Catching Up with Sunil Shanbag

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 protégés, 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 22 nd January. They also performed their critically acclaimed play Words Have Been Uttered, a Studio Tamaasha production alongside their other cast members on 23 rd January. The following interview was conducted by Sania Lekshmi and Nidhi Panicker, who are Bachelors students at MCH, on the afternoon of the 23 rd , before the play was staged.

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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

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shape, but, there is a need to build a larger theatre-viewing habit among people; there is a great need for theatre of quality and excellence to be produced all over the country, even in its remote pockets. And that means there is a lot of work to do, and this is not easy. Society has to decide that art is important and then these things will happen. Right now, people who make art do it by themselves, and it is made under very difficult circumstances.

I would say that human beings are social animals - you might be wrapped up in your phone but at the end of the day you still crave a little human contact, human company. I think the pleasure of watching something as a group, rather than individually, is very different. People really crave that sense of community. Secondly, I believe, a living, breathing human being on stage is a very powerful experience; you may see the most fantastic movie with the greatest special effects, but the kind of experience you get watching real-life people on stage is very unique. I think people keep coming back for that, maybe they don’t come every day, but once in a while they need that experience. I think that’s something we need to build on. That is why I say, let us not do theatre that you can see on television or in a movie; let us do the kind of theatre that you can’t see anywhere else. You’re not likely to see what you see on stage, on television. Thus, really, we need to consider that. In my opinion, this responsibility lies on theatre-artists more than anybody else. How else could we use that magic of theatre?

95 Chaicopy | Vol. III | Issue I