Try impressing veteran theatre personality Probir Guha on the lack of adequate performance spaces in Kerala, and he will tell you, without blinking an eye, that there are enough spaces that remain unexplored. Sometime ago, he had conducted a workshop in which participants were asked to find their own spaces to perform. “The result was mind-blowing. Some found a corner in a room, some performed on the rooftop, some under a tree, some on a treetop while there were those who chose the toilet. Suddenly, there appeared so many possibilities. So many spaces which they had never thought of until then,” said Mr. Guha, director of the Alternative Living Theatre and Theatre Lab in Kolkata, who was in town the other day to conduct a theatre workshop.
For the maverick director, who had turned to Kalarippayattu in a bid to derive a language of the body, theatre should be inexpensive, light (so that it’s easy to travel) and should never try to mimic cinema. Not for him the grand multimedia-enabled theatre performances that have come to be the order of the day.
Mr. Guha’s theatre is intimate, as close to the viewers as they can get. “We don’t need more than 100 spectators, as we are particular about connecting with each of them.”
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Modern theatre, he says, does not mean that the practitioners are at liberty to do what they want. “One must understand one’s culture. It is culture and region-specific and tradition is not made by a single person or in a day,” he explains, using the analogy of the lotus stemming from the mud in a pond to drive the point home. “The mud is the tradition, stem, the process, and lotus is my product,” he says, arguing that his effort is to demystify theatre and give the weapon to the commoner.
Kerala, where he arrived to learn Kalarippayattu , is his second home, where he keeps coming for workshops and with the group. Some 15 years ago, he directed a play, Thiruyathra, for the DYFI in Kerala. He is a regular at the PJ Antony Memorial Theatre fest, Theruvarangu, but he thinks they should organise a national theatre workshop instead of the fest and that “the plays evolving at the workshop could be performed at the end of it.”