SAWITRI Theatre Group's 15 years

Recently, SAWITRI Theatre Group celebrated its 15th anniversary at the Art Gallery of Mississauga at a glittering program attended by theatre connoisseurs and friends of SAWITRI’s dynamic founders Jasmine and Nitin Sawant.

The theatre group has been an important part of my personal journey in Canada in the last decade. It reintroduced me to the theatre and gave me an opportunity to enjoy the tremendous joy one experiences when actors perform on stage.

The first time I heard about SAWITRI was when Jawaid Danish invited me to Rang Manch Canada’s Hindustani Drama Festival in 2011 that he held in Mississauga. Jasmine and Nitin Sawant and Shruti Shah were present at the roundtable discussion held prior to the festival Challenges of Staging Indian Drama in Canada and Experiences of Desi Talents in Mainstream Showbiz.

About a year later, SAWITRI performed its play Saree Kahaniyaan (The Saree Stories) written by Jasmine, performed by Shruti and Naimesh, with Jasmine as the sutradhar (narrator). Since then, I’ve tried not miss a Sawitri play. The group has mounted a major play and several smaller staging annually.

SAWITRI has a frequent presence on this blog. If you’re interested, you may read the blogs of the different SAWITRI plays here:

• Gramma
• The Saree Stories
• Street Soldiers
• Case #99
• કાય પણ ઍક ફૂલ નુ નાં બોલો તો
• Lata Pada’s guest post
• Jasmine Sawant’s guest post
• South Asian Theatre panel discussion

Over the years, the group has created an audience for South Asian theatre and shaped the sensibilities of this audience by providing it with a rich variety of theatre experience in all the major contemporary languages of Bombay – Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati and English.

Jasmine and Nitin Sawant

Recently, prior to the celebrations of its 15th anniversary, I had the opportunity to sit with Nitin and Jasmine and chat with them at length about their group.

The group's name is an acronym. SAWITRI stands for South Asian Women's Intercultural Research Initiative. It's also derived from the character in Mahabharata. Jasmine is clearly the driving force behind the group, although she readily admits that too many supporters have played a crucial and critical role in making SAWITRI the institution that it has become today.  

Among their steadfast supporters is legion of friends who have become an integral part of the group and includes the legendary Lata Pada, the globally renowned danseuse and the artistic director of Sampradaya Dance Creations. Among the supporters that Jasmine and Nitin acknowledge for having contributed tremendously include Prakash Date, who directs all the Marathi plays that SAWITRI produces. Keyoor Shah is an integral part of the team who takes care of the technical aspects of the production and is also a member of the set-building team. 

Jasmine and Nitin also acknowledge the role of the co-founder Shobha Hatte-Belgaumkar who was a part of SAWITRI for the first 5 years, as was Nain Amyn who took care of wardrobe, make-up, etc. After 5 years, they both wanted a bigger canvas to express themselves. Shobha moved on to pursue her own acting career and Nain moved on to become a part of Mosaic Festival along with Asma Mehmood.

Aniruddh Sawant was one of the founding directors of SAWITRI along with Nitin and Keyoor when SAWITRI was first incorporated. Jasmine recalls, "No matter where he was in the country he always flew back to see a SAWITRI performance and had solid and spot-on constructive criticism's to offer which went a long way in improving the quality of our performances." He was a Drama Major from Cawthra Park High School and a tremendous artist. "I cannot tell you how much we miss his feedback," she says.

Apart from auditioning and acting in SAWITRI productions when he is cast, Siddhant (Sid) Sawant is responsible for the photoshoots for our posters and many a time for providing music for the productions. He too is a Drama Major from Cawthra Park High School.

Both Jasmine and Nitin derive tremendous satisfaction from their success and the journey that they commenced in 2003. Shruti has been an integral part of their journey. The Group was keen to produce socially relevant theatre; in 2006, it produced the powerful women-oriented play From Here to There (Janice Goveas).  

A year later, the group was registered as a not-for-profit, with a board of directors.  Jasmine and Nitin teamed up with Prakash Date to produce तो मी नव्हेच for the Marathi Bhashik Mandal. Subsequently, in 2009 SAWITRI produced Mahasagar, its first Marathi play. It was directed by Prakash Date. 

Without ceasing its shorter productions, the Group was now keen to do major plays. In 2011, during the Festival of South Asian Literature and the Arts (FSALA), the Group met Mahesh Dattani, the renowned Indian playwright who has an awesome global reputation for writing powerful plays on contemporary issues. The first collaboration between SAWITRI and Dattani was Where There’s a Will. Subsequently, it also staged Seven Steps Around Fire and Dance Like a Man.

