Thespo, an annual festival for theatre enthusiasts below the age of 25, has launched an online crowdfunding campaign to support four international projects that experiment with drama for its week-long festival scheduled for December.
With corporate funding for arts projects shrinking, Thespo has for the first time turned to an online crowdfunding platform, >www.wishberry.in , to raise Rs.5 lakh to support the workshops. “We have been raising funds through donations for the past few years, but the pool of donors we were reaching was very small. Wishberry will allow us to reach out to a larger pool, and also make it easier for donors to contribute,” said Quasar Thakore Padamsee, the co-founder and artistic director of Thespo, which is in its 17th edition.
Thespo has played a crucial role in exposing India’s young, home-grown theatre talent to international projects.
Last year, the festival brought cutting-edge international work such as Falls 2-11, performed by Bristol-based group Clerke and Joy,and the Violence Against Women Project , conceptualised by Gillian Clark from Halifax, Nova Scotia. The latter attempted a cross-cultural discussion on sexual violence against women in urban India and Canada.
The festival also featured workshops with leading faculty from American theatre schools like the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute and Fordham University.
This year, the festival has invited theatre collaborators from Australia, Italy, Canada, and the U.K. Stimulated Voices by Australian Glenn Hayden will be a performance piece using poetry and writing by young Indians. The Stranger by Italian Daniel Bartolini will be an immersive, interactive experience designed for one spectator at a time, where a spectator is transformed into a performer.
The Toronto-based Sebastian Heins’ Brotherhood is a one-man show that tells a story through hip hop. The U.K.-based Tim Smith’s Livery of Freedom uses multi-media storytelling techniques.
Changing cultural scene “The world is changing rapidly, and the cultural scene is also changing fast. These are cutting-edge theatre experiments we are bringing to Mumbai, and it is important that the younger theatre people here get an exposure to these. Sebastian’s project is audience-specific theatre, while Tim Smith, a photographer, uses photography, installations and theatre to create a larger artistic work,” said Mr. Padamsee, who runs QTP productions and has worked on Tim Supple’s critically acclaimed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Toby Gough’s The Merchants of Bollywood and aerial drama Mind Walking .
“ Brotherhood is [set in] the hip hop-era and an exciting new form of storytelling. Glenn Hayden’s project experiments with poetry. The poem derives its power from basically what is unsaid, and it can be a powerful way to communicate as a performer. He will work with 10-12 young actors and create a 30-35 minute performance piece,” he said.
