• 1. This Evening Too: From Lal Ded to Abdul Ahad Zargar (20 mins)

Inder Salim

Lal Ded alias Lala Arifa is undisputedly the most celebrated spiritual icon of Kashmir. Her immediate contemporary Sheikh-ul-Allam ( Nund Rishi) nourished this Sufi-Bakti movement which was enriched by a galaxy of other Sufi poets of Kashmir. In this sense, strictly speaking, Ahad Zargar is considered the last Sufi poet of Kashmir, who stands out because of his unique intensity in his verses. Inder Salim's performance included stitching lines of the poem onto his back and re inscribing the text of this popular Sufi poem on a translucent sheet of paper. Inder Salim's performance intended to reconnect ‘the self’ with history in order to discover ‘the present’ in its most chaotic form.



                                             

• 2. Creeper (75 mins)

Written and directed by Ram Ganesh Kamatham
Featuring Mallika Prasad and Abhishek Majumdar

"Creeper" is a modern re-imagination of the tale of Vikram and Vetal. The play slams this mythos into a contemporary urban setting – creating a shadowy world that is immediately recognizable, yet bizarre and entertaining.

“Creeper” was written and produced as part of Ram Ganesh Kamatham’s project on Vikram and Vetal during the 2007 Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellowship. Kamatham, one of Bangalore’s best-known up-and-coming directors has created work for stage, film, radio, and video games.

• 3. Chennai Sabha Drama: An Actor’s Story (30 mins)

Scripted and performed by Pritham Chakravarty

For her 2007 Independent Fellowship project, Pritham Chakravarty researched and revisited the lingering artifacts of a scene that she herself had been a part of as a child actress: Chennai’s “sabha drama”, a semi-amateur subscription theatre scene. Her solo show performance was not autobiographical, but based on a composite reconstruction of interviews with actors and others—it drew on Chakravarty’s usual and intensive method of designing one-person scripts based on a series of interviews, inhabiting the persona of the interviewed. Pritham K. Chakravarty has been a political theatre performer and theatre activist based in Chennai for 20 years; but her acting debut first came on the Sabha drama stage itself, at the age of six.