Both Nitin and Jasmine take pride in discovering and nurturing talent in different spheres of theatre – from direction to production design and from stage lighting to costumes. Gabriel Grey, Christina Collins, Joe Pagnan are some of the professionals who are regularly involved with SAWITRI productions.

A self-funded entity for most of its existence, the group has managed to get some official grants lately but such grants cover generally about 20 percent of the entire production cost. As a not-for-profit, the group distributes all the extra resources generated amongst the professionals who work to put up the performance.

GRAMMA

It’s only in the realm of fiction that the past and the present can be made to coexist. Both on the screen and on the stage, interspersing of the past and the present compels the audience to willingly suspend disbelief and, when the playwright and/or the director gets it right, this commingling of time and space creates incredibly poignancy that is heartwarming.

As GRAMMA, the latest offering by Sawitri Theatre Group reached its climax, I was disappointed that the play would end soon. Yes, the grandmother had passed away, but, I argued with myself, the play could’ve gone on for a bit with by switching over to the story Samantha and Raj. In these two characters, playwright Jasmine Sawant created characters that were endearing in their youthful innocence.

And as far as I could tell, they couldn’t have been part of the original memoir. 

The play is based on Dr. Jane Fraser’s memoir of her grandmother Lillie Carberry (1865-1949), and Jasmine makes it relevant to our times by incorporating characters in the present. Adopting an Indian theatre tradition of having a narrator (sutradhar), Jasmine turns Samantha and Raj into narrators of the story of the eponymous GRAMMA’s life.

Lillie’s story epitomises the lives of Canadian women and families living in Mississauga from mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. But she's not the docile and domesticated archetypal woman of her times. Lillie's an independent woman with a steely determination to do whatever she wants to do. Out of necessity, such strong-willed people (and especially women) lead a life that to others may seem lonely but that's not so. They prefer their solitude without feeling lonely. Lillie’s best pals are trees outside her the many homes that she lives during her lifetime.

The gradually changing dynamics of human relations between all the characters are evocatively portrayed and the witty and perceptive exchanges between Lillie and her daughter and her mother make the characters come alive. Lillie’s relationship with her mother and daughter also reveals her deceptively dominant (and manipulative) nature, all of which is conveyed in a few pithy lines. Her late marriage and relatively early widowhood strengthen her character even more.  The loss of her babies makes her a hard woman, who has learnt that it's only she who can adequately console herself to overcome her immense losses. 

Lillie's an intelligent woman with strong opinions on worldly matters; she doesn’t mince her words expressing unconventional views such as the futility of war. She lives through two World Wars. Jasmine makes that early 20th century period relevant to present times and makes a strong political statement by including in the narrative the contribution of Indian armed forces (then part of the British colonial army) to the war efforts. Although it’s a part of prattle between Samantha and Raj, it underscores the fact that this contribution has never been adequately acknowledged (the latest example is Nolan’s Dunkirk).

The material progress ushered in through technology that the Canadian society experiences in the early 20th century (such as the telephone and the automobile) and the growth of urbanisation in Mississauga (localities such as Derry Road and Meadowvale) in particular and the Peel region in general personalises the play for the local audience, nearly all of whom would’ve been familiar with the geography.  

Both Sawitri Theatre Group and Jasmine need to be acknowledged for producing a play that is as Canadian as it can ever be. It's a welcome departure from what the group's been doing in the past few years. I’m sure this is the first of many such efforts to follow. 

Credits:

GRAMMA's author - Dr. Jane Fraser

Playwright - Jasmine Sawant

Director - Christina Collins

Producer - Nitin Sawant

Production Design - Joseph Pagnan

Sound Design - Christina Collins & Sid Sawant

Costume Design - Shruti Shah

Projection Design - Nitin Sawant

Choreography - Akhila Jog, Shruti Shah & Raina Desai

Cast:

