What does it mean to inhabit a space and make it your own? How do you make sense of a time that feels like it is constantly in flux? How do you anchor yourself in such a time, when it is easier to let it sweep you away?
I started drawing-on-location after I moved to the US to pursue my Masters degree. I had been living in a mid-sized midwestern city for a year, and yet, I felt completely unanchored to the place I was in– almost like I was floating through it. Drawing the sites and scenes around me was my way of claiming witness to a particular moment or place in time; and to make the fleeting moment halt. Soon this practice of visual documentation became my way of understanding a place or a time through close observation, and of presenting my point of view to the world.
I first heard about Sharanya Ramprakash’s play, Project Darling, while working on the branding for a theatre festival where she and her team had been invited to perform. Later, I found out that they were based out of Bangalore– the city I currently work in. Following some inarticulable instinct, I decided to ask her if I could document her process: the rehearsals, the set up, and the performance itself.
Here, I share drawings from a rehearsal at her residence, a performance at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP), and another performance at the Ranga Shankara Theatre, Bangalore. All these drawings were made between January and April of 2025.
Tracing the Unfinished: Rehearsal-ing Images
The rehearsal at Sharanya’s residence is relatively informal. I am an hour late because I go there after work, braving Bangalore’s infamous traffic. When I reach, I learn that they are rehearsing for an upcoming performance at the Museum of Art and Photography (MAP). Their allotted slot is shorter than the play’s usual run time, and so they have to edit certain parts of the script out. The ceiling at MAP is also lower than most formal performance venues, which means certain parts need to be re-visualised for this venue. Additionally, Project Darling is the closing act for a conference about funding in the arts. The play uses a mix of Kannada and English, a lot of which the actors improvise on stage. They discuss which parts they want to perform in Kannada versus English, based on the kind of audience they are expecting at MAP. Some of this conversation happens in Kannada, and so I sit through it quietly, piecing things together from the hand actions, intonations, and stray sentences of English that find their way into the conversation.
The need to understand, though, feels secondary. I am here to observe and to document. And so that evening, mostly I draw.
Director Sharanya makes mental notes while watching the rehearsal.
A Strange Location: The Post-Conference Performance
The second time I meet the crew, we are all at MAP. I am here with a heavy bag, stashed with an A3 sized sketchbook, my 50-piece connector set of Faber Castell sketch pens (you never know how many you will need), a steel water bottle, and my airpods. An air of unnerving confidence wafts through the museum building. Everyone looks immaculately dressed. They socialise with jovial hugs and confident handshakes. People seem to be there with a mission. I too have a mission, but it feels weaker than theirs. I wonder if the rest of the performance crew feels as uncomfortable as I do. I put on my earphones to tune these thoughts out.
The performance is set to take place in MAP’s 120 seater Mazumdar-Shaw auditorium, after the conference is over. They get an hour or so to set up before lunch, and another hour or so before their performance.
Between lunch and set up time, while the conference is still on, we are given a different conference room to rest and keep our stuff.
The pre-performance setup is not as frantic as I had expected. The crew has performed the show several times before, so I guess they have a handle on things by now. An array of miscellaneous objects emerges out of large tin boxes and is arranged on stage to create the appearance of an organised mess.
The objects placed on stage include a typewriter, rolls of toilet paper, and several scattered photographs of female Kannada actresses of yore. A whiteboard in the back lists down themes that the characters discuss during the performance.
The Moment of Climax: Performing at Ranga Shankara
My final encounter with the crew takes place at Bangalore’s famous Ranga Shankara Theatre, on the day of their performance: April 4, 2025. 2 months have passed since I last saw them. We had departed on a cheery note– hoping to catch each other again at a different performance, of the same play, or of another one.
I found out about the performance through a broadcast message on Whatsapp from a cast member, 2 weeks before it was scheduled to take place, and jumped at the opportunity to document it. At that time, I did not have a sense of what these drawings would amount to, or how I would put them together. But there was something about the visual contrast between the two performance spaces of MAP & Ranga Shankara that felt enticing. It felt indicative of the larger cultural scene of Bangalore, where a flashy new private museum co-exists alongside a traditional Proscenium theatre space. Both exclusive in their own right.
I had been thinking about the ways in which people in the arts navigate these spaces to get their work out. And in the context of a performance– the ways in which it adapts itself to various venues. The moment felt right to explore these questions.
I reach the theatre at 12.30 pm, 7 hours before the play is due to start. I have never seen the space so empty.
I ask a Kannada speaking guard if he knows if the crew has already arrived, but he stares at me cluelessly. Then I find another guard who speaks Hindi and ask him the same question. He cautiously leads me through a roped-off staircase to the performance hall.
At once, I am struck by how large everything feels. The stage, the lights, the wings…this is legit I think.
I proceed to spend the next 3 hours trying to capture the enormity of the space, drawing from different angles, and different positions in the theatre…with only half satisfying results.
I take a tea break, and find the cast and crew goofing around when I return. One of them is doing some sort of dance step across the stage, and asking another one to record her on her phone. Occasionally, they express interest in my drawings, and flip through my sketchbook. I feel a little embarrassed because there are a lot of empty pages with half finished strokes of things that were moving too fast. Still, it is what it is. And I do want to show them what I’ve been doing.
As we approach closer to the performance, the crew starts dissipating into the green rooms. I follow the women in awkwardly, and feel a palpable shift in energy inside. The goofing around has quieted down, and the atmosphere feels almost meditative. The actresses put on their costumes and do their make-up with a kind of automatic energy. Now, they are in the zone.
***
A few days after the performance, I have the opportunity to interact with Sharanya at length about her research process and the documentary work that went into this performance. She had travelled across the breadth of Karnataka, speaking to female actors from Kannada theatre, with a desire to uncover and document their stories. She spoke to women from both, the professional Company theatre (1940s-1970s), as well as the amateur theatre movement (1950-present). In the process, she unearthed stories of joy, power, promiscuity, compromise, audacity, and often, bitterness over being ‘forgotten’. She tells me she has spent five years with her material. 5 years, I think. That is no joke.
As we talk more, Sharanya shares anecdotes from when these women had performed on stage. They had led full and exuberant lives, and carried an entire, extensive, cultural history on their shoulders–along with their male counterparts, and other members of the performance ecosystem. I think about how, at one point, they were such a regular, extremely present part of people’s everyday lives. Families dressing up to go watch a natak, actors hurriedly putting on their makeup before the start of a show, costumes that did not arrive on time, men hooting after a salacious scene, crowds gathering to catch a glimpse of their favourite actresses—and then one day, just like that, none of it exists anymore.
Sharanya’s larger project to me, feels like a tussle with History, against the cultural disappearance of these women. She drags these stories out, wrestling their erasure, and piecing their stories together to form something resembling part of a whole.
I stare at the drawings splayed in front of me and wonder, how much of the fullness of our own lives will carry forward? And how much of it will lie completely forgotten.
Special thanks to Sharanya Ramprakash, Shrunga BV, Surabhi Vashist, Shobana Kumari, Shashank Rajshekar, Matangi Prasan, and Sridhar Prasad for letting me hang around while they did their thing.
1 Comment
Sandeep Ratkal
Beautiful..Watched PD in Ranga Shankara.So can connect. I think some more drawings could have done justice to the brilliance of Director.