Chanakya Vyas

Chanakya Vyas is a playwright, performance maker and educator based in Bangalore. In 2014, he received the Charles Wallace India Trust Award to study Devised Theatre an Performance Making at the London International School of Performing Arts (now Arthaus, Berlin). In 2017, he received a scholarship from the Columbia Centre for Oral History Research, New York to attend their Summer Institute and has completed his Certificate Course in Oral History from Centre for Public History, Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology. Chanakya is also serving as the Artistic Director of Indian Ensemble, Bangalore. Algorithms, his latest play, has been selected as one of the three plays from India to be translated in Czech, as part of the NAYA/NOVÉ festival by Feste Theatre, Czech Republic.

In the Curated Artistic Engagements under Project 560, Chanakya Vyas wants the audience of a game theatre performance to make choices around problems associated with urban commons or city spaces that are for the public, resulting in real-time consequences. It will be realised through an interactive game theatre performance using the tools of Live Action Role Playing (LARP) games, participatory art, storytelling and so on, where the audience will be invited to take on roles and play a game. Chanakya will also be using the mechanics of card games, board games and app-based games, in order to aggregate a repertoire of signs and symbols that the audiences are familiar with. 

The degraded condition of the lakes in Bangalore city is the environmental problem that Chanakya wants to highlight. The invitation to the audience would be to protect, revive and transform a common space in the city - the lake - which has dried up, been encroached upon and is filled with waste generated due to rapid urbanisation. The inspiration for this game comes from the successful story of the revival of the Kaikondrahalli Lake on Sarjapur Road. The residents of the neighbourhood alerted the municipal authorities and held them responsible in order to resuscitate the lake which had been a landfill before they intervened. The transformation of the site from debris to a lake with walking tracks, amphitheatre and a school is a fascinating story about the ways in which we can imagine urban commons in the future. Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is in the process of rejuvenating more lakes in the city with constant help and push from citizens. This compels Chanakya to ask the important question - what role does the community play in urban planning. This opens up enquiries around how different pressure groups, such as the resident welfare groups, activists, recreational users, land owners, farmers and fishermen, play out their class and stakeholding interests in the formation of the “community” that is affected and impacted by the urban commons or the city spaces self-governed by the public beyond the control of state and market. In this very heterogenous mix, Chanakya wants to examine the relationship between commons, communities and commodification of natural resources. 

Methodologically, Chanakya wants to examine the emotional impulses that make a game engaging. He also wants to extensively research the social fabric of a developing neighbourhood to understand the stakes of the communities in the urban commons. He draws inspiration from works of theatre companies such as Rimini Protokoll (Berlin) and Coneys & Hobo Theatre (UK) that use role-playing games around issues concerning the city. While the audience play the roles of the government and individuals, Chanakya wants them to make decisions which have real-time consequences while keeping the playfulness of the game. Structurally, the game-theatre will have the elements of paths, junctions and threads. Paths build a narrative route through the story as a particular set of experiences; junctions are points where the play can be changed through externalities or internally programmed twists in the game-script; and threads are multiple outcomes that will be generated based on the decisions made by the players. The real-time consequences of the decisions made by the players are important to give them the value as stake-holders, which will be unpacked at the time of post-game debriefing. The second aspect of the methodology of extensively researching the social fabric around the urban commons in the city of Bangalore, involves primary research of meeting individual stakeholders who had an impact on rejuvenating lakes in Bangalore. These would include organisations such as Biome Trust, BBMP and research organisations. B Satish (Former Chief Engineer BBMP Lake Development Authority), Geeta Pillai (Mapsas Trust), Shubha Ramachandran (Biome), Kuldeep Dantewadia (Founder, Reap Benefit), Shilpa (BBMP Engineer), and Rajappa (Fisherman and Head of Fishing Society) are some of the individuals that Chanakya would interview as a part of his primary research. Secondary research involves reading and collating archives, documents and other material pertaining to land rights and usage.

Over the 12 months, the project will develop from collecting materials to game-testing and final production followed by neighbourhood engagements through six phases. In the first phase, a knowledge base on the urban commons will be created through collating materials from archives, papers and blueprints. In the second phase, the game plan and strategies will be outlined followed by testing of the game prototype. In the third phase, final draft of the game will be tested with trial audiences after making revisions in game challenges based on the previous game prototype tests. The fourth phase is to rework and revise the game to be finally produced in the fifth phase. In the sixth and last phase, there will be a series of 10 neighbourhood engagements in across the city starting with the Sarjapur/ Bellandur areas, across homes, parks, schools, and auditoriums. This will be the final outcomes of this project, hoping to build a repository of ideas based on people's responses with each performance.

Chanakya’s deliverables to IFA will be a detailed textual illustrated document outlining the game design process, interview records and transcripts, and photographic and video documentation of game-testing, final production, and the subsequent ten engagements with audience.

This grant is part-supported by Infosys Foundation.