Lillie Carberry / Little Brown - Amy Osborne

Samantha Fraser - Ivana Bittnerova

Raj Nilan - Carlos Felipe Martinez

Isabelle Carberry & Grace Brown / Grace Emerson - Lucy Winkle

Henry Brown & Luther Emerson & Rag and Bones Man & Janitor - Jesse Anderson

Makeup - Akhila Jog

Stage Manager - Jeremy Pearson

Technical Director - Keyoor Shah

Production Assistant, Props & Wardrobe - Raina Desai

Makeup Assistant & Wardrobe - Forrest Jamie

Assistant to Stage Manager - Devansh Shah

Set Build - Keyoor Shah & Nitin Sawant

Marketing & Administration - Jasmine Sawant

Postcard & Cover Design - Arti Bakhle

House Program - Shamy Kaul

Period Costumes / Props - Courtesy Heritage Mississauga

Antique piano and table - Carol Ambrault

Antique chair - David Huband

Piano Tuning - David Patterson

Rocking chair - Emma Ryan

Preparing for my theatre debut has been terrifying & exciting: Lata Pada

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Guest Post: Lata Pada

Globally renowned danseuse Lata Pada, the artistic director of Sampradaya Dance Creations, is making her first foray in theatre this week, when she debuts in Mahesh Dattani’s Dance Like a Man. In this first person piece, Lata, who has the rare distinction of being honoured with both the Order of Canada and the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, describes the thrill of acting on stage 

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When Jasmine and Nitin first asked if I would consider auditioning for the role of Rathna in Sawitri Theatre’s DANCE LIKE A MAN, I was impulsive and readily agreed. After all, I could completely relate to the role of Rathna and the ‘world of the play’ certainly resonated for me. I thought this would be a piece of cake!  But little did I know what I had committed to.

Preparing for my theatre debut in Rathna’s role in DANCE LIKE A MAN has been both terrifying and exciting!  You might ask why a seasoned dancer like me would feel this way. After all, I have been on stage for the past forty years and should have grown accustomed to quelling my nervousness, taking a deep breath and holding my own in dance performances for a range of audiences – intimate salon type to large outdoor stages with thousands of spectators.  Why should a new but similar medium of theatrical expression challenge me?  Ah, that is the crux of the matter.

Dance and theatre share many techniques and devices. In bharatanatyam, I have been trained to be a soloist, interpreting the many characters in the poetry and lyrics we portray. We are trained to understand the spirit of the character, embody the emotions and gestures that are specific to the situation or role, hold the ‘sthaayi’ or dominant mood that the poetry suggests.  Essential to our training is projecting the delicate and nuanced expressions to large audiences without caricaturizing the role. Not different from theatre one would say.

Working with Mahesh Dattani and Christina Collins has been such an uncharted journey, filled with new learning and surprises, about myself and my co-actors. For the first week, Mahesh worked with us in Chekhov's ‘archetypal sensations’ like falling, floating, balancing and internalizing and veiling  ‘intent’ such as push, pull, smash, lift, reach, penetrate, gather, throw and tear.

What a powerful way of embodying the characters we were playing! For me a dancer, whose gestures and emotions are our tools of expressions, learning to literally ‘tie my hands behind my back’ and work with the intent alone was frustrating, but had to be done.

Decades of training with my dance gurus have polished the art of improvisation and exploring the ‘sanchari’s in the composition. Knowing that I had a responsibility towards not ‘tripping up’ my co-actors with forgetting a line or phrase felt like a huge weight to carry.

But I surprised myself.  Gradually my confidence grew, I learnt to ‘lighten up’ and be in the moment.  A huge thank you to Mahesh, Christina, Anand, Sid and Navneet for your generosity and support in holding my hand through this exhilarating new journey. I've had so much fun and learnt so much. Thank you Jasmine and Nitin for believing in me; I will do my best not to let you down. 

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Dance Like A Man – Three performances. On Thursday, October 16, Friday, October 17 and Saturday October 18 - 8 pm, at Meadowvale Theatre, Mississauga, 6315 Montevideo Road, Mississauga, ON, L5N 4G7. 

Directorial Vision – Mahesh Dattani; Co-Director – Christina Collins; Set & Lighting Design - Joe Pagnan; Music – Deepak Sant; Stage Manager – Heather Bellingham

Cast Lata Pada, Anand Rajaram, Sid Sawant, Navneet Kaur

Tickets: $50, $30 & $20. Go to http://sawitridlam.bpt.me 

FB http://www.facebook.com/sawitritheatregroup

Website www.sawitri.ca

Mahesh Dattani festival in Toronto

Mahesh Dattani (l) and Girish Karnad (r),
interviewed by Dalbir Singh (c) at 2011 edition of
Toronto Festival of South Asian Literature & the Arts

Koi Pun Ek Phool Nu Naam Bolo, is a Gujarati play by Madhu Rye (better known to non-Gujarati audience as the writer of Aushtosh Gowarikar’s 2009 film What’s Your Rashee where Priyanka Chopra enacted 12 roles). 

A young Mahesh Dattani accompanied his parents to see the play in Bangalore as a child, and was awestruck. 

