Projects > THE LAST POET
ABOUT
Theatre is a world and it has many rooms. These rooms are located on a server. The server is placed on a longitude of absence. The dramaturgy of these rooms is not specific, but atmospheric. The bodies are customized for our hyper-stimulated, overindulged, and polarised times. The model of this unbuilt world is an attempt to capture a political moment – a poet disappears, a virus spreads within and amongst us, and our world becomes haunted. The audience is invited to immerse themselves in the constancy of this virtual event. A whirling city searching for its poet; listless yet hungry, moving yet remaining still.
The Last Poet is a multilayered art form with theatre, film, sound art, creative coding, digital scenography, and live performance. A web-portal opens to rooms, and rooms open to doors, and inside, there is a precise and unambiguous fiction. You may treat this experience as a counterintuitive assurance of life, or you may become unmoored from your life’s comfort with reality. The possible world of this cyber theatre is the only universe in which we can be absolutely certain about something – a cartography of shared memory. In it, there are multilogues, there are multiple possibilities in how you can experience it, and there are infinite freedoms.
CREDITS
Concept & Direction | Amitesh Grover
Amitesh Grover (India, b.1980) studied Live & Digital Arts at University of Arts London, U.K. His work explores the immaterial conditions of our bodies, and occupies the intermediate space between Theatre, Performance, and Interactive Art. He has created work on grief, on sleep, on happiness, and on several ephemeral grounds of knowledge. His works are shown internationally in theatres, galleries, public spaces, and on the internet. He is the recipient of several awards and artists’ residencies including MASH FICA New Media Artist award, FORECAST Emerging Artist HKW (Germany), Arte Laguna Prize nomination (Italy), and Bismillah Khan National Award (India) among others. He serves as Artistic Director for ITFoK Theatre Festival, Kerala till 2021. He writes prolifically on performance, and teaches at various universities including National School of Drama, and Shiv Nadar University, India.
Scenography & Tech Design | Ajaibghar
Ajaibghar is a strategy, programming and project management practice for cultural organisations. With a background in design, music and project management, they have worked from concept to execution on new museums, exhibits, spaces, experiences and culture projects. They also build and develop programming that works hand-in-glove for a variety of project.
Dramaturgy | Sarah Mariam
Sarah Mariam (b. 1991) is a writer and researcher in New Delhi. Her work engages with creative writing in prose, dramaturgy, and translation. Her translations have been published with Penguin India and Aakaar Books. Her MPhil and PhD explore modes of writing for stage, and historically trace the evolving notion of theatrical authorship. As writer and dramaturg, she has written performance-scripts that have toured across theatre spaces and art festivals in India, has worked as dramaturg for the National School of Drama, and has taught dramatic writing at Shri Ram Centre for Performing Arts. She is recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship (London, 2019), and the Fulbright Doctoral Research Fellowship (New York, 2020) as Visiting Scholar at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU to build and participate in the Theatre Studies program at the School. She has recently been awarded the Sangam House Writers’ Residency (Bangalore, 2020) to develop on her ongoing writing project.
Film | Annette Jacob
Annette Jacob is an independent filmmaker based in New Delhi. She has been an active participant in the documentary film production circuit in the country. She has worked on productions that focus on subjects like drought in the Bundelkhand district, land rights in Indonesia, conservation of ecosystems, gender and sexuality among the country’s youth, and sustainable fashion among others. She has also participated in the production of several campaigns and videos for HarperCollins India, IMG Reliance, Goethe Insitut / Max Mueller Bhavan, HkW, The YP Foundation, Hachette India, Ecru.
Sound | Suvani Suri & Abhishek Mathur
Suvani is an artist currently living in New Delhi, India. Her practice is centred around contemplating the aesthetics, politics, philosophy and temporalities of listening. An alumna of the National Institute of Design, she has been a component of several trans-disciplinary practices, alternating between the roles of an artist, assembler, designer, researcher, sound- producer and educator. Her evolving interests and inter-media experiments have been implicitly tethered to a preoccupation with the auditory spectrum, encountering and speculating its multi fold possibilities. In recent years, her work has been exhibited at KHOJ Studios, Mumbai Art Room, Soundreasons Festival and the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2018.
Suvani has been teaching at the Master’s programme in New Media Design at NID, India, amongst other educational spaces where her pedagogical leanings align with critical inquiry into digital sensoriums and diverse inter-disciplinary creative practices.
Creative Tech | Praveen Sinha & Gagandeep Singh
Assistant Director | Pankhuri Zaheer
Pankhuri Zaheer is a young practitioner and academic of dance and performance. She competed her MPhil in Women’s Studies, from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and has recently joined as a Repertory Member at The Little Theatre Group, New Delhi. She also runs a weekly variety podcast, ‘Zindagi As We Know It’, covering topics that range from mental health to contemporary politics.
