What better than watching the best of performance acts coming your way every ten minutes at the ongoing Short+Sweet Festival. Rupinder Kaur speaks to artistic director liz Hadaway
The week comes to an end and you often promise to step away from the usual activities/chores and opt for something different and creative for once. Then the search for what the city has to offer begins and this time around, the Short+Sweet Festival 2015 might be the perfect offering if you like your entertainment quota to be fulfilled in small doses. Best of theatre groups and performers take to stage for the next ten minutes and then follows another act.
We caught up with liz Hadaway, artistic director, who tells us, “The criteria is ten minutes or less. The show, like today, has some thought-provoking pieces and some are comedies. Its all mixed up. We have a devised piece, physical theatre, movement dance, there are historical dramas, there is everything but yes ten minutes later, change. It is kind of like bite-sized theatre because people these days take things in very small portions and the attention span, it is a bit of generalisation, but it’s a lot shorter. There are so many things fighting for our attention so the festival is very relevant to its time. Its fast-paced, its energetic.”
Hadaway has been associated with Short+Sweet for the last four years. “Australian playwright Alex Broun set up Short+Sweet in Delhi in 2010. We have a theatrical production company in Dubai called Constellation, which is the producer of the shows here. Alex and I have been running this festival in Dubai, Abu Dhabi for the last four years together. This year we are producing Delhi and next year Mumbai as well. It’s actually been an interesting journey.
A platform, where one gets a taste of varied histronics, sees the coming together of Delhi’s theatre community which Hadaway calls “incredible”.
“One of the really interesting things about this place is the way in which the large theatrical companies have come on board which has been amazing because if you look at the line-up for the show, its incredible. In other places like Dubai, theatre companies operate in their own individual space and there is not much interaction with each other. At times there is this competition with each other which is understandable but at the same time, what Short and Sweet does really well is that it brings the theatre community together,” she explains.
She further states, “Yes it is a competition but that element is not as important as coming together of the community. Sometimes they would meet people at the festival whom they either know vaguely or perhaps have never even met before. They start to talk to each other, they would exchange ideas and opinions. Maybe next year, you’ll find that when this festival comes around they might be working with each other.”
But how and when did Hadaway get into theatreIJ “All my life really. My first role was when I played Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty when I was four. I’ve been a witch many times (laughs). I played the witch three times in Macbeth.
photo Nicky Chandam
(You can catch the shows at Epicentre, Apparel House in Gurgaon from October 30 to November 1)