In the spotlight 

BENGALURU: What can be a better recognition than being honoured by a theatre that you “love dearly”? For actor, director and playwright Neel Chaudhuri, who has been conferred the Shankar Nag Award 2020, at Ranga Shankara Theatre Festival, this is a moment of glory.

“It has always been our pleasure to perform at Ranga Shankara, to such a thoughtful and responsive audience. I have to share this honour with my theatre company, the Tadpole Repertory, because all this work was born out of years of deep collaboration and the collective imagination of actors, designers and technicians,” says the Delhi-based artiste. 

A recognition conferred to an all-rounder in the field of theatre, under the age of 40, the award constitutes a citation and carries a cash prize of `1 lakh. The ceremony, that took place online on Nov. 1, had veteran theatre personalities M S Sathyu and Arundhati Nag presenting the award to Chaudhuri, who grew up in Bengaluru and moved to Delhi when he was in his early 20s. Chaudhuri studied history and film before beginning to work in the theatre about 15 years ago. He has worked principally as a writer and director, and more recently took up sound designing. 

As a theatre practitioner, he misses being around people physically in rehearsal rooms and basements and theatres, as also watching plays. But the way forward, he believes, is, perhaps, not to continuously lament what is not possible or to wait idly for a return to ‘normal’.

He says, “There is an opportunity for many things at this moment – to pause and consider our work and the role of the arts and all the things we say we don’t have the time to think about. It’s also a moment to think about how unprepared we were for this. We were already leading digitally-driven lives before this pandemic, and we have to think about what that makes possible and what it risks.

Theatre is always having to improvise and innovate to stay in the public imagination and we will have to learn from each other, build new forms of stories and new relationships with the audience. It’s not about compromising or making do but almost finding another language to speak for a moment,” he says. 
The pandemic has created a lot of certainty, particularly for the artistic community. Chaudhuri agrees that this is a strange and difficult time for theatre artists everywhere.

“Especially in reimagining our relationship with the act of making collaboratively and then being able to share it in a ‘live’ environment. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be making work in this time -- not just in the pandemic, but in a time of all kinds of movement and upheaval,” he says. 

Currently collaborating on a project called Meridian, which is being written and designed as a listening experience for phones, he is also working as a writer and sound designer for The Nights, an adaptation of 1001 Nights. “I’ve also been thinking a lot about audio as a format, about how it can be a deeply intimate and immersive form of storytelling,” he says.