Ravi

I grew up in Toronto and was born and raised there. My parents are from New Delhi. And the arts were just a big part of my life. As immigrants, we would gather with many different families who were making their homes in Canada every weekend and they all missed home. They would all get together on the weekends and have potluck meals and sing songs about home. Everyone would be singing and telling stories all the time at these gatherings. That was the performing arts for me. It was like a piece of home and a reminder of home and culture that was performed internally. And so, I fell in love with Bollywood and celebrities and movies and TV and cartoons. My world was just a mash-up of entertainment, be it South Asian entertainment, or Western, Canadian and American entertainment. Through high school, I did plays and stuff like that. Then gradually, it got more serious in the sense that I took it more seriously. I really started to find a passion for performing. I especially loved making people laugh. That was something I enjoyed doing. I was a bit of a class clown and performing became second nature to me.

I then went to England for a year and then to NYU. I went to the Lecoq School in France, and I was always working while I was studying, finding my way, working with companies and artists, particularly master artists. When I was very young, I worked with [theatre director] Anne Bogart and the SITI Company. Amazing.

I got exposure to the people who created these companies that were in some kind of intercultural dialogue. And I was surrounded by that and drawn to that and fell in love with companies like Theatre du Soliel and Complicite. People who were using storytelling to have conversations that were intercultural, that were blending and hybridising. Having conversations and making work resonated with me somehow because it was multilingual. It had different forms. It was a kind of storytelling that somehow felt familiar to me.

When I look back at all my journeys, what was really interesting was that I was training at a workshop in Sweden, in Japanese Noh theatre. It was taught by a Latino teacher who lived in Germany. German was his first language, but his name was Carlos. I mean, it's so great, because that just explains how hybrid it all was, it all is. And we're working and I was really good in the class. It was very physical. And he really took to me and I became a kind of assistant in a short time. He was teaching the class and said, you know, it's like Indian theatre. He pointed to me. I was probably 22 and I was like, what?

He's like, you don't know Indian theatre? You don't know anything about it?

I was like, nope!

He grabbed my arm. And he ran his fingers down the veins of my wrist and said, how do you not know that those people and those stories? All of what was made runs through your veins. And I was like, whoa. That is how I first became curious about Indian forms.

It was not necessarily like I wanted to become proficient in Indian forms of theatre. But it informed a lot of things that I was thinking about at the time. I started to think more about forms, I started to think about emotions, and storytelling traditions, and the different ways that stories are told. And with time I started Why Not Theatre in 2007. When I came back to Canada for a number of years it was super racist, and nobody wanted to hire me. I had this massively amazing international resume. People just didn't see beyond my skin colour. I started [thinking], why not to make that international company that I always wanted to be in? To show people that you can do things another way. The whole point of Why Not Theatre is [about] the question you ask when you're met with a barrier and want to overcome it.

R

It was a bit of a fluke. There was desire, but we sort of stumbled backwards [into] doing it and in the early days, I was really overwhelmed. I was like, I don't want to do this, I think it's too big, it's too stupid and crazy. And then I started to fall in love with the story.

And then I guess in terms of a take, it revolves around the concept of Dharma, and Dharma has many meanings. And the interpretation we're taking is primarily from a guy named Devdutt Pattanaik. Dharma is empathy. It’s the duty for those with the most privilege to take care of those with the least – that is how we build a civilisation. Humans are animals. And the law of the jungle is the law that governs the animal, which is only describing survival. But humans, because we have empathy, we can understand that that's not the way to build a civilisation. We need to take care of people in order for civilisation to thrive. So that would be the main instinct of the content.

And then formally, what we're doing that I think is really unique is that we're playing with every kind of storytelling possible, to honour the multitude of ways that the story has been told over thousands of years. We go from someone sitting around a fire, to physical theatre, to a kind of Indian street theatre performance with live music, to traditional Western theatre with scenes in European storytelling, to opera, to postmodern dance all the way back to original storytelling. We're trying every way to tell the story because the how of how it is told is as important as the content. The meaning isn't in the words. The understanding does not solely [revolve around] hearing a story if that makes sense.

It's all the various ways that we receive story that help us to understand it. There's also a part of the play where the audience sits and has a meal. A lot of people receive the story through an Elder over a meal. We try every kind of way we can think of in order to get at how people have told the story and how the how informs the what.

R

I think in a contemporary telling, my contention has been with dealing with differences in Western and Eastern values. From a Western perspective, there’s a desire to make everything simple, good and bad. Trying to avoid doing that at all costs, so that the contradictions and the complexities can live and be present has been the struggle. On a simple level, Draupadi is a woman who becomes the wife, the bride to five men. We struggled a lot with staging that: do we comment on it? Do we need to undercut it? How do we contemporise it or have a feminist take on this story? We really struggled to find ways to do that. Then at the end of the day we found subtler ways. We went from very overt to very subtle ways in order to translate it off the page responsibly.

R

We had to really get out of the shadow of that production in order to find our own voice. We relied on it for a long time, because the way they told the story was very efficient. Very surprising, and very efficient in my opinion.

In terms of responsibility, it's really about the treatment of the material. We spent a lot of time making certain decisions. There's a moment during which Draupadi is de-robed, it's essentially a rape. How do you treat that for a modern-day audience that is tired of the trauma of sexual assault? How do you find an artful way to tell that moment that does it justice and doesn't trigger people and manages to deal with it artfully? That's one kind of example in which our rehearsal room is an arena where we're trying to be responsible. [It’s about] honouring the material, making sure both the aunties and uncles, and the White folks feel welcome and feel like the material is respectful, interesting and accessible.

I think the approach is essentially that we don't show any violence. And we imagine it. Its important to remember that Draupadi is born from fire, she is human of course – but the story isn’t realism. It is full of metaphor, symbols…she has a power, arguably a much larger power than Duryodhana, who is the one who tries to assault her.

R

I think it is twofold. I think we also missed the moment here. I think that a lot of White people wanted to feel like things changed so that we could keep everything the same. So, we hired a couple Black Artistic Directors, you know, we gave a couple of positions of power away, but we didn't change any structures, we didn't change any systems, we didn't change any funding models, it's all kind of the same. The only thing that's different is money. Money has changed a little bit on the federal and state funding side. There's more money available now. And that's allowed people a little bit more empowerment and a little bit more room. It's not proportionally balanced. But it is not insignificant money.

I find that across a lot of the different communities, even though it might be a Black voice, or an Indigenous voice, or a Chinese voice, what people are making is still based on the processes of a Canadian play. It's still three weeks around the table, having us asking the same kinds of questions, about the genre, the prose and the similar kind of methods. And though the content is different, the conversation of what it's doing, or the form of what it's doing hasn't really progressed. So artistically, we haven't necessarily moved the needle forward- a lot of work is shackled by realism. But in terms of stories, important stories being put on, that has changed. There is a place for diversity on our stages, there is a place for new stories on our shelves. It’s all good but also still kind of the same.