Lend theatre an ear

Actors record the Marathi podcast Vyatha Suno Re Logo

There was a time - and it's starting to seem so long ago now - when the idea of theatre involved actors staging an often grand spectacle in front of audience members who were transported to a different realm while bunched up inside an auditorium. But the past year has of course turned that idea on its head. Theatre practitioners have wracked their brains in order to come up with innovative ways of keeping their craft alive. There was a surge in audio plays. There were performances that were live-streamed on the Internet. And now, there is a podcast that has been built exclusively to let youngsters turn theatre into a wholly sonic medium.

Youngsters take part in a workshop that's part of the project

It's part of an initiative called Thespo Audio-Torium and has been put together by the folks behind Thespo, the theatre festival aimed at people below the age of 25. Anoushka Zaveri from the team tells us that for 21 years, the annual event entailed people taking over Prithvi Theatre in Juhu, showcasing their productions before a physical audience. "But since that wasn't possible this year, it was a welcome challenge for us to think out of the box. We felt during the wee months of the lockdown that it was a great time to explore mediums we have never thought about before, especially as young people.

Anoushka Zaveri

Theatre performed on the stage is incredibly familiar to us. But we haven't delved into audio storytelling as much, even though we [youngsters] are the primary target audience of streaming platforms."

With that in mind, the organisers put out a call last August for sample scripts that could be brought alive as a podcast. The chosen creators went through an intensive six-month period of workshops, conducted by experts in the audio field, such as Nadir Khan who works closely with the BBC, and Fred Greenhalgh, who runs a company called The Final Rule in the US. Seven teams were eventually shortlisted to come up with diverse audio productions. Three of them are already live, while four more are in the pipeline.

But as an audience member - or rather, listener, in this case - how does this format play out? What is the experience of hearing a play through speakers or headphones like? We listen to Covid and the City, the latest of the three podcasts available at present. Nimish Nanda has created it and the experimental podcast consists wholly of recorded sounds that offer a chronology of the pandemic so far, ever since the lockdown last year began. It's the middle of the night when we put the speakers on, and there is an eerie silence outside courtesy the curfew that's again in place. But that only means that the sounds of the birds and voice of news presenters updating people about the pandemic - which is the sort of soundscape that the podcast inhabits - is even more pronounced. And for the next 18 minutes, we are taken on a journey that is a sonic reflection of what a tumultuous period the past year has been.

And that - travelling on a journey as soon as you plug your speakers in or put your headphones on - is the very purpose behind this podcast series, Zaveri says. "You can be swept away into a world that is not your own," she explains, adding that the effort is testament to how youngsters have deep-dived into a territory that they were totally unfamiliar with earlier. So, let us give them their due, even as we wait for theatre to return to its old ways of being a staged spectacle.

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