Rajamahendravaram Play

Playwright : Aliyar K
Director : Aliyar K
Group : Athlete Kayikanadakavedhi (A Sportive Theatre Space Palakkad), Palakkad, Kerala
Language : Malayalam
Duration : 60 Min.

Play

The play is about the memory of a librarian suffering from amnesia. The story is based on the events that take place inside the village library set up in memory of his late grandfather Kunjambu, a freedom fighter but little known, in Cheruppulassery, a small village in the Southeran region of Valluvanad under British Malabar. The storyline is about a librarian who loves books so much that he encounters many characters within the book and writers in many languages ​​while searching to retrieve the page of a lost book. He interacts with writers in many languages ​​of the world, including Neruda, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Shena, and Kafka, among the many books on the list. The story ends with him searching and realizing that such a library is only a memory of the past and welcoming his departure day in grief over the lost page.

Director’s Note

I have always envisioned the library as a public sphere of democracy. That’s why I placed the library on the stage as the space of equity of pluralities. The stage witnesses an actor’s body passing through the forgotten memories of countless freedom fighters, who have fought and died in great valour. The performance encompasses the Brechtian idea of approaching the stage as an open space of possibilities, as well as the Stanislavskian method of revealing the internal essence of the actor and the characters. The performance has kept it’s own space of deep and keen examination of boundaries between the audience, performer and character. The design of the performance has kept away the complexities of the staging, and and made it minimal, which appeals and expands to the imagination of the audience.

Director and Playwright

Aliyar K is a Post graduate in Theatre arts from School of Drama, Thrissur and National school of drama, New Delhi. He was awarded as best director by the Government of Kerala in the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Academy Amateur Theatre Competition 2017. Aliyar K is the founder of the sportive theatre space of “Athlete Kayika Nadaka Vedhi, Palakkad”. “LIB”, directorial by Aliyar has won the Best Play award of 2019 in the theatre competition by the Kerala State Youth Welfare Board. He has been keen in developing a performative language where sports and theatre converge and merge. He has directed many plays in India as well as abroad.

Group

Athlete kayikanadakavedhi (a Sportive theatre space Palakkad) is a theater group established in 2014 in the Kerala Palakkad district. Each play of the athlete is an attempt to combine art and sports to create a new theatre vocabulary. This theater group puts forward the view that actors are athletes of the heart. Many plays have already been performed, including insolence, penalty kick, The Why Why Girl,  A Play on Death, Boiling Point, LIB ( let it bother), Knock Out ( a boxing theatre performance) The plays have been performed at various drama festivals inside and outside Kerala. In 2017, The Why Why Girl won the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Academy Award for Best Drama, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress. LIB was selected as the Best Drama of the Kerala State Youth Welfare Board in 2019. Recently our new script ‘1947 Not out ‘(A Cricket Performance) has been selected for the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Akademi Presentation.

Director : Arun Lal
Playwright : MP Rajesh
Group : Astitva, Mangaluru
Language : Multi Lingual (Kannad, Tullu, Konkani, Beary, English, Malayalam)
Duration : 90 Mns.

Play

Kendonians is a play that depicts the suffering of the people caught in an illusionary world of brands, materialism, hypocrisy, and unemployment. ‘Damanna’, the protagonist of the play, a simply Tea stall owner, living happily in his village with his family, enjoying the cultural and religious harmony, was allured by a visa agent with a high salary to go to a country called Kendonia. Only after reaching the strange land, he realizes that he is duped, and he can’t come back. Once in an unknown land, of no return, he had no choice but to work like a monkey in a Circus Company. The events that turn out there, the people he meets, make him realize the irony of this developmental world. This play has been performed at various occasions in languages, Tulu, Kannada, Konkani and Malayalam winning hearts of numerous people, helping them to see the mirror image of progress.

