

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Curated by Arundhati Nag

The show follows two performers as they discover that there is much more to plastic than what meets the eye. Cellophane sheets, poly bags, and plastic bottles transform through rhythm, sound, light and shadow creating ever-changing worlds of shape-shifting wonder

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Curated by Atul Kumar

Four bodies trace a trajectory of thought within a circular space, moving to feel the negative space around each other as much as the space within the intention to move. Every time they move, they reach out towards something – constantly creating different relationships with everything around – constantly seeking to reinvent themselves

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Curated by Atul Kumar

T.S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ examines the disillusionment of a man with the times he is living in. Derived from this literary masterpiece, the performance uses the interplay of the human body to understand the poem’s protagonist and the structures surrounding him. In the attempt to find Prufrock inside the performers’ bodies, residing alongside their own anxieties, the performance ends up creating multiple Prufrocks. All cramped inside this overwhelming world of ours, the fractured narrative is threaded delicately by swift movements through urban landscape

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Curated by Arundhati Nag

Using methods and approaches of creating a non-verbal sensorial play for toddlers, the sensorial pedagogy workshop has a twin objective. In working with a mix of theatre practitioners and primary school teachers within the same space, the workshop aims to trigger an imagination for the teachers to re-invent their classroom space while challenging the theatre practitioners to work on a form which cannot use verbal language.

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Curated by Atul Kumar

Set in a thriving underground club scene in Mumbai, Gentlemen’s Club follows the lives of various drag kings who perform in the city that never sleeps. The protagonist Rocky, aka Shammsher, pays homage to the legendary Shammi Kapoor and the golden era of Hindi cinema. Joined by a motley crew of women who revel in drag performances, this cabaret like show takes the audience into a grimy secret world that gives you the license to be whoever you want.

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Curated by Atul Kumar

Notes on Chai is a collection of snippets of everyday conversations inter woven with abstract sound explorations that attempt to relocate our relationship with the quotidian. The piece explores the inner and outer landscape of urban life through everyday conversations. The humour created through these details carries within it desires, fears and insecurities of the mundane that remain unsaid and yet palpable.

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Curated by Atul Kumar

Created in 2016 in response to Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalized sexual intercourse against the heteronormatively defined ‘order of nature’ in India for over 150 years, before it was finally scrapped by the Supreme Court of India in September 2018, Queen-size is a choreographic exploration that takes the form of a detailed study of the intimacy between two men. The duet was initially triggered by Nishit Saran’s article titled ‘Why My Bedroom Habits Are Your Business’, first published in the Indian Express in January 2000

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Agent Provocateur is a dance-theatre performance exploring the effects that a climate of growing intolerance has on the body and its impulses. The body is the site for both- sharing a personal response and for pondering the collective anxious. Conflict, humor and contradiction provide the turf for resistance and negotiation. Choreographed as a series of episodes with two performers and a live musician.

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Curated by Atul Kumar

Master Tusk is a young boy, who has been given a new head- an elephant’s head. Confused and bewildered, he finds himself lost in the forest, where danger lurks at every turn. He encounters a motley couple- Makadi (spider) and Moork (poacher), a clumsy duo in search of a big-ticket ransom. They kidnap Master Tusk, but their scheme goes awry when a prophecy is revealed and changes everything.

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Curated by Arundhati Nag

A person, a place or a thing or much more? Join a fascinating journey with wool in Oool, where the performer takes you through discoveries with this versatile material along with music, movement, play and madness!

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Curated by Arundhati Nag

The play explores the representation of the feminine within the male-dominated practice of Yakshagana. What happens when a woman enters the professional space of a form performed by men for the last 800 years? Drawing from research and personal experience, the performance imagines a reversal of roles in the popular Yakshagana plot of ‘Draupadi Vastrapaharana’.

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Choreographed by Avantika Bahl

Say, What? focusses on the interaction between two people who slide between using and abandoning codified language. As the audience encounters various conversations that are set up in space using sign language as a point of entry, the role of gesture is re-interpreted and demystified within the realm of communication. By lending itself to abstract proportions, this piece opens up a world of meaning making that is both embodied and visceral in nature.

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Curated by Arundhati Nag

Dinner is at 8’ uses steel utensils as its central object of play. While steel utensils work as a sensory medium through the play of sight and sound for the very young audiences, they also metaphorically allow the creators of the play, to think through the concept of the “everyday.”

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Curated by Atul Kumar

At SAF this year, apart from the established and more formal theatre venues, we wish to bring theatre into the homes of individuals who are as passionate about this art form as the artist themselves. We want to bring these works to an intimate environment, where the informality and warmth of a lived space lends its own distinctive character and experiential qualities to the performance. These performances will take place for small audiences through October and November, with the following production to take place during the Festival in December.

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Curated by Arundhati Nag

This performance with puppets, masks, shadow puppets and materials looks at the Mahabharata as a dynamic narrative which has evolved over a few thousand years through the sung verses of Togalu Gombeyatta’s Sillakeyata Mahabharta and remains relevant in the new search of contemporary puppeteers.

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Curated by Atul Kumar

This play is inspired by the stories of Daniil Kharms (1905-1942), an early Soviet era absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. Kharms was often incarcerated by the Stalinist regime for his unconventional and rebellious ways. He is said to have starved to an anonymous death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital after being arrested in 1942.

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Curated by Atul Kumar

Walk Back to Look is a performative response to the rhythm of the public site, by offering a counter beat—be it a crowded bus stand or a chaotic vegetable market. The temptation to look back, at an intriguing stranger or a luscious piece of fruit constantly exists, in these spaces. Yet, few walk back to take a closer look, at a person deep in slumber or that effervescent vegetable seller chanting, “ come buy, come buy”.

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Curated by Atul Kumar

Fermented Frontier is a series of performance walks that originate in a bookshop/library, spill over to the streets and congregate over tea/coffee. An interactive installation of the sounds, dramatic texts, visuals and movements of conversations in multiple languages – from the performance walks – starts to grow in different spaces spread over many geographies. It takes off from the sci-fi plot of alien invasions and the ensuing siege, surveillance, and survival. Any sci-fi plot with aliens in human forms is about how the concept of reality and normalcy in relation to other things changes.

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