Monday, October 21, 2013

2013

Dear friends,
2013! What a year it has been!

We started with a short play for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival's Children Literature Fest. That was Mister Jeejeebhoy and the Birds. A magical book that was brought alive in a manner found strange by most adults. The interactive nature of the performance kept the young audience engaged and they thoroughly enjoyed the play. And adults enjoyed the mithai we distribute after the show.


By March we were gearing up for our summer season and started work on Taoos Chaman Ki Myna, directed by Atul Tiwari. A long drawn 6 weeks of rehearsals with 3 plays being rehearsed everyday. One more day and the team would have collapsed! A busy summer that showcased 5 plays at 4 venues with a total of 15 performances. We all needed a break!

 After a couple of weeks we began work on Mind Your Head, a play presented with objects and actors. Directed by Choiti Ghosh. And soon we were off to Bangalore with our new format of performance-cum-workshop for small audiences. At first there were was only one booking and soon there were eight. We had to use up our one 'off' day on the tour. This was by far the most tiring week of the year.


Once back in Mumbai, we started work on She-He-Shey for the Rabindra Utsav Kolkata. After an intense six week process, we were off to Kolkata, wary of the reactions we would get. Thankfully the play was well received by most.

So we actually produced four new plays in 2013!! Two were planned and two came as commissioned works. And In 10 months we have crossed our target of 40 shows and reached 47 already.
Up next is Performance Calendar

The best part has been to see the team members grow individually and collectively. For 2013-14 we have changed the structure of our repertory and we now have Repertory Artists (Sharvari Deshpande, Vighnesh Sinkar, Ghanshyam Tiwari, Manoj Karki, Prasad Dagare); Guest Artists (Hetal Varia, Vinati Makijany, Ishita Dave, Nishna Mehta, Anagh Banerjee, Janit Temkar, John Soans, Pooja Pant and others) and New Artistes on for a short period (Sahil Gangurde, Amit Bhargava, Devina Medda, Aditi Thirani, Naman Banthia, Shreyans Iyer and others).
As happy as we may be with the year, we also have 2014 to look forward to. And as you read this we would be cooking up new ideas and waiting to share these with our audience :)

More to come soon...
Shaili Sathyu, Tanya Mahajan, Yashoda Joshi, Mithila Lad, Abir Patwardhan