Director’s Note

In the present-day scenario, where many are speaking about globalization, unemployment, economic crisis and such major issues, I, came across this story written by M P Rajesh, on which I have developed the play. The story inspired me to conceive a play that would non- verbally highlight all these issues on the stage. I thought I could humour my audience and at the same time in a very subtle way sensitize them of the issues we are facing. I had always wanted to stage a play where the message, theme and issues could be highlighted and made clear to the audience visually and non-verbally rather than taking the help of the dialogues. Such a subtle try on present day issues is the play, ‘Kendonians’

Director

Arun Lal is an actor, director and trainer. He has been working in the field of theatre arts for last 20 years. He has acted more than 30 plays and directed more than 25 plays. He has trained under various theatre personals and theatre groups, inside as well as outside India. As an actor and director, he has exhibited his abilities in different theatre festivals all over the country. He has participated I theatre festivals like BRM NSD- New Delhi, JashneBachpan National Theatre Festival- NSD, ITFOK, IAPAR International Festival– Pune, Rangayana Fest- Mysore, PRD Theatre Festival, Bratyajon- Kolkata, AIR Theatre Festival. He won the Kerala Sangeetha Nataka Academy State Award for the best director in Amateur Theatre festival– 2015, C N Parameswaran Pillai Endowment Award for young theatre personal– 2016, Best Choreographer Award in META 2019. He is the director of Little Earth School of Theatre, Kerala.

Playwright

Sri MP Rajesh is a famous writer and a good school teacher Who used to write short stories in Malayalam Journals. He has also penned several Plays. His Plays are performed by several theatre groups in Kerala at various Theatre festivals and competitions. He has also bagged RACHANA Award for his short story in 2010.

Group

Astitva is an organization of Theater lovers. The members of this group include lecturers, film actors, teachers, students and literature and art lovers. Eminent resource personalities graduated from the National School of Drama, Rangayana, and Neenasam take sessionsto our theatre students in Acting, Directing, Music, Lights etc.

The team has performed in 10 National Level Festivals and 12 Multilingual Theatre Festivals and 1 International Theatre Festival held in Dubai. We have performed and organized 368 Theatre performances in past 5 years in Karnataka, Mumbai, Goa. The Institution has successfully hosted 6 Multilingual Theatre Festivals and 2 State Level Theatre Festivals. Astitva has awarded seven personalities recognizing their work ‘off the stage’ in Tulu, Kannada, and Konkani theatre. We have been hosting CGK State Level award for the past two years.

Playwright/Writer and Director : Murugaboopathy
Group : Manalmagudi Theater Land, Tamilnadu
Language : Tamil
Duration : 75 Mins

Play

In the past, Homo sapiens, had led to the greatest shift in human evolution, the migration of mankind, which continues to this day, despite the destruction of numerous human beings throughout history as a result of the migration. In this migration, history is the collection of perishable stories of rejected and tortured bodies. When a body is disconnected from the land, it will become powerless, unhomely and easy to destroy by anyone.We can understand that the Jews of World War II, the genocide of the Romas, the genocide of the Armenians and in the pandemic, the bodies of migrant workers who tottered all over world with the burden of their children and domestic animals in the boiling tar roads, are all landless / bodies exhumed from the land.

Theater land traces out the stories from the bodies of the millions of Southeast Asian & Malaysian Tamil refugees who were so powerfully decimated and destroyed in the construction of the “Siam Death Railway” without any basic human dignity. Those who have been killed in the displacements, and become folk deities, are going to be awaken in the theatre space with the voice of voiceless. Children, the divinities walking past the crisis of war, disasters & environmental destruction hugging dolls to their chests and sowing the hope all over. Play receives these children as themselves with their dolls laughing at exploitation and oppression.

Director’s Note

For the past 20 years, our dramatic text researches are based on the body, its deep rooted relationship with the land, holding the land within a self and the physical space without the land; the ritual bodies, that embody the movements of biodiversity – we have found that these are the liberated. The bodies of these rituals are all theatrical ritual bodies in our theatrical land, which accepts only the theatricality of these rituals.

