As Director

"The grimness that emerges in the dialogue-driven production is complemented by movements inspired by Eugenio Barba, an Italian theatre director who Saha assisted during her stint at Odin Teatret in Denmark. “I choreographed the play as a dance piece rather than blocking it like a play,” she says." - Indian Express

Romeo Ravidas, a young farmer’s son loves riding his horse in his village Dumari, Bihar. He calls his horse Juliet. In a peculiar journey he meets Kausalya in a dream who was once known in her college as Juliet. What is the story of this Romeo and Juliet? Based on the murder of 21 year old Pradeep Rathod in Gujarat and the life of activist Kausalya in Tamil Nadu in this unusual Romeo Juliet story, love, friendship and freedom to simply live are explored.

Director: Sharmistha Saha
Playwright: Sharmistha Saha & Shubham Sumit
Performed by: Priyanka Charan & Dilip Pandey
Second Cast: Pooja Vedvikhyat & Manasvi Sharma
Music by Aman Nath
Costume and scenography by Reema K.
Photographs by Rahul K. Singh
Total number of travelling cast and crew members: 5
Duration: 70 mins
Languages: Hindi/Bhojpuri

Been part of Kala Ghoda Festival 2020, Shadipur Natak Utsav 2019, Natrani Festival Ahmedabad 2019 amongst others

"Indian artists tend to treat the celebrated work of Rabindranath Tagore with kid gloves. But in adapting the master's 1914 Bengali short story Streer Patra, the Mumbai-based collective Qissa Kothi has taken a bold, and mostly successful, approach.' - India Today

HER LETTERS is based on Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Streer Patra. It was written a hundred years from now in 1914. What is beautiful about the story is that it is contemporary. This is also what makes it tragic since it reminds us that not much has changed in the last hundred years, in so far as how we treat women. Mrinal writes a letter to her husband while on a pilgrimage for which her husband does not accompany her. She realizes soon how she had become bound to her habits and revisits her relationship with Bindu, the unwanted guest in her house. Was she her lover? We do not know. She does not make it clear to us or to her husband. HER LETTERS as it was adapted was woven with narratives from the lives of the performers as also with addition texts and poetry from Virginia Woolf and Amrita Pritam.

Director: Sharmistha Saha
Adaptation from Rabindranath Tagore's 'Streer Patra': Sharmistha Saha
Light designer: Jatin Negi
Costumes: Maulik Pandey
Props: Ashish
Music: Heineli, Rabindrasangeet and other compositions and performance by Ssamaran.
Additional Text: Virginia Woolf's suicide note, Amrita Pritam's poetry, Lata Singh, Sukeerti Sharma, Bharti Perwani.
Production: Saurav Pratap Singh, Gaurav

Commissioned by Tagore Centre Berlin, Germany in 2014.

"As a part of the process, the director and I conducted a workshop with theatre artists and (humanities and media studies) students to explore the connections between the archive and performance-making. Sharmistha developed a performance exhibition that involved the curation of interludes of visual and performance exhibits within the narrative of the performance traditions as well as the relevant socio-political context in colonial India. It was an exercise of animating the archival material with theatrical energies to bring about the synergies between the archive, society and individuals. Instead of presenting a linear narrative by establishing a connection between the archive and the performance, Sharmistha’s idea of performance exhibition helped me explore the power dynamics between actors managers and patrons through the stories of the material objects and exhibiting them in a space. As a writer sitting through the process, I could respond to visual images, abstract movements and soundscapes that enabled me to sketch different scenes for the process and later writing of the play, Sadasarvada Purvapar." - Ashutosh Potdar

About the play
Sadasarvada Purvapar is the story of a man called Netaji who owns a second hand bookshop. He also likes collecting old newspapers, magazines and all kinds of documents and objects related to theatre. He lives in his world with characters from theatre history who come to talk to him when he is alone. One day Riya who is researching for her new play based on the archival material of Marathi theatre comes to meet him. Riya and her friends Nadi and Rafique who are her collaborators in making the play discover a script ‘Karna-Draupadi’ in the process of their research. Riya tries to recreate ‘Karna-Draupadi’ and the story about the making of the play. A series of events unfold about the author of the script, it’s original actors and a riot. Riya, Nadi and Rafique struggle to join the dots in their quest for the truth about the play. Do they succeed? Is Netaji hiding something from them? Sadasarvada Purvapar explores human relationship to material, objects, history as it tries to find out more about power structures, identities, ideologies, creativity and love.


