2020, the year of resilience in theatre: Practitioners and institutions rose to the challenges of an unprecedented crisis – Firstpost

For the theatre community, the last month of the year is usually a time for winding down, taking stock, balancing the books, and carefully putting away the implements of a year-long engagement with the practice. Read on Firstpost: Coronavirus Outbreak: India’s theatre practitioners view crisis as time to introspect, reinvigorate stage ecosystem As the Akvarious group returned to its prolific ways by celebrating 20 years of its existence with a slew of performances, the moderate turnouts could do nothing to dampen the excitement of eager actors once again treading the boards, looking out at real people peering down at them, sinister Addams Family masks and twinkling eyes in place — a special kind of spectatorship that went both ways, in a year that threw into sharp relief the umbilical cord that irrevocably links audience and performer. Related: FirstAct, Firstpost’s special collaborative project features theatre and improv artists from all over India, who perform short pieces or readings over a Zoom video-conference call The pandemic presented endless opportunities for theatrewallahs to rally together as a networked community beyond the usual barriers of geography or language — from the edifying international lecture series in theatre pedagogy, Unrehearsed Futures, organised by the Drama School Mumbai with remarkable regularity, to cheerleading Instagram channels like Akvarious Live, D for Drama Live and Dhiraj Wadhwani’s Offbeat Circuit papering over the cracks of a community falling apart, to the popular Online Theatre Adda, a monthly forum on Zoom attended by scores of practitioners lighting up scores of windows, from “young drama students to career veterans; venue managers to writers; technicians to administrative staff, actors to academicians.” The elephant in the room, at least in the early months, was whether the internet could be commandeered into a site for theatrical performance, given the uneasy relationship between live performance and material expressly captured on camera. Reimagining their 2019 hit, Duncan MacMillan’s Every Brilliant Thing, as a live online play, director Quasar Thakore Padamsee and performer Vivek Madan delivered one of the online season’s first bona fide home runs, as they thoughtfully strung together the play’s ‘Hallmark card’ moments, drawing genuine uplift from material that could as easily come off as whimsical. These ostensibly ‘youth theatre’ outings exhibited some of the best uses of available technologies to stream theatre as engrossing digital content without losing the vitality and frisson of live performance.