The landless body becomes the apolitical body and it alienates itself by being apolitical. When the mother embraces the body of the child who has severed the umbilical cord, every landless body is chanting, “Grab your land”, for the land is its own. Once the body has been transformed into a ritual body, it grabs its river line that runs hidden in the foothills of its own land.

A theatrical ritual body becomes a medium for transmitting liberation to the self and the landless collective bodies (the spectator). It transforms the play into a philosophical event that reclaims their alien body, secreting and regulating their inner well for liberation and unites them against the exploitation of power. The play is going to dialogue through its cultural theatrical props, as the landless refugee bodies are liberated from the ravages of power exploitation as a collective body, when they are in ritual body.

Director and Playwright

An actor, playwright, musician S. Murugaboopathy is founder and the director of Manalmagudi Theatre Land. He also teaches and experiments theatre with children for last 20 years. Murugaboopathy has acted and directed more than 25 plays contextualizing the silences and gaps in mainstream history such as the forgotten faces of great theatre personalities, the loneliness of prisoners, the tragic life of migration labourers and refugees, the unbearable distress of farmers leading to their mass suicides, suppressed local histories and the detachment of human life from the local cultural-ecological landscape. He received formal training in Theatre at Pondicherry University, Pondicherry and Tamil University, Tanjore. His main productions include Vanathaathi (1999), Uthiramugamoodi (2003), Soorpanangu (2012), Puzhuthimarapparavaikal (2019) etc. He not only experiments with the rituals and performances of local culture but evolves a new theatrical ritual. Murugaboopathy has also directed about 45 children’s plays, and published books of his selected plays, children’s stories, and continuously writing articles on theatre.

He has received the prestigious, “Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar (2011)” by Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi. He is IFA Grantee for the research on the “Traditional Dolls and the Theatre practices” 2015-2016.

Group

Manalmagudi Theatre Land based in Kovilpatti, Tamil Nadu is a contemporary Tamil theatre troupe. It continuously experiments with non-conventional theatrical content and forms in terms of theatrical language, text, property, music, visual and space. Manalmagudi seeks to spread the seeds of theatre, deeply rooted in culture, possessing palluyiri (multiple-organisms) life-forms, beyond human centeredness. The troupe always aims to dramatize music and voice, crossing borders, but being in its own land’.

Manalmagudi’s main productions are instrumental in bringing about a new genre of Indian theatre, focusing not merely on human centric theatre practices, but on incorporating theatrical language of non-human forms such as animals and plants, dolls and masks, sculptures and paintings within the productions. Since 1998 Manalmagudi has had more than 300 performances across Tamil Nadu and over 30 performances across India that includes many International and National Theatre Festivals. Semmothaai (Ancient Mother), Mirugavithusagam (Animal Jester), Soorpanangu, Kuhaimaravasigal (Cave tree Dwellers) are some of its much applauded performances.  At Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) New Delhi, Mirugavidushagam was awarded Best Costume Design, 2013; and Kuhaimaravasigal Best Choreography in 2016.  Manalmagudi’s pre-production processes involves participant and non-participant observation of rituals and festivals, traditional performative forms and centuries old performative cultures and art in indigenous patron deities across Tamil Nadu.

At present, Manalmagudi is engaged in creating a theatre culture in south Tamilnadu by working closely with our younger generation school / college students and offering intensive theatre courses to children, college students, and the public in our theatre academy at our home town Kovilpatti, Tamilnadu.

Director : Surabhi Jayachandra Varma
Playwright : Late Sri Dharmavaram Krishnamacharyulu
Group : Sri Venkateswara Surabhi Theatre
Language : Telugu
Duration : 120 Mns.

Play

Hiranyakashyapa, the Rakshasa king wants to kill Lord Vishnu, his rival. Hiranyakashyapa had won a boon that he couldn’t be killed by any weapon; by any human or animal, on land or water and at day or night. With the help of such a powerful boon, he defeated Devendra, made the ashtadikpalakas his servants and propagated himself as God. Due to Narada, the son of King Hiranyakashyapa, Prahlaada is born with prenatal wisdom and devotion for Lord Vishnu. Hiranyakashyapa tries to change him first with love and later with fearful punishments. Prahlada is thrown from the hill, pushed into fire, thrown into the seas, thrown in front of violent elephants, hanged and poisoned. But Prahlada escapes every time any kind of harm to him and refuses to give up his bhakthi for Lord Vishnu.

