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Will Ranga Shankara foster a dialogue between cultures?
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The journey has surely got longer for the theatre lovers of Bangalore. The city's hot favourite theatre space, Ranga Shankara, is located at the southern end of the city. Unlike our older auditoriums such as Ravindra Kalakshetra, Town Hall or ADA Rangamandira, which are more centrally located.
Theatre that went through a period of lull suddenly came into life with Ranga Shankara, founded a year and a half ago. It brought with it a new theatre culture that was hitherto alien, particularly to Kannada theatre. Girish Karnad, playwright and actor puts it this way: "Ranga Shankara has revolutionised theatre in Bangalore. It is our first professionally-run theatre."
Apart from technology and stagecraft, it has also made a big difference in terms of the ingredients that go into our notion of theatre.
What one sees at the swankily-designed Ranga Shankara is a whole lot of well-heeled youngsters (a combo of the hip and jholawala looks) hanging around at the coffee shop, many of them with a new-found interest for theatre written all over their faces. In the so many years of Kannada theatre, one has never seen this breed of youngsters occupying spaces such as Ravindra Kalakshetra. Theatre was never this fashionable and happening. Of course, the youngsters who swarm the premises of Kalakshetra, come from an entirely different cultural background.
Ranga Shankara's plush looks, the coffee and book shops and English-speaking volunteers are far from the theatre ambience the Kannada theatre audience knew. The whole experience of going to Ranga Shankara can be quite intimidating and alienating, starting from the fact that you are denied entry if you make it a minute late. You can't expect them to listen to you say that traffic was put on hold for a good 30 minutes because some minister wanted to take that road!
The problem is not with the "correctness" of this approach, but a certain clinical attitude that is so far removed from the theatre of our emotional world. Don't we remember how the crowd that simply hung around and warmed the steps of Kalakshetra could walk in, even without a ticket, after the third bell? For us, still, theatre is something essentially inclusive. In the larger framework, Ranga Shankara seems to represent the upwardly mobile. And its pricing surely sieves out an entire class.
Meeting worlds
But the significant connections this space allows cannot be undermined. You can't help noticing that guy who has suddenly woken up to local icons like B.V. Karanth or K.V. Subbanna. Or that girl who went head over heels over Rathan Thiyam's experiments and Badal Sircar's Third Theatre. You can argue that they have an English or a pan-Indian bias. But one also remembers what the late K.V. Subbanna once said about Ranga Shankara representing the meeting point of cultures — the very local and the global.
One hopes Ranga Shankara fosters a healthy give-and-take between cultures, so that the not-so-upmarket theatre lover also feels at home here.
DEEPA GANESH
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