Catching up with Sunil Shanbag Born in 1956, Sunil Shanbag is an Indian theatre director, screenwriter as well as documentary filmmaker. He graduated from Mumbai University and has worked with Satyadev Dubey, who considers him as one of his most notable protĂŠgĂŠs, despite having received no prior formal training in theatre. Shanbag founded the theatre company Arpana in 1985. Their work has been lauded for strong performances with minimalist staging and experimental incorporation of music as well as design. He co-founded Tamaasha Theatre, a company focused on encouraging alternate theatre in Mumbai, with Sapan Saran in 2014. Shanbag and Saran visited Manipal Center for Humanities in January 2019 under the TMA Pai Chair in Indian Literature and conducted a one-day acting workshop for MAHE students on 22nd January. They also performed
their critically acclaimed play Words Have Been Uttered, a Studio Tamaasha production alongside their other cast members on 23rd January. The following interview was conducted by Sania Lekshmi and Nidhi Panicker, who are Bachelors students at MCH, on the afternoon of the 23rd, before the play was staged. *** S&N: We will start with something regarding your early days, when you founded Theatre Arpana. Without a formal background in theatre, how did you gather resources such as finance, space, etcetera and manage them and go on to found your own theatre company? SS: I worked for about ten years with Satyadev Dubey and during those ten years, I played many roles; I was an actor, director, I did light design, I worked with the set, and so on. So it was the kind of theatre company 82
Yours Truly
