Chennai: To make people from all walks of life get involved in theatre, Chorus, a theatre group based out of Alwarpet, for over the last one year has been involving in training non-experts in theatre, making them realise their potential to act on stage.
The programme titled ‘Potti Kathai’, which is a part of Chorus, features stage plays in which amateurs perform once their training gets over.
Speaking about the group, Chorus founder Sriram says, ”I have been into theatre for the past eight years. I was trained by Jayakumar and Kumaravel from Koothupattarai and then I was doing plays for a theatre group called ‘Theatre Kaaran’. Last December, I started my own group Chorus. Our motive is to involve as many people as we can in theatre”.
On what made him start this group he says, ”We wanted to break the niche that drama is only for a particular section of people and wanted to take it to people of all strata. This was also started to break the shell of the many introverts,” he says.
Having already done two plays in Potti Kathai, they are gearing up for the third which will be staged soon. About Potti Kathai he says, ”We started it only during July this year and it was titled Potti Kathai based on the idea of nothing outside the box. It features stage plays that have already been done and we wanted to show it in a fresh representation. There are lot of training involved in it.”
He says that their latest Potti Kathai was about the similarities in Ramayana and Mahabharatha and they presented it based on director Mani Ratnam’s point of view about the epics.
Speaking about the training he says, ”For 45 days we teach everyone the basics of theatre by organising workshops like acting, make-up, facepainting, prop-making, voice-modulation, singing, dancing, street-play etc and at the end of the training we make them perform a show.”
”Since Potti Kathai is a paid workshop, it will see a floating crowd. Our
first workshop had 15 members and it increased in the second show. So far we have 25 permanent artistes and nearly 30 people from the floating crowd”.
On what makes his group stand-out from the rest Sriram says, ”Our motive is to involve many people into theatre and we find out a lot of talents through this. We collaborate with film fraternity too which many other groups don’t do.”