The long Night of Theatre is a unique concept inviting 20 people to produce a play from scratch in 24 hours and perform in front of a live audience. Sukhesh Arora, founder and director of Yellow Cat Theatre, tells Divya Kaushik about breaking the conventional norms of theatre and giving people an opportunity to explore their creative strength
If you can only perform well under pressure then this is for you. There would be no option to back out or make excuse to not be on stage. Twenty four hours is what you will have to prepare yourself to perform in front of a live audience. This can be an experience of a lifetime, can help you get rid of stage fright and you might even discover your love for writing or acting. Yellow Cat Theatre came up with an interesting concept, which they call long Night of Theatre, last year. The idea was conceptualised by the founder and director of the Delhi-based theatre company, Sukhesh Arora, and his team of people, who have rarely followed conventional norms of theatre. The company invites entries from people to participate in the long Night of Theatre. Twenty strangers are chosen from the entries. The participants get a chance to create, write, make and perform a play in just 24 hours. Some interesting but super intensive training sessions are a massive part of the long Night of Theatre. This year these sessions will be led by Sukhesh, Mandeep Raikhy of Gati Dance and Katkatha’s Anurupa Roy.
This is yet another interesting trend in theatre that seems to be inviting those who are not able to pursue their passion for theatre due to many reasons.
Sukhesh shares what led them to come up with the long Night of Theatre and says, “In September we will hold the second edition of the event. It was a fun idea to put people under pressure cooker kind of a situation, to give them a strict time frame to come up with something creative that they would put infront of the live audience. The other reason why we came up with this was that we realise that not many people have an access to theatre platforms. They want to learn theatre but they feel workshops and courses are either too short or too long to participate, so we decided that we will limit the event to only 24 hours. These 24 hours are not a training session, it is giving people an access to explore and understand different aspects of theatre.”
As soon as they open the entries for applications, there are massive number of people writing to them. For this year, they have already received over 50 applications and more are expected. The participants are chosen on the basis of their reply to the question, ‘Why would you want to do thisIJ’ If you are from a theatre background, that can be an advantage, but if you are not that doesn’t affect your chances of participation.
“People from varied profiles write to us. They are architects, students, psychologists, school teachers and people from IT background. last year, the youngest member of the group was a 18-year-old student and the eldest was over 50-year-old school teacher. What we do in 24 hours is a lot of fun. It is not some training on how to write a script or how to perform, it is about various activities to understand some basics through people who approach theatre differently. People are divided into groups and are given tasks to create a sketch and develop those sketches further. We believe that script is a very conventional way to look at theatre, there can be so many physical ways to express yourself and for that one needs to understand the physical presence on stage,” explains Sukhesh.
As a company, Yellow Cat Theatre is known to create their own stories and present them in innovative ways. Aspiring actors or directors are mostly welcome to participate in their work. For example, Sukhesh curated a series of six plays by Spanish women writers under the title Women by Women. Six young Indian women directors were invited to interpret the six Spanish plays. And why only womenIJ “Reading plays from the 1980s onwards, it appears that women voices bring something entirely different to the idea of an emerging self and how it is articulated. WxW is an attempt to explore and understand the impact of women voices particularly in the Indian context where recent events have revealed enormous fissures underlying society. WxW offers a unique opportunity to hear the voices of Spanish women writers mediated through the myriad lenses of young Indian women directors. WxW is meant as a platform to showcase the work of emerging Indian women performance makers. It is also conceived as a space for exploring new approaches to making performance where process is central to creation,” says Sukhesh.
The long Night of Theatre is being organised in collaboration with the Goethe Institut, Delhi.
photos Pratyoosh Kashyap