Every few years in Mumbai, Rajit Kapur, Shernaz Patel and Rahul da Cunha’s theatre company Rage organises Writers’ Bloc, a workshop to encourage new writing for the stage. At the end of the process, London’s popular Royal Court Theatre vets each story. And if it passes muster, the play goes into production.
One such play, Outer Dilli, about a migrant family living on the outskirts of Delhi, premiered on April 3 at Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre. Its dramatisation was not archetypical: there were elements of object theatre overlaid on a realistic play. Knowing that the story needed to be deftly told on two planes, director Shivani Tanksale got puppeteer Choiti Ghosh on board.
Object theatre uses everyday objects as symbols to convey ideas and stories – unlike puppetry, it does not animate or humanise the objects. Over a week, Ghosh trained the actors of Outer Dilli to think “non-literally”, and came up with symbols and ideas to represent the characters’ lives through inanimate things. With her guidance, things fell into place.
Born into theatre
Ghosh, who brought her experience of five years in object theatre to the play, is getting the Sangeet Natak Akademi Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar for puppetry this year. The award is given to achievers under 40 years in fields such as theatre, music and dance.
“I had been hearing murmurs,” said Ghosh, 36. “My parents [Ashish and Ruma Ghosh], who are in theatre, got calls congratulating them. But I didn’t want to get excited till I got official confirmation.” On April 26, she got an email from the Sangeet Natak Akademi. It simply said she had been chosen for the youth award.
Ghosh has worked with various forms of theatre since the age of four, starting with roles like “little girl in a group of children” in Jatra plays. She moved between New Delhi, Mumbai and Bhopal in the 2000s, working with Naya Theatre, Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust and Sunil Shanbag (on Mastana Rampuri).
From 2002 till Habib Tanvir’s death in 2009, she worked with his Naya Theatre in Bhopal in plays like Agra Bazaar. It was here that she met her future husband Abhisar Bose – they got married last year.
“From Habib saab, I learnt the theatre of jugaad,” she said. “He could perform anywhere.”
Ghosh’s interest in puppetry stirred in 2004, when Anurupa Roy’s Katkatha Puppet Arts Trust in Delhi asked her to do a play with them and trained her in puppetry – she still works periodically with Katkatha on projects and workshops. In between, she did movies like Shonali Bose’s Amu about a survivor of the 1984 Sikh riots, in which she played the part of the protagonist’s cousin Tuki.
Another decisive turn in her creative journey came in August 2010, when she went off to Institut International de la Marionnette in France for an intensive month-long training course in object theatre. “Everyone here was curious about object theatre. It was the new kid on the block [as puppetry traditions go],” she recounted. “I did not know then that I would do this for the rest of my life.”
The job of the objecteur is to use everyday objects to tell a tale through symbols. “Just by being there, an object can evoke a thought or a feeling,” explained Ghosh. The challenge is that even a universal object evokes different feelings in different people. The idea is to cull the themes of the play with clarity and then boil them down to hard-to-miss symbols.
This is easier said than done.
Ghosh struggled in the early days at Institut International de la Marionnette and the feedback for her first few performance assignments was poor. But Ghosh persisted, and her teacher Agnes Limbos guided her on how to break a story down to its essence and then portray that crux through symbols and metaphors. “My final presentation was perhaps just okay for the audience, but for me it was a revelation.”
Six months later, in February 2011, Ghosh and her theatre group Tram put up their first object theatre performance, Nostos. Based on Homer’s Odyssey, it was staged as part of the Prithvi Theatre Carnival.
Why Odyssey?
“The why is very important to me. I had studied Odyssey in college,” said Ghosh, an English literature graduate from Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College. “I remain pregnant with a story for a very long time. Then something clicks and the birthing begins.”
Bird’s Eye View, Ghosh’s second object theatre production in 2011, established her as an objecteur. The play, about a messenger pigeon in a time of war, was shown last year at the Bharat Rang Mahotsav, the annual festival of the National School of Drama.
A patient teacher
In 2014, Ghosh conceptualised and directed Alice in Wonderland, a fantastical play inspired by Lewis Carroll’s classic but not quite based on it. “Because object theatre is so symbolic, you can talk about everyday things in a non-realist way,” she said. And therein lies the challenge and fun of creating an object theatre production for Ghosh.
Puppeteer Dadi Pudumjee has seen both Bird’s Eye View and Alice in Wonderland. He recalls Alice as an elaborate production. “Choiti uses a range of objects like smiley balls in the play. I have used objects in puppet theatre as far back as the 1980s. But what Choiti does is special. We [at the Ishara Puppet Theatre Trust] have used different objects like shoes and umbrellas. We animate the objects, whether they are figurative or not. Choiti’s style is different. She uses the objects to signify weakness and strength. To form a connection between the object and the observer.”
Ghosh’s two most recent works in object theatre deviate from her usual practice of creating theatre for young viewers, of 8-13 year-olds. Outer Dilli is specifically for older audiences. And a Museum of Ordinary Objects – a “pop-up museum” organised on April 16-17 in Mumbai by Tram Arts Trust in association with Harkat Studios and Extensions Art – was for people of all ages.
Outer Dilli is a first for Ghosh in more than one way. She hasn’t overlaid an object theatre piece over a conventional “verbose” play before. “The plays in Writers’ Bloc are all scripted; I (usually) do devised theatre,” she said.
The play is also a first for Tanksale and the actors who had to be trained to work with objects. “There’s a ‘frog poem’ in the play,” said director Tanksale, by way of an example. “A schoolgirl carries frogs to a pond. The script says the frogs are jumping inside their box. Choiti came up with the idea to use a paper cutout of a frog and trained the actor to interact with it in a way that looks like the frog is jumping before it leaps into the pond. Choiti is an extremely patient teacher.”
A dollhouse stands in for the home of the protagonist in Outer Dilli. A window in the schoolroom is symbolic of freedom as well as introspection. Ghosh says she hasn’t seen the play yet, though she’s excited and nervous to catch it later in May at Prithvi Theatre. “It has apparently gelled well.”