One day, enraged Hiranyakashyapa compels Prahlada to show his Lord in the pillar and breaks it with his gada (mace). From the broken pillar, miraculously, Narasimhavathara comes out. Narasimha lifts Hiranyakashyapa, places the King on his lap, on the threshold of sunset and kills Hiranyakashyapa with his nails piercing into the stomach.

Director’s Note

I have Directed this play with  Surabhi  youth. The Surabhi theatre’s dramas are mostly based on mythological stories. This story of Hiranya Kashyap and his son Prahlada is also a very famous anecdote (legend). This play was initially written in the year 1916 with a blend of many poems and songs, and was a very lengthy script. I edited the story in 2 hour-duration performance and have made some changes. In its ultimate form the play is going successfully in our repertory. The most interpretative dramatic points of the play are- this play contains certain devotional message – oriented lines, special effects, trick scenes, wonderful music; and especially- Prahlada role played by the 5 years old baby Parnika Varma.

Director

National Sangeet Natak Akademi New Delhi’s Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Purskar Awardee, Surabhi Jayachandra Varma Rekandar is the 6th generation actor & Director of Surabhi theatre, He is the grandson of Padma shri Surabhi Babji, the grandson of Surabhi founder Vanarasa Govinda Rao. He started his theatrical life in the 7th month of his birth. He had completed his M.B.A. alongwith giving theatre performances at nights since his child-hood. Being a main artiste of Surabhi, he had completed more than 5,000 performances with all types of characters. With the experience enriched by the participation in all three theater work-shops conducted by Padma Shri B.V. Karanth jee in 1996, 97 & 98, he directed the plays Bhaktha Prahlada, Jai Pathalabhairavi, Swayamvaram, Annamayya Vennela, Kanaka Tara, Baala Mayabazaar Etc.. He conducted many Acting workshops and Science in Theatre workshops about Surabhi theatre Techniques. He received many prestigious honours including JL. Narasimha Rao Rangasthala Yuvapuraskaar 2017 from Potti Sriramulu Telugu University, Telangana and many more.

Playwright

Late Sri Dharmavaram Krishnamacharyulu is respected as to be a legendary Telugu play writer. Born in the year 1853 he penned down about 29 dramas successively, and staged them earning great acclaim and success. He was first to introduce songs and poems in Telugu drama. He wrote the play ‘Bhaktha Prahlada’ in earlier 19th century. Later the Surabhi people started performing it in the year 1916, and the play was converted to the first Telugu talkie movie in 1931. Dharmavaram Krishnamacharyulu breath his last in 1922.

Group

Surabhi theatre group, also known as Sri Venkateswara Surabhi Theatre was founded by Sri Vanarasa Govinda Rao garu in the year 1885. Surabhi theatre holds its glorious history of being traditional theatre family existing from 138 years. Situated in Hyderabad, Telangana State. SRI VENKATESWARA SURABHI THEATRE, the Repertory Company with 52 artistes, in its repertoire has been performing 5 to 10 shows every month, in Telangana and across the country. The group is actively run by the 6th generation Director Surabhi Jayachandra Varma, the Grandson of Surabhi Babji Garu (Padmashri Awardee), the Grandson of Surabhi founder Vanarasa Govindarao. This group does many experiments in the field of theater with protection to Surabhi Drama tradition, including Acting workshops and performances whith children at Surabhi Theatre. This group has given performances with participation both in NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL level Theatre Festivals like 20th Bharath Rang Mahothsav and Jashne bachpan by NSD, Sangeet natak Akademi festival at Guwahati- Assam,  Science in Theatre Festival by Visweswaraiah Museum & IFA at Bengalore and so on.