Sugumar Shanmugam

Sugumar Shanmugam is a theatre director, actor and designer based in Pondicherry. He comes from a traditional family of Therukoothu performers. He has acted in more than fifty plays, written and directed twelve and been associated with several others in various capacities.

This grant will enable Sugumar to research the historical, theatrical and psychological aspects of characterisation in the performance of Therukoothu towards making a play in the form of documentary theatre. Through extensive interviews with Therukoothu artists, he will study the process of preparing actors for various characters and explore the pedagogy, performativity and the contemporary trends that have influenced the form in various ways.

Sugumar enters this project as an insider who has grown up in a family of Therukoothu performers. His interest in the art form intensified while he was pursuing a diploma course at the National School of Drama, Bangalore. While pursuing his research on characterisation in theatre, he learnt about the philosophies and approaches of modern theatre, which set him thinking about the same for Therukoothu. Through this project, he will conduct a series of interviews with members from a select set of contemporary Therukoothu troupes and individual experts to explore their understanding of myth and reality in the contexts within which they perform and live. The emphasis will be on how actors approach the performative aspects of various characters which they play on stage.

The Therukoothu performances are usually based on stories from the Puranas and the two epics – Mahabharata and Ramayana. Sugumar will study some of the important characters and episodes from the epics with a focus on situations of conflict that are performed to arouse emotions in the performances. He will further examine the significance of pedagogy and ways in which actors are assigned to specific roles and trained for them. The relationship that an actor develops with a certain character that they play for a prolonged period of time will also be studied.

According to Sugumar, since they are based on long episodes from the Puranas and the epics, Therukoothu performances are usually spread over a few weeks. In doing so, they get severely intertwined with people’s livelihoods, emotions, values and attitudes in intimate ways where the story also becomes an expression of their experiences of life. Often the stories grow organically, rooted in the local history of the place they are performed at, and draw on the significant events and collective memory of the people. In this process, apart from the mythical characters, some region-specific significant characters enter the performances. Sugumar will study the ways in which these local characters are portrayed as against the characters from the Puranas and epics.

In order to understand how sociopolitical contexts contribute to the making of performances, Sugumar will watch Therukoothu performances in various villages across Tamil Nadu to locate the art form within its socio-cultural and political sphere. Simultaneously, he will study the historical, religious, ritualistic and psychological underpinnings of Therukoothu.

The outcome of this project will be a play he will make in the form of documentary theatre in Tamil. According to Sugumar, the documentary theatre form will allow him to bring on stage multiple viewpoints and narratives from the interviews with the performers and other perspectives in a coherent way. It will also allow the critical research findings to be presented within the performance itself. The Grantee’s deliverables to IFA with the final report will be audiovisual documentation of the interviews conducted in the field and the documentation of the theatre production.

The decision to support this project is embedded in our programmatic mandate for supporting practice-based research in the arts to create space for dialogue between theory and practice. It is also rooted in our endeavour to support research in Indian languages, so as to contribute to discourse in various language contexts. The budget is commensurate with the proposal.

This grant is made possible with support from Titan Company Limited.