If you visit Sunaparanta, the popular culture hub on the Altinho on a Saturday afternoon, do not be surprised if you actually see young school children rolling on the floor and laughing (ROFL) or a girl playing on a swing, munching pop-corn and delivering a dialogue or a boy ascending and descending a staircase non-stop. This is Arundhati Chattopadhyaya territory.
For Arundhati, the Soccoro-based dancer and theatre director, theatre is a physical activity, where you communicate with every single sinew in your body. Speaking to The Herald in her lovely bungalow surrounded by large trees, Arundhati attributes her theatrical style to her Off-Broadway years in New York when she worked with theatre directors and choreographers who only professed out-of-box philosophies.
Recalling her time in the Big Apple, Arundhati says, “I remember acting in plays, where we only spoke gibberish. The directors gave us a lot of freedom to improvise.” According to Arundhati, she was often part of multinational casts, which spoke several different languages. “Our body and eye movements were the only real communicators,” Arundhati says.
Arundhati has carried forward this learning to the present tense. Directing the Karmali village children last year for an environmental play, she flummoxed them when the only dialogue they had to deliver in the first fifteen minutes of the play was the Marathi word, Paani ( water)!
“For the children, who are normally accustomed to portraying historical characters in a school play delivering long dialogues by rote, my style was indeed unsettling!” recalls Arundhati.
Arundhati is convinced that children are the most adaptable to experimenting with body movements. “Children have a great imagination. They are very physical. They have no inhibitions and have the minds of acrobats. They are able to communicate best through body movements, where language alone is not important,” says Arundhati.
Improvise-improvise-improvise, is the other mantra that is close to the director’s heart. Directing the English adaptation of a Vijay Tendulkar play – ‘The King and Queen want sweat’ at Sunaparanta last year, Arundhati gave the entire play a rock and roll feel. “I introduced the music of Santana, Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendricks in the play and even had the actors dress up on stage. I had a Sutradhar (narrator) interact with the audience,” says Arundhati.
Similarly, in a forthcoming production for the Mitsuko Trust based on the government’s ‘beti-bachao-beti-padao’ slogan, the director plans to have the audience walk past a set of murals, listen to a poetry recitation and then stand up and watch a play. “Ideally, plays must have out-of-the-box themes, so that audiences remember them many years hence,” affirms Arundhati.
Arundhati, who has been associated with Sunaparanta for the last five years, conducts a year-long theatre workshop for children in the age-group of 10-14 under the banner of ‘In Stages’. Typically, the children meet every Saturday for a three hour session where they are exposed to the different aspects of theatre which include music, song, dance, acting and production. Arundhati also brings in subject experts to take two-day weekend sessions with the children periodically. “We run an approximately 35-week theatre training workshop for about 25 school children. The children are brilliant and I enjoy working with them. Typically, we bring out a theatre production by the end of the course in February each year,” Arundhati says.
Arundhati initiation into dance and theatre was natural. Her late mother, Shalu Murdeshwar was a very fine singer and her older sisters, Chitra Palekar, the actor-director-script writer and Shakuntala Kulkarni, noted installation artist are both accomplished dancers. “With my sisters already into dance, it was natural for me to take up classical dance,” Arundhati says. According to the director, classical Indian dance teaches its practitioner a lot about theatre and acting as the dance forms revolve around drama, mythological stories and shringar (dressing up).
“My tryst with acting was very interesting,” recalls Arundhati, who began as a prompter in her sister Chitra’s Marathi and Hindi plays in Mumbai. “I was made to stand in the wings and prompt the actors with their lines. This is how I was initiated into theatre. Of course, I was also lucky to attend theatre workshops by giants like Badal Sarkar and Satyadev Dubey, by the end of which I was well and truly hooked to theatre,” says Arundhati.
Presently, Arundhati confirms that it is teaching that gives her maximum joy. According to her, her life as a teacher began in New York several decades ago, when she began teaching Indian classical dance and theatre in the USA.
“I would be wary to act in a play today. I am more comfortable teaching theatre and directing plays,” says Arundhati.
