Theatre Award 2023: Janhvi Marathe, Vardhan Deshpande and aPurpleHeart
The three Theatre Awardees for 2023 are Janhvi Marathe, Vardhan Deshpande and aPurpleHeart (Birth Name: Pallavi S).
Janhvi will be working on musical soliloquies based on the works of Kabir , Vardhan will be training in drama therapy and aPurpleHeart will be training at Adishakti to challenge binary understandings of the body.
Janhvi Marathe
Janhvi Marathe is an actor and singer working primarily in the fields of theatre, films, and music. She has elementary training in Hindustani and Carnatic music and has also been exploring the realms of folk music for the past year and a half. Being multilingual has offered her with a wide range of languages and cultures to explore and by inspired by.
She has completed her graduation from Pune University's Lalit Kala Kendra in performing arts (theatre) and has been working as an actor in Mumbai since March 2022, with The Company Theatre's musical production ‘Aaeen’ directed by Atul Kumar and the Mandali Talkies musical production ‘Mahanagar Ke Jugnu’ directed by Amitosh Nagpal.
Her body of work is largely based on the confluence of music and theatre. Through the opportunities offered by this grant she aspires to broaden her practice and artistic explorations around the same.
She intends to craft a musical soliloquy using the literary works of Sant Kabir and formulate a piece, that is a blend of folk music and singing, poetic verse and dramatic storytelling. Her aim is to create a performance that has its roots in Indian texts, folklores, myths and folk music; but at the same time caters to a wider range of audience, breaking barriers of differentiation. She envisions the rendition to be a piece that is a convergence of sounds, visuals and emotions, whilst incorporating instances of body movement and visual art forms. Janhvi will be training with Bindhumalini Narayanswamy.
Vardhan Deshpande
Vardhan Deshpande is from Aurangabad, Maharashtra. He is an engineering graduate (B.Tech I.T) from College of Engineering, Pune and for a year worked as a Support Associate in Tata Technologies Pvt Ltd. However, he chose to pursue his a master’s in theatre (M.A. Theatre) from Lalit Kala Kendra, Pune (SPPU). After his masters, he received a fellowship named Goshtarang from the Quality Education Support Trust (QUEST) in 2019.
Goshtarang is an inter-disciplinary ten months residential fellowship. The Goshtarang programme takes books to children through theatrical performances of children's stories by trained artists with the aim of creating a culture of reading. Through the programme he participated in over 150 shows in more than 100 schools in various villages of Maharashtra. Even through the Covid-19 imposed lockdowns he continued online storytelling.
In 2021, he worked as a field investigator in a research project sponsored by Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), conducted by IIT Bombay, entitled, ‘Performing Arts Industry – The economic and livelihood implications on artists and cultural impact on society due to COVID-19’.
Currently, he is working as a theatre facilitator conducting workshops for children, theatre students, school teachers and for people working at NGO's. He is also teaching ‘Theatre and Dramatics’, as an elective subject, at his alma mater, College of Engineering, Pune.
He enjoys telling stories. While working as a storyteller, he realized their importance. Stories can give hope in times of despair. They are very much responsible for our cognitive, social and emotional development. This interest in stories intrigued him further to a technique called drama therapy. Drama therapy is a specific technique which deals with healing of traumas, psychosomatic disorders and other diseases with the help of drama, play and theatre.
Drama therapy itself is a creative process which uses theatre games, storytelling, puppetry and many other theatre techniques. It also deals with drama for special needs and theatre in mental health. He intends to understand the evolution of drama therapeutic practices in India by interviewing well known drama therapists all over India. With the help of the Inlaks Theatre Award, he hopes to dive into this vast subject with his mentor, Aanand Chabukswar.
aPurpleHeart (Pallavi S)
aPurpleHeart (Birth name: Pallavi S) was first exposed to art through Bharatanatyam, Dollu Kunitha, and Hejje Kunitha at a young age. Dollu Kunitha and Hejje Kunitha are the folk dance forms of Karnataka. She was more intrigued by the folk forms than the classical ones. In a summer programme during higher primary school, she was introduced to theatre and Yakshagana. Since then, the notion of becoming a character has stayed with her. Luckily she was able to find her way back to the arts even though she momentarily had to pursue engineering due to societal pressure.
She travelled from her hometown to Bengaluru, the ‘city of dreams’. In Bengaluru, she worked with amateur theatre companies and began to realise her dream of becoming an artist. Primarily, she performs in plays revolt and resistance. She has also been in feature film and a short film.
In 2019, while undergoing training, two courses gave her the skills she needed to observe and interpret her body. One of them being Venu G’s discussion about the discovery of Navarasas and Vyabhicaribhavas in our bodies at Natana Kairali in Kerala. The other was a short introduction to ‘Suzuki Method of Actor Training and Practice of Six Viewpoints’ under Akshay Gandhi. This enabled her to understand the fundamentals of the body as a performer through six viewpoints : space, shape, time, emotion, movement, and story with Suzuki tools. In conjunction, these workshops also raised alarms and concerns about her body. It is during these moments that her exploration of her body began.
The lockdown complimented her goal. With the aid of space, shape, and compositions with seven tensions introduced by Lecoq, she started exploring her body and documenting it for research. Initially, the investigation led to healing; later, it took a significant turn toward lustful explorations and expressions, which was liberating. Later, she reached disgust and shame over photographing her naked body, at which point the investigation turned into a study of her individualism as a result of an artist's existential blocking. This research developed into a discipline particularly after the SOPE workshop at Adishakti as her understanding of her body significantly deepened.
Today, she believes it's important to challenge judgmental, binary, and totalitarian conceptions of the body when establishing norms for everything from social interactions to sexual preferences. She also believes the need to question our ignorance of the physical and emotional abuse that takes place within our social systems. As her experience taught her without our conscious mindset towards our body, individualism is a myth. It piqued her interest in combining historical and cultural data on the expressions of the body with autoethnographic materials from her and her creative partner to create her art. She hopes that this will open up channels for discourse about our bodies.
