SMART: Year 2021 - 2022

As the pandemic continued to rage through the country, SMART continued its online engagement with the field with three SMART In the Round sessions launched in the previous - first year of the COVID-19 pandemic - on topics that addressed the theatre community and its life during this difficult time. The previous year two session were organised and this year it went up to three making a total of five such sessions. 

SMART In the Round is a series of curated conversations on creativity, culture and context. This series, the first online activity under SMART, is built on the seven years of SMART’s experience of working with theatre groups from across India’s diverse language, regional and disciplinary contexts. The series hosts conversations that address topics of concern and relevance to the theatre community. This year three conversations were organised with theatre practitioners throughout the country to under their work with community, spaces and experiment in the times of the pandemic. 

SMART In the Round #3: Community
Wednesday, August 25, 2021 | 07:00 PM | Zoom and Facebook
Panelists: Anurupa Roy, Nisha Abdulla, Sanjoy Ganguly & Sapan Saran, in conversation with Sameera Iyengar (Moderator)

During both the first and second wave of COVID-19, theatre people, under pressure themselves, stepped up to give much-needed relief to their communities. In this panel, Sameera (SMART Core Team) speaks with Studio Tamaasha's Sapan on TheatreDost initiative (Mumbai); Nisha (Bengaluru) on the Deep Listening Circle she runs; Anurupa Roy (Delhi) on the multiple relief efforts by Katkatha; and Sanjoy (Madhyamgram, West Bengal) on the relief efforts of Jana Sanskriti through COVID and Amphan. They discuss the elements of their performing arts practice that brought them to these relief efforts; the communities they reached out to and why; how they imagined and organised their relief, given their own paucity of resources; how this experience feeds back into their practice in the future; and much more.  

SMART In the Round #4 Space
Wednesday, September 29, 2021 | 07:00 PM | Zoom and Facebook
Panelists: Kallol Bhattacharya, Manu Jose, Michaela Talwar & Rupali Bhave, in conversation with Sunil Shanbag (Moderator).

Over the last five years, small, independent alternative performance spaces have been mushrooming in many cities across the country, profoundly changing the way in which theatre is created, curated and received in these places. In this panel, Sunil (SMART Core Team) of Studio Tamaasha in Mumbai, speaks with Kallol of Tepantar in rural West Bengal; Manu of Ala from Mulanthuruthy, Kerala; Michaela of Mumbai’s Harkat Studios; and Rupali of The Box, Pune, who share their diverse experiences of running independent alternative performance spaces. They discuss how they have managed to survive by adapting, improvising and even radically re-inventing themselves during the precarious pandemic times; the price they have paid for it; whether they have been able to hold on to their original vision; how it has impacted their work; what happened to the community of practitioners and audiences they served; what the future holds; and much more.

SMART In the Round #5 Experiment
Tuesday, October 26, 2021 | 07:00 PM | Zoom and Facebook
Panelists: Lapdiang Syiem, Mallika Taneja, Mohit Takalkar & Vivek Madan, in conversation with Neel Chaudhuri (Moderator)

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutting down of performance spaces, theatre makers in India responded to a challenge to its most fundamental and ritualistic relationship - that between the performer and the gathered audience. Across the country, practitioners committed themselves to finding ways to innovate and adapt, to build and share work for digital platforms. In this panel, Sunil (SMART Core Team) speaks with Lapdiang (Shillong), whose interactive piece Ngan hiar sha Wah (I'm going down to the River) was a part of the Refunction Festival 2021; Mallika (Delhi), whose production Allegedly recently received the ZKB Patronage Prize at the Zurich Theatrespektakel; Mohit (Pune), who staged and filmed The Colour of Loss, an adaptation of The White Book by Han Kang; and Vivek (Bangalore), who has performed in QTP’s Every Brilliant Thing, a solo stage production that adapted itself for audiences online in 2020; share their diverse experiences of building and performing theatre in the pandemic, to be shown digitally. They discuss how these experiments have re-configured and re-imagined the space of the theatre for a remote audience; how they have grappled with the expectation of liveness, intimacy and immediacy in performance; whether theatre can make its audience excited about the technology that has now become quotidian in our daily experience; and much more. 

SMART in FY 2021-22 was supported by Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi.