STAGED REALITIES

Theatre director Sankar Venkateswaran melds social conscience with experimental technique that transcends national boundaries

- VIKRAM PHUKAN

Recent years have seen the mellowing of director Sankar Venkateswaran into a theatre maker with a strong social conscience, whose commitment to offbeat experimentation remains unshaken. Last November, he was the recipient of the Bengaluru-based Ranga Shankara Theatre’s annual national prize—The Shankar Nag Theatre Award—given to a “theatre all-rounder below the age of 40”. Venkateswaran, 41 now, is a veritable veteran of the stage, an accomplishment he wears lightly even after two decades in the performing arts.

In the mid-1990s, Venkateswaran’s tryst with theatre began in obsessive fashion. The collegiate circuit, with its frenzied one-act competitions, took such a toll on his curriculum that he couldn’t meet attendance criteria for the physics course at St Joseph’s College, Devagiri, in Kerala’s Kozhikode district. Having tasted blood on stage while at college, he enrolled at the University of Calicut’s esteemed School of Drama and Fine Arts in Thrissur. There, the emphasis on rigour and practice, as well as renewed scrutiny of traditional forms like Kathakali or Kalaripayattu, instilled in him the discipline and priming that allowed him to move away from a tried-and-tested canon to the immediacy of devised collaborative work.