Bengaluru’s traffic, politicians, and loads of nostalgia from India is sure to find resonance in the hearts of Indians in America soon, and that too with a generous dose of laughter, thanks to radical mime group PunchTantraa.
PunchTantraa has been invited by a few Indian organisations in USA to perform for the prestigious AKKA (American Kannada Koota Association) Festival to be held in Atlantic City from September 2 to 4. AKKA is a non-profit organisation primarily aimed at networking for Kannadigas in the United States and Canada, and organises regular conferences.
The city-based radical mime group, which they claim is the only one in India, brings together theatre, mime, humour, spoofs, exaggeration, Mad-Ads, films, song, in multiple languages, all rounded off with a punchline – and therefore the group’s name. And because the humorous takes on all things contemporary also deliver a message, they have named it so after the traditional short Indian stories with morals at the end — the Panchatantra.
“PunchTantraa has performed over 100 live public shows and over 70 corporate shows,” says team member Saveen Hegde. “It’s no easy to get an audience for a live public performance these days when most people are glued to their TVs and phones for entertainment,” points out team member Vikas Sangam.
Their corporate shows are mostly tailored to an organisation’s requirement. For example, they did an entire series of programmes for IBM on LGBT community awareness in their centres in Bengaluru, and Chennai and will perform soon in their offices in Pune, Kolkata and Delhi soon.
They will be taking to America a specially tailored show for the NRI community there that misses “Indian-isms”. “We have discovered that many in the audience there are people who have studied here and gone there to work, so we are also working on the nostalgia aspect a great deal,” adds fellow teamie Arjun Nadig.
The team at some point in their college life, were part of Mad-Ads teams from their colleges/ universities. Many of them had competed against each other at inter-college festivals. But when they grew out of college and into their careers, they went back as judges for the same events. “But we felt that the quality of performances had deteriorated and a lot of the shows were getting vulgar,” says Saveen. And that is why the boys once again decided to get together for their hobby -- many of their teammates had left to study abroad, so they had to form one big group – and perform a show as a one-off experiment. “We wanted to keep the comedy clean,” adds Arjun. Their first show sold out and the audience demanded on the spot to know when the second was. Ever since, there’s been no stopping them.
Apart from AKKA, the group also hopes to extend their tour in America for a month and perform over four weekends for the Indian community in Boston, New York, Houston, and New Jersey, he adds. Their core group of 10 performers (they are a larger team of 22) will need to fly to America, and herein lies the crux – that they need funding to be able to travel and perform abroad, and AKKA has limited funds. They have created a crowdfunding campaign on the platform Wishberry to fund their travel and stay, which will cost about Rs. 1.2 lakh per head. They have managed to raise about 30 per cent of their target of 6.5 lakh in the first 10 days. They hope to get their visas this week too. In fact six of the team members have quit their full-time jobs this January (all of them are engineers) to be able to do this full-time!
The team members, aged 21 to 30, include Arjun Nadig, Vikas Sangam, Saveen Hegde, Lazar Verghese, Naveen B. Ramu, Sharath Rao, Ram Charan, Amith A, Shreyas Srikanth, Sudarshan Harnalli and Sunil Devpur. Their crowdfunding campaign ends on August 10. To contribute, look them up on http://bit.ly/29SXYAI
