Desdemona Rupakam (Day 1)

Time: 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Venue: Kote (Auditorium)

Director: Abhishek Majumdar

It is a concert theatre performance centered on the character of Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello. It examines the absence of female voices in the play as well as in traditional Indian mythology.

Directed by award-winning playwright Abhishek Majumdar, Desdemona Roopakam will be performed by acclaimed musicians M D Pallavi and Bindhumalini Narayanaswamy.

Desdemona Roopakam is unique not just for its perspective but also for its performance format. It combines musical scores, comprising Hindustani and Carnatic music, and folk forms such as Hari Kathe, Yakshagana, and Yellamma Aata, spoken word poetry, dramatic scenes, and Tishani Doshi’s poem ‘The River of Girls.’ The sound design is by India’s well-known sound artist, Nikhil Nagaraj.

The Caretaker (Day 2)

Time: 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Venue: Kote (Auditorium)

Director: Venumadhav Bhat

The Caretaker is a 1960 English play written by Harold Pinter. The three-act play is set in a single room of a house in West London with three men circling around each other's life.

The play has a magnified lens of understanding the humaneness around these three men, at the same time confronting their realities while engaging politically on the refugee crisis, hierarchical structures, mental health, and politics of space of 1960.

In The Caretaker, a wheedling, garrulous old tramp comes to live with two brothers. The tramp’s attempts to establish himself in the household upset the precarious balance of the brothers’ lives, and they end up evicting him.

Talamaddale (Day 3)

Time: 1:45 pm – 3:15 pm

Venue: Kote (Auditorium)

Director: Kriti R

Padmavathi Kalaga is an original Prasanga (libretto), written by Kruti R. who is also the Bhagavatha (singer). By taking traditional popular tropes in Yakshagana Prasangas – the grieving mother in Abhimanyu Kalaga, the innumerable Ashvamedha Yaaga Prasangas, Vanavihara and Mahila Rajya of Shashi Prabha Parinaya and Pramilarjuna – and reimagining them with the gender of the characters reversed, the hope is that the resulting absurdity will reveal a bit of the absurdity embedded in the patriarchal sexism that permeates traditions and society as a whole. It tries to question the “naturalness” of those traditions.

Kruti R is a farmer, Yakshagana Bhagavatha, poet, and an independent researcher. She directs an all-female Talamaddale troupe. Through her practice of Yakshagana and her poetry, she tries to examine the relationship of caste and gender to tradition. Her productions explore the female voice in Yakshagana, its materiality and content.

Yaksha Durga Mahila Kala Balaga is a Talamaddale collective, which tries to articulate a distinctly female experience rather than just imitating the male tradition of Yakshagana; tries to discover the possibilities of female voice or gaze in traditional Yakshagana librettos, singing, and dialogues. The group aspires to make a space where women can read, think, and engage in a meaningful, thoughtful conversation about gender and society.