Quasar Thakore Padamsee: The moment you look back, you’re doomed!

Last week on December 10, on Thespo’s 20th anniversary, the youngest person in the room was asked to cut a cake. “Just before doing that, she looked at us and said, ‘Do you guys realise that Thespo is older than I am!’ That’s when we felt really old!” recalls Quasar Thakore Padamsee with a laugh. Q, as he’s fondly called, was only 21 when he co-founded Q Theatre Productions (QTP), the theatre and arts management company in 1999.

Today, Thespo, their annual festival has grown, into what Quasar likes to call, ‘a different beast altogether’. It is now a full-grown theatre movement with year-around workshops, collaborations, outreach activities, curated performances, a bi-monthly e-zine and finally, a week full of fun, plays and more at their annual Youth Theatre Festival in December. The 20th edition of the festival, which is dedicated to the memory of the late Alyque Padamsee, will see 15 performances, seven workshops and the launch of a collection of plays.

Getting younger!

A lot of the things that Thespo has managed to achieve over these two decades, have been organic. “Earlier, young people would take up Performing Arts during college, but that would take a backseat later. With Thespo, they can continue with it even after college. If you look at every third commercial on TV, or some film, you will find that someone or the other working on it has been a part of the Thespo family,” he says. The other thing the theatre initiative has managed to do is that it has grown younger over the years from the audience’s point of view. “Younger people doing theatre means younger stories being told and therefore, a younger audience coming in to watch them. We’re trying to build a global community of young theatre lovers,” adds Q. 

Thespo has also played a key role in creating art managers, a hitherto unknown thing in India. “Arts management is a relatively new term, especially in the country. But now, there are many groups and institutions that employ art managers, many of them who have worked in Thespo at some point,” states the maverick director.

What’s on the anvil 

While a landmark anniversary like this tends to make organisers nostalgic and go down memory lane with an  AV or re-staging an old play, Thespo decided to look ahead. “The moment you look back, you’re doomed,” reasons Quasar. Since Thespo has always tried to plug gaps, including performances and workshops for younger theatre enthusiasts, this year, they decided to fill another lacuna. “We realised that there is very little access to new plays that have been staged as play publishing is so rare. So this year, we are publishing a collection of four new plays that have been staged at Thespo. It’s called Thespo Writes Volume 1 and we hope to publish more in the coming few years,” inform Quasar.

Thespo’s 20th edition will be held at Prithvi Theatre, Juhu from Dec 17-22, 2018. 

Thespo’s full length plays   

Gal Kufr Di

Theatrewaalas group from Mumbai will perform this Hindi-Punjabi play written by Akshay Anand Kohli. It’s a story of infidelity set against the backdrop of 1984 pogrom, a time that shook up most of northern India and claimed thousands of lives.
Date: December 18, 6 pm & 9 pm

Man Maana Square

The Red Mark (actors studio) from Bombay present Man Maana Square in English and Hindi by writers Monika Panwar, Pallavi Jadhao, Bhupendra Singh Jadawat and Ujjwal Kumar. Memories become a library of unpublished stories and bittersweet experiences. How is curiosity expressed conflictingly in thoughts and actions by the same body? It reflects as a memory of the four players as they revisit their past.
Date: December 20, 6 pm & 9 pm

Sometime Somewhere 

The play by Vighnaharta Theatres from Pune in Gibberish by Sankalp Mahabaleshwarkar is based on Karma, which elaborates the law of ‘What goes around, comes around’ and gets self-explored through the life of a Neanderthal man. It’s a realistic presentation with chunks of physical theatre and innocence.
Date: December 19, 6 pm & 9 pm 

Andhar 

The play by Pune’s Abasaheb Garware Mahavidyalaya group in Marathi by writer Suraj Gadgile is a satire highlighting the various superstitions followed by people. The play pays tribute to the great social activist Dr Narendra Dabholkar.
Date: December 21, 6 pm & 9 pm