Two decades back, she was a naive16,
stepping under the arc lights in Neelam Mansingh Chowdhary's play Heth Wage Darya. Today, City's own but
now Kolkata based actor Ramanjit Kaur tells us of her Creative Arts Group's
latest project Theatre In Science & throws big words like 'biomedics,
Indian mud crab whose molecules are used in AIDS research. And we realise that
she, winner of Sangeet Natak Akademi Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar for Theatre
& Charles Wallace scholarship, has come of age as a theatre-person in her
own right. Yes, even now, she'd like to be known as Neelam's prodigy, her actor: Indeed she is very much an
integral part of her mentor's productions & is here to rehearse for Nagmandla which Neelam takes to Japan
early next month.
But back in Kolkata, the lady is
finding feet, voice & idiom, .. Hmm ... can she escape Neelam's dominant signature….’
does she consciously fight her influence? "My work is different, for one,
my genre is not the same. I am doing site-specific productions. But yes when it
comes to visual language, you could sense an uncanny resemblance". Another
similarity with her guru is the urge to chart unexplored waters. Take her new
preoccupation - theatre in science. As you wonder of the common ground between
theatre & science, she explains: "Actually Theatre of Science is a
unique collaboration that began at Theatre Royal Plymouth in UK and involved
leading British playwrights & eminent biomedical scientists. The purpose
is to enhance awareness & provoke debate surrounding the ethics & practice
in biomedical science". Their group was one of the two so selected from India.
They have (for their production) zeroed in on the sensitive issue of AIDS. Thus
Raman, so named by fond father after the noted scientist CV Raman but had
little to do with science these years, is researching bio medics of AIDS. She
agrees that whipping up a production, that’d entertain & inform too, is no
cakewalk. In fact, making it on her own in the City of Joy
too has been rather arduous. She confesses: ''It's never easy for an outsider:
And in Kolkata where theatre groups are by the hundreds, it was doubly tough to
find my space". But she felt a vacuum in theatre training. Thus in 2002
Creative Arts was formed with one of its purposes being - to imbibe formal systematic
training. So you say the obvious - is she herself trained? Sure she doesn't
have a degree per se. But being with Neelam has been as good as enrolling in an
institute. Then she's had, the golden opportunity to train under the bigwigs
from Ariane Mnouchkine in France to Firenza Guidi in Italy to Clive Barker and
Tess De Quince - of international theatre. Today, she believes, training is
most essential, for, "theatre has its own science, discipline. You can't
create a play over a cup of coffee". But in unusual places, she sure can.
Just as she did in Job Charnock Coming to
Dinner?' at Swabhoomi, a Delhi Haat like place in Kolkata, to capture the
spirit of Kolkata ' and The Merry Go
Round - parts I and II wherein audiences were on stage & actors in
auditorium. No wonder she says, "I am not so interested in
proscenium". However what she's keen on now is cinema. Neelam's shisya and not seeking new horizons!
Impossible ... which by the way is unlikely to figure in this actor's Science
Of Theatre too.
