Sharanya Ramprakash

Sharanya Ramprakash is a theatremaker whose work experiments with language, tradition and gender. She writes, acts, directs and collaborates with various forms, communities and theatremakers locally, nationally and internationally. Her latest work includes Akshayambara, a critical exploration of gender and masculinity in Yakshagana with a contemporary feminist lens, which was supported under IFA's Arts Practice programme. Her other works include I am Not Here - a dance-drama exploration of censorship and women's writing; Mythology Upon the Table, an Asian queer, colonised, feminist take on Homer's Odyssey in partnership with Asian artists; and the Kannada play, Nava, in collaboration with nine transwomen, also part of IFA’s Project 560 grant programme. Sharanya is an INLAKS scholar and member of the Lincoln Centre Director's Lab. This grant enables her to explore the hitherto unresearched and marginalised narratives of mainstage lead and frontline comic actresses of Kannada Company Theatre from the 1960s to the present. She will examine how these actresses define and defy notions of female respectability and vulgarity through their performances and selfhood.

Although women and female bodies are central to its cultural imagination, Kannada theatre's actual relationship with women as performers has been fraught with anxiety. The female performing body has been subject to several types of invisibilisation and marginalisation across history of Kannada theatre. During the heydays of Kannada Company Theatre, 1905 to 1930, women were not allowed to perform on stage. With the advent of the talkies, the demand for female actresses rose, resulting in 'loose women' from 'unrespectable' backgrounds being recruited to uphold the respectable domain's cultural project. Sharanya will attempt to uncover various mutinies and subversions in the Kannada Company Theatre by the entry of these actresses. One crucial occurrence is the rise of the spontaneous, bawdy, comic woman frontline actresses. They were called 'frontline' actors since they occupied only the front of the stage, and the performers occupying the centre stage were called 'mainstage' actors. The frontline comic track, which started initially as a 'filler' in the late 1960s, began to take over the company's mainstage performances, with resounding success, often upstaging the mainstage performances. The fact that these frontline comic actresses could not only enter the hegemonic patriarchal structure but actually bring money into the cash strapped theatres is an essential but predictably ignored chapter of Kannada Company theatre history and the discourse on the female performing body.

Sharanya will critically examine the coexistence and collision between the mainstage lead actresses and frontline comic actresses who shared a common stage but were portrayed as contrasting icons of womanhood in Kannada Company Theatre. Some of the questions that would be central to her inquiry are the ways in which the character of the frontline comic performer originated, and evolved to its present-day form; how they define, employ and negotiate 'vulgarity'; the response of the mainstage lead actress to the arrival of the frontline comic actress; the ways in which their offstage personas, backgrounds and histories affected their onstage dynamics; and how they affected and impacts the landscape of Kannada Company Theatre and Kannada culture in general.

Sharanya proposes to unpack these narratives through semi-structured interviews with actresses from the Company Theatre era, 1960-80, and frontline comic actresses of the present-day company theatres, including consultations with experts such as Prakash Garud, B Jayshree, among others. Her methodology also involves the ethnographic study and examining archival footage, videos and scripts.

The outcome of this project will be a series of essays in Kannada and English and a photo essay. She will also create an outline for a script for a theatre performance, thus enabling the transformation of the research material into practice work. The Grantee's deliverables to IFA with the final reports will be the essays, the photo essay, the script, and audiovisual documentation of the present-day Company Theatre performances in Karnataka.

This grant was made possible with support from Tata Trusts, with the corpus interest of an earlier seed grant.