Where is theatre heading? Has the corporate culture sung the final psalms on it in a dirge? Has the media gloss and glamour moved people away from it? Where is the cultural variant for people if theatre in the contemporary world has ceased to be of any relevance?

‘Udaya Kalavidaru’ from Sagar (Shimoga district) tries to answer this. They are a motley theatre group of amateurs engaged in a quiet theatre revolution in the last 60 years.

A precocious, but a passionate blend of young and old this theatre group was in the beginning, developed over a period of time into a mature array of artists whose mainstay was not theatre, but varied professional practices. Being highly devout custodians of theatre fascination, they would spend hours for theatre activities like producing and staging plays alongside discoursing matters of the ordinary.

Under theatre director late N R Masur, they had specialized in staging plays by Sri Ranga. Though unique in the history of theatre in the whole of India to translate a single playwright’s texts into unforgettable theatre performances, for many years, such an uncanny act had distilled off a myth that they could bring only Sri Ranga on stage!

None the less, Sri Ranga’s plays had such an endearing oeuvre reaching out to small groups of theatre lovers in the vicinity. Through Sri Ranga, they had trained themselves in theatre appreciation by decoding theatre language into infinite possibilities of life itself!

In course of time, this minority of theatre goers had enlarged their space. Now they were being treated to plays by Shakespeare, Brecht, Kailasam, Lankesh, Kambar, Karnad and others who formed an intrepid galaxy of dramatists produced on the stage by another renowned theatre director Dr Guru Rao Bapat, basically an English teacher.

Sixty years hence, theatre world over is not the same unenviable experience it was. Corporate bonhomie has appropriated art and its production. And media doles out capsules of art for instant consumption.

The inveterate ideological moorings of the theatre past in being post - colonial and anti establishment have to be recovered and relocated in a counter discourse of theatre. ‘Udaya Kalavidaru’ has precisely started this alternative discourse of theatre by taking it to people and modifying their space away from digital surveyllance.

Mane Mane Mathu is how it has all begun. And then it has reoriented itself into Mane Mane Nataka. One’s urge to become just professionals and nothing else and succeed in life is always a sterile course of creativity. Mane Mane Nataka should alter this course.

Theatre to do just this can always believe that it can restart a dialogue with a myopic mass of people and open their eyes to different possibilities of life. Theatre in the post modern world is a remedial exercise for them. ‘Udaya Kalavidaru’ choose to do just this. But how?

Two short productions of just 45 minutes each, one Russian and another Kannada, staged in an intimate theatre ambience using simple tools like music and sound which are most sober and apt, cast and costume which are as revealing as they are distinct and light, which is just the bare minimum are being staged in small halls with a seating capacity of just over 20 and in corners of streets to where people can have access from just outside their homes.

Theatre would become education and experience, both. Kadu Manushya (adopted from Chekhov’s One Act Play, The Bear) directed by Dr Guru Rao Bapat is a play that exposes the duplicity of the bourgeois class of people whose love and hate are easily swapped.

Poovamma, who is a widow of dimpled cheeks still anchors her looks as a supplement of her avowed grief over her husband’s death and offers her love in the end to escape repaying the loan her husband is alleged to have borrowed from Poonacha. Poonacha too, a conceited lover doesn't ask for more!

It is an abject revelation of our times when all relations are commodities and when emotions that peel as in an onion without pact or commitment make little impact on our torn selfs.

The play Kunta Kunta Kuravatthi, written by Champa and directed by Manjunatha Jedikuni shows our timid selves in absurd manifestations only to further depict how we try to create an inviolable space to conceal our weak links.

Locked in a triangular web, a blind, a lame and a deaf improvise all canons of speech to deny themselves a pre destined world of being. Their absurd world makes a mockery of a cherished goal and purpose we have given ourselves. Their inimitable styles of bothering one another are a slant demonstration of the world we inhabit.

The two plays should help eschew our ego. We inhabit both the worlds; the bourgeois, masking deceitfully our indulgent pursuits of bliss and the ordinary, trying to define our destiny in the new global world order. Kadu Manushya and Kunta Kunta...’ annilate both the worlds and make us look inwards.

Selecting these two plays and to take them to people is only to make people realize the absurdity of being as also the elusive nature of space into which they try to prompt themselves. ‘Udaya Kalavidaru’ plan to take these plays to different audiences in different cultural milieu which the corporate world tries to homogenize.