“Anything that can shut up a thousand Gujaratis has to be impressive,” the playwright recalled at talk he gave at Toronto’s Munk Centre last week.

The talk – Me & My Plays – was based on his forthcoming memoir (to be published by Penguin, which has also published Mahesh’s collected works in two volumes). Chelva Kanaganayakam, the former head of Centre for South Asian Studies, who chaired the session, introduced Mahesh.

A seminar on his plays Staging Identity Across Nation, Family and Sexuality in the Work of Mahesh Dattani preceded the talk. Speakers included Anindo Hazra, Margaret Herrick, Rahul Sapra, and Naisargi Dave. The Centre for South Asian Studies and the Asian Institute organized the Munk Centre program.

Mahesh’s talk was deeply personal and yet very objective. He spoke of his passion for dance, his gurus and the discipline they inspired in him, the role of his mentor Alyque Padamsee and Lillete Dubey in his success, his zeal to give voice to a voiceless people.

I’ll not report on the talk here. We’d rather wait for his memoir due early next year.

Towards the conclusion of his hour-long talk, Mahesh said he feels most connected to three of his creations – Dancing Like a Man (1989), Morning Raga (2004), and Where did I leave my Purdah (2013) - these creations encompass his love for dance, music and theatre.

“They form my triptych,” he said.

With the playwright

Overcoming my general reticence, I said the plays that really form his triptych, plays that he will really be remembered for are Final Solutions (1993), On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998), Seven Steps Round The Fire (1998) all of which evocatively deal with the issue of minorities (religion, sexual orientation, gender).

Mahesh admitted he hadn’t really thought of them as such, but agreed that they do form a unit.

Last week turned out to be an embarrassment of riches for the Dattani fans. Thursday the Sawitri Theatre Group staged Seven Steps Round the Fire, originally a radio play.

Bhanji &Sawant

Directed by Christina Collins, the play, which brings to life the in between world of India's  transgender hijra community, was enlivened by bravura performances by Jasmine Sawant (Champa) and other members of the cast that included Farah Bhanji (Uma Rao), Siddhant Sawant (Munswamy), Amit Mohan (Anarkali), Aryan Ahuja (Suresh Rao), Naimesh Nanavaty (Mr. Sharma, construction worker, and beggar), Shafik Kamani (Salim, prisoner, hijra at intersection), Andrew Ravindran (Subbu, prisoner, hijra at Champa's), Ivana Bittnerova (Kamla, hijra at Champa's and sweeper), Nicole Balsam (bride).

Sawitri's actors lived the characters. The performances were uniformly superior, a major feat for the group considering nearly all the actors have a day job, and do theatre because they love the art form. The play was originally meant for the radio, and so didn't need any major props. What makes the production memorable is the nuanced understanding of each character and the motivation that each of them have to do what they do, leading to a tragic climax. 

The minimalist stage design, depending more on the lighting, enabled the audience to directly connect with the characters on the stage, and moreover, enabled for a smoother flow of the narrative. 

The technical credits include: Nitin Sawant, Producer; Joe Pagnon, Set and Lighting design; Shruti Shah, Costume; Brooklyn Doran, Stage Manager; Keyoor Shah, Technical Manager.  Dancers at Wedding: David Primeau, courtesy Shiamak Davar Dance Company - He also plays 'other hijra rehearsing at Champa's. Sachel Metoo of Samsara Dance Company and Namita Dandekar.

Sawitri Theatre Group’s repertoire of staging Dattani plays also includes Where There is a Will (1988) which was staged last December.

Then, Friday evening, University of Toronto’s the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies, in collaboration with the Centre for South Asian Studies and the Centre for Comparative Literature organized a staged reading of Mahesh The Big Fat City (2013).

The play is about a couple who are facing imminent eviction from their flat in Mumbai for missing multiple mortgage payments, and involves a banker friend, a television actor whose career is on the decline, a paying guest, her lover and in an unexpected climax the paying guest’s brother.

It examines the crass superficiality of the middle class social climbers in a housing society in Mumbai.

Mahesh directed the staged reading, Dalbir Singh was the sutradhar. The performers included: Rebecca Biason, Christine Mazumdar, Jaleel Siddiqui, Shak Haksa, Brian de la Franier, Mirabella Sundar Singh, Aaditya Aggarwal, and Sally Jones.

Mahesh Dattani was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for his Final Solutions (1992-93). 

For an academic study of Mahesh's work, see Bipin Parmar's thesis here:

ACritical Study of Dramatic Works of Mahesh Dattani

Images: FSALA-2011, Sawitri Theatre Group & Dalbir Singh