What: The Guru of Chai
Where and when: Your place? See www.indianink.co.nz
The next big thing in local theatre could be quite small. Indian Ink, producer of the ground-breaking trilogy of plays Krishnan's Dairy, The Candlestickmaker and The Pickle King, is about to launch its next play - but not in a theatre.
Instead, company founders Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis are taking the work on the road and into the nation's living rooms, community halls, drama classrooms and church auditoriums.
Called The Guru of Chai, it is an adaptation of a traditional Indian folktale blended with the ingredients that have earned Indian Ink national and international acclaim: live music, puppetry, masks and a cast of off-beat characters brought to life by actor Rajan.
Like Indian Ink's previous productions, which also include The Dentist's Chair, it has been a careful and considered journey from the page to the stage. It started late in 2008 when Lewis travelled to Australia for further theatre training.
He and Rajan had launched the ensemble piece The Dentist's Chair and were starting to think about the next show. The plan was to stage Shakespeare's The Tempest as a one-hander starring Rajan, but it was proving too difficult.
Lewis says he always wanted to do a play set in a home but had no plans for a production to be actually performed in the home. In the middle of the Australian bush, on a theatre workshop, he began to think about staging epic plays.
"I was thinking that there are two ways to approach an epic," he says. "You can have a cast of thousands and do a large-scale production or you can do them with one person and really engage audiences' imaginations.
"That is something which has always been really important to us and we have realised that more and more as we have worked on this show. We have been asking ourselves, 'How rich a story can we make with one person?"'
Around the same time, Rajan happened across a traditional Indian folktale with themes similar to popular children's fairytales: love, loss, redemption and the triumph of good over evil.
Then came a trip to Bali, which the duo visited to learn more about traditional Indonesian mask theatre. All around was a heady mix of the contemporary and customary, of cultures meeting on a middle ground to create new rituals, traditions and art forms.
Often Rajan and Lewis were astounded at some of the incongruous juxtapositions: traditional tea-sellers, chai wallahs, pushing old-style carts while nattering on cellphones; elderly mask masters discussing how to get on Facebook or watching serene performers rehearse in open-air community halls (banjar) on the side of frantically busy five-laned highways.
They attended arts festivals with the most spartan facilities - wooden benches set up facing one end of a building but no stage or black-out curtains; they went into private homes where the family watched - and laughed - as the duo struggled to learn complex mask dances.
Inadvertently, they were gathering material and inspiration for their new play. To combine the contemporary and traditional, The Guru of Chai features a chai wallah serving tea at Bangalore railway station in modern India. He becomes the storyteller, taking entranced customers back to an earlier time. Using just a set of teeth, Rajan portrays hundreds of characters including a poor young girl with a heavenly voice, a shady thug, an ambitious policeman, a desirable stuffed parrot and, of course, the guru. In one scene, Rajan portrays 12 people pretty much simultaneously.
He says they started out with more masks but these were reduced to a set of teeth because it took too long to go through 25-30 mask changes. "I'm only one person trying to create a whole world."
So there are props - a traditional chai teapot and cups from India, a stuffed musk lorikeet Rajan calls Thathay, puppets - and music from David Ward who has worked with the company previously.
The corollary of stretching the boundaries of imagination to access this mythic world became, "How could the company connect with audiences on a new level?"
"From what we had seen, we realised you didn't need a theatre to make theatre," says Lewis.
Having seen Warwick Broadhead performing Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark in a private home, Lewis was intrigued and charmed by the concept. From 1995 to 2004, Broadhead performed Snark 505 times for about 12,000 people in New Zealand and around the world. Lewis says performing in private homes is a way to bring another dimension to the play.
"It's a way that the ordinary world can become part of the theatre. It really provides a new level of intimacy and connection with people in a much less formal way. When people gather in a house, there's a different kind of energy with some staying to have a drink and a chat."
The set can be packed into a purpose-built box slightly bigger than a suitcase, and there are lights and live music. "It has all the trappings of a full theatrical show and the added advantage of being able to be performed in a living room."
