Sri Neelakanteswara Natyaseva Sangha

Sri Neelakanteswara Natyaseva Sangha (popularly known as Ninasam) is a cultural organisation located in the village of Heggodu in Sagar taluk of Shivamogga district in Karnataka. It is dedicated to the dissemination of theatre and culture. Established in 1945 by renowned dramatist K V Subbanna, Ninasam is one of India’s best theatre training institutions and repertories. Ninasam’s Tirugata and Marutirugata is a theatre dissemination and audience development initiative that travels to almost all districts in Karnataka with about 80 to 100 shows a year. This grant provides partial support to Ninasam to create and disseminate a theatrical production titled Olangana, an adaptation of the play Interior by Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck.

Interior is one of Maeterlinck’s few plays intended for marionette puppets. The plot revolves around an old man and a stranger. The family can be seen within through the windows. The old man and the stranger argue over how to inform the family of the death of one of the daughters. As the crowd approaches with the body, the old man enters the house and can be seen through the windows informing them of their loss. The main theme of the play is death. Maeterlinck creates tension by contrasting the anxiety of the characters in the garden with the serenity and ignorance of the family within the house.

In April 2019, theatre director Sankar Venkateswaran came to teach at Ninasam. As a culmination of his work there, students made a presentation based on the play Interior. Sankar was initially attracted by this play for its poetic content, its unconventional theatricality and its use of ‘death’ as a metaphor. For this presentation, translations into Kannada were improvised by the students. In this presentation, Sankar attempted an acting idiom that was an innovative combination of the psycho-physical concentration of Kudiyattam and a slow and balanced pace of movement inspired by Noh theatre. Actors, audience, as well as Sankar discovered a new theatricality that was fresh and path breaking with this approach. The process also critiqued in an oblique way many of the current theatre practices and exposed the limitations of actor training methods, mainly in its pace and the way the body, mind and voice are connected.

What had been achieved through his work at Ninasam was only the beginning of a process. Everybody who watched the initial presentation felt the need for a full-fledged production of the work with proper translations and deeper engagement. This grant will enable Ninasam to take this initial exploration forward and create a professional production of Interior. Ninasam will be responsible for the conceptualisation, planning and execution of the entire project, while Sankar, as the guest director, will be responsible for its artistic and aesthetic aspects. About 15 actors, musicians and technicians will be chosen from Ninasam’s alumni of over 600 students. This will provide a fresh impetus for the alumni to reflect and re-energise their craft and practice. Sankar will work intensively with this group for 25 to 30 days for about eight hours daily to create the play. The Kannada script will be collectively worked on by the students and later fine-tuned by a poet.

The play will open in Ninasam and will subsequently be performed in to 15 to 20 cities and small towns across Karnataka to reach an estimated audience of around 8000 people, as part of Ninasam’s Marutirugata. Through this wide dissemination, the production hopes to enhance audience experience and raise their expectations from theatre.

Contemporary Kannada theatre is mostly text-centred and all other theatrical elements are only complementary to the communication of the text. Works that question the centrality of text are few and often take place in small groups, as exercises or student productions. Through the experimental and innovative idiom in Olangana, Ninasam hopes to bring a new language into Kannada theatre. On the other hand for Sankar, whose earlier work has deliberate absence of speech, this will be an innovative exercise in incorporating text and speech along with his form of acting in silence and slowness.

The deliverables from this project will be photographs and video documentation of the rehearsal process and performance.