Director’s note
What is our relationship to the work we do? Are they only projects we take up for money or is there something more than that? What about the human relationships that we build with the people we work? Or with the objects, data, material that we collect, analyse or mould? Do they say anything about us and about our world? The play Sadasarvada Purvapar began as an exploration of archival material about theatre in colonial Maharashtra and Bengal two years back with the playwright Ashutosh Potdar. Borrowing from our understanding of our research work on archival material, Ashutosh created characters of the play who explored ideas rather than being tools to take a story forward. Once the play was written, I opened up the archival material of Marathi and Bengali theatre history once again to the actors, who then devised sequences that were initially not there in the play written by Ashutosh. The written dramatic text, the devised pieces by actors helped me to imagine human relationship to past, history, object and our actions in the present as a live performance for stage. With help from the playwright and the actors I tried to create a play about archive, history and past instead of a historical play.

Director Sharmistha Saha
Playwright Ashutosh Potdar
Music Aman Nath, Prabhakar, Pradeep
Songs written by Prabhakar
Ensemble scenes based on archival material created by actors
Lights
Costume
Set and Properties

Cast
Netaji
Nadi
Rafique
Riya

Ensemble Cast
Vishnudas Bhave/Tailor
Govind Mahadaji/ Actor of Riya
Govind’s wife
Raoji Vitthal Bhatekar/ Actor of Riya
Vishnushastri Chiplunkar
Parsi Actor (Shakuntala)/ Actor of Bhave
Parsi Actor (Dushyant)/ Actor of Bhave
Binodini Dasi/ Actor of Riya
Girish Ghosh/Actor of Riya
Satyendranath Tagore
Shakespeare/Actor of Bhave


Commissioned by Lalit Kala Kendra, Pune University,

Have you ever imagined waking up one morning in a camp? A camp which is a perfect world where you have the material pleasures of a good life. What if this perfectly glossy camp promises carnal pleasures but you are not in charge even for the basic needs of life? How does it feel to have a life swept away by constant fear and paranoia of being watched over the shoulder, by a faceless power. What if right now this life of surveillance is your reality and you are already in a camp without knowing of it? Based on the novel THE VIRGIN FISH OF BABUGHAT by Lokenath Bhattacharya (an author extensively published and read in France) Bundelkhand Ki Virgin Machhliyan is a shameless testimony against the State or those who are in Power. Our protagonist who is nameless or may be one of you happens to find love in Ishnoor, the divine light. In this grotesque developed world he finds a hint of beauty. This is a dangerous beauty that turns the world of the camp upside down. Scenes of this impossible love story in this dystopian world are knit together like frames in a film running through those years of captivity, editing together a panorama of social breakdowns. Five actors live through these breakdowns fighting their will to act. They are not allowed to without permission. Bundelkhand Ki Virgin Machhliyan is a political satire that promises to give a good many laughs - at yourself!

Georg Büchner’s ‘Woyzeck’ was written in Germany at the turn of the 19th Century. Based on a true story, although the play was a response to fast industrialization and subsequent militarization of that period, it remains relevant even today. Especially as human beings are no more than human resources and land no more than site. ‘Waseem’, an adaptation, is therefore an attempt to understand love, life, desire and above all, the ‘human’ through an everyday story – as everyday and exemplary as murder and suicide…

Script, Lights and Direction: Sharmistha Saha

Cast and Crew
Tarique Hameed, Ghufran Ragheeb, Prabhat Raghunandan, Farha Noor, Sumit Rajputt, Neelesh Singh, Suchetana Chanda, Kartikeya Sharma, Arpit Singh, Suresh Kumar, Raj Kumar, Ankit Malhotra, Aadil Saifi

Poster: Mani Maran, Rishi, Saurabh Vyas
Set: Uday Bharadwaj
Properties : Sumit Rajputt
Publicity: Janani Kandhadai, Lakshmi Menon, Sujay Thakur, Ved Prakash, Violina Borah.
Backstage : Sarah Niazi, Bob Khurana, Parikshit Sachdeva, Mousumi Mandal,Anurima Chanda, Dhirendra Kumar,Manish Kumar, Greeny Francis.
Script Assistance: Members of ‘Wings’
Coordinator: Farha Noor
Music and Sound Design : Ankush Gupta

Produced by Wings Cultural Society, New Delhi 2014.