The term spoken word has reached the top of the popularity charts when it comes to labelling a performance. But veteran theatre artiste Sunil Shanbag is quick to disapprove of the form being solely used to define his performance piece Blank Page
The term spoken word has reached the top of the popularity charts when it comes to labelling a performance. But veteran theatre artiste Sunil Shanbag is quick to disapprove of the form being solely used to define his performance piece Blank Page (contrary to the description that's been used time and again to characterise the piece). "Spoken word has become a popular category altogether. But Blank Page doesn't come from that tradition, where poets read their works. Here, we have theatre artistes, who are interpreting contemporary Indian poetry in four languages using elements of theatre, movement and music. It's like a theatrical production, which has the formality of a theatre piece," says the director.
A 2015 performance of Blank Page at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. Pic Courtesy/Chirodeep Chaudhuri
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Blank Page was first performed at an arts festival in the city in 2015 and has since travelled to various locations, including Delhi, Chennai and Bengaluru. Shanbag tells us, however, that no changes have been made in the performance as "there is still lots to discover". The 55-minute performance includes close to 30 poems in Hindi, English, Marathi and Kashmiri. Blank Page has been choreographed by Maithily Bhupatkar, with the music score arranged by Rohit Das. The poets include Kedarnath Singh, Arundhathi Subramaniam, PS Rege, Anamika, Nissim Ezekiel, Taslima Nasrin, Radhey Nath 'Masarrat' and Adil Jussawala. The performance stars Divya Jagdale, Hridaynath Jadhav, Maithily Bhupatkar, Natasha Singh, Nisha Dhar, Sapan Saran (who has co-conceived that play), Sonal Khale, Nikhil Murali, and Shanbag.
Sunil Shanbag
"It was the result of a lot of reading. We use poetry extensively in actor-training workshops and felt that it would be fascinating to see how actors work with poetry. Hence, we extended this thought and created a bigger piece. The first choice consisted of poems we were fond of. After several readings, common themes emerged from our choices. Four came up strongly — poems on the act of writing itself; poems about difficult relationships; strong voices of women poets writing about the experience of being who they are; and political poetry," shares Shanbag.
While music has always been a big part of the director's works, he has also been equally in love with poetry in the recent past. The advantage that poetry has over prose is that it is layered and can be subjective, he elaborates. And it's this multi-layered facet of poetry that made him include music and movement in the piece, as "some amount of interpretation can be done outside of words".
Shanbag, who has worked on adaptations of several classics, ranging from Shakespeare to Tagore, finds contemporary poetry highly exciting. "The outward forms [of poetry] will change but the essence of a lot of things will be common. So, when you are talking about the human condition, relationships or injustice, you will find resonance across time and language. It's really about the vehicle or the form and how an individual deals with an idea. That's what makes poetry from different eras unique," he signs off.
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