Performer | Atul Kumar
Atul Kumar is The Company Theatre’s Founder Member and Artistic Director. An acclaimed actor and director with more than 25 years of stage experience, Atul has dabbled with different languages and forms of theatre and has showcased his work all over India and abroad. His basic performance training was in the traditional Indian Dance and Martial Art forms of Kathakali and Kalaripayattu in Kerala. He also learnt from his various travels abroad where he got to work with Compagnie Philippe Genty in Paris- France & Sacramento Theatre Company in California- USA. Atul was recently invited by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in the UK to direct for their International Theatre Festival. Amongst many grants he has been awarded French Cultural Fellowship, Charles Wallace Scholarship and Chevening Fellowship to develop his theatre pursuits in Europe.
He has served as a steering committee member of the International Network for Cultural
Performer | Ashwath Bhatt
Born in Kashmir- Ashwath Bhatt, after his graduation from National School of Drama- New Delhi, did his Post Graduation in classical acting and Acting instruction from LAMDA (London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts) London. He was the first recipient of Inlaks foundation scholarship for Theatre/Acting. He is a visiting faculty to various prestigious institutions in India & Europe and has worked with reputed theatre companies in various countries. ‘Inlaks India Theatre Awards’ is his brainchild. Apart from teaching, he regularly performs his one man show ‘Ek Mulaqat Manto Se’ (A rendezvous with Manto) based on the life and times of Sadat Hasan Manto. He has performed at various festivals around the Globe. He is widely known for his work on ‘Red Nose Clowning’ theatre form in India. In 2007, he established non-profit trust – Theatre Garage Project. The philosophy behind his work is ‘Finding something in nothing’. He is recipient of SNA’s Ustad Bismillah Khan award-2013.
He has also worked with acclaimed filmmakers like Oscar winning director Danis Tanovic, Mira Nair, Meghna Gulzar, Vishal Bhardwaj, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Rahul Dholakia etc.
Performer | Dipti Mahadev
Dipti Mahadev is a 24-year-old actor and dancer born and brought up in Pune. It was her college where she found and fell for theatre. Ever since, she has performed more than twenty-five plays like The Colour of Loss, Item, Kabutar Ja Ja Ja, Teen, Nocebo, and Bai to name a few, as well as street plays.
She is trained in Kathak by Guru Manisha Sathe for over 8 years, and has received distinction at ‘Gandharva Mahavidyalaya’. She is also trained in Contemporary and Latin American styles.
Dipti has attended numerous workshops all over the country. In 2018 and 2020, she was selected to be a part of the legendary theatre director Ariane Mnouchkine’s Ecole Nomade workshop held in Pondicherry.
Dipti has acted on screen in two Marathi feature films- ‘Deid’ and ‘Mi Vasantrao’ and multiple award winning short films. For her performance in the play ‘Item’, Dipti has been nominated for Best Actress at the Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Awards (META) and won the Best Actress Award at the Broadway World India Theatre Awards. Dipti holds a C1 certificate in French.
Performer | Pallav Singh
I am a wild energy, working in curated sort of affairs, still finding that collective wildness as soon as the third bell is heard or “Action” is called. Stationed in Mumbai suburbs, presently, working as an artist across disciplines. If I commit to theatre, the reason behind it is nothing at all, but theatre itself. And it was the suspended beliefs of spectators and what can be done with it, that I joined the National School of Drama (2016-19), to be kaleidoscopic in my craft, enthralling but invisible. Or for that matter, layering Mechanical Engineering (MIT Manipal – 2011-15) and theatre between two hands of the clock for four years. The art of lying honestly, has bagged me a job with Amazon India as Business Strategic Development Manager in past (2015-16) and I intend to get better with each iota of my awareness and passing time.
Performer | Bhagyashree Tarke
Bhagyashree Tarke, 29, is a theatre maker and an actor/performer based in Hyderabad. She is an alumnus of National School of Drama and a former print journalist currently authoring and performing her own pieces and touring with them nationally. Her solo play, Salma Deewani (a hyderabadi comedy) was staged at Itfok 2019. She has extended her writing interest by cowriting an independent Telugu feature film. Prior to her journey into theatre she has been part of case studies and projects held by NGOs based in Hyderabad and Germany as a field worker and researcher. As an artist she aims at exploring possibilities of interactive theatre, comedy in Dramatic settings, musicality-physicality and the extent of improvisation on stage within the structure. Finally and most importantly, Bhagyashree is 4 feet 11 inches and always looks up to people.