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1. What makes Bengaluru tick? I have known this city as my own for 44 years. In this time, it has swallowed Whitefield so one hardly needs to go “into” Bengaluru, however long that would take! The city ticks because people come and make a home and a life. Of course, they stray, but isn’t that part of being at home and living?

Swami and Friends is one of those books that is deeply entrenched in the minds and memories of anyone who has read it. Malgudi, the fictional town created by R.K. Narayan, has landscapes that readers will already have mapped in their own heads. They will have mentally trod the path from Ellaman Street to the Sarayu river through Nallappa’s grove. Readers have met Narayan’s quirky characters and have ideas about how they look and what they might say. So how does one recreate a story and an ethos that has already been imagined and reimagined multiple times? Visual Respiration, a Bengaluru-based theatre group will create these landscapes onstage as a compelling 90-minute performance at the Jagriti Season 2015.

Unless one is a regular theatre goer, chances are that one does not know which play to watch. Information available is usually about the cast or a brief plot summary. Theatre productions in Bengaluru are remedying this dilemma: For starters, they are creating trailers or promos on the lines of movie trailers.

Urban angst and a marriage in crisis. The two never explode on to the Edward Albee stage, but they make themselves known, nonetheless, in jittery conversation, inference and a difficulty in communication. Themes that remain relevant even over 10 years later — which is why Arundhati Raja, artistic director, Jagriti Theatre, has decided to explore them on the Bengaluru stage.

Love, Bombs & Apples. Seems like an unlikely combination. Seriously - does a couple fall in love over bombs and then eat an apple afterwards? Or is this the story of a fruitarian fart - resulting in an unfortunate stink bomb that repulses your love? Written by Hassan Abdulrazzak, (you might remember him from his first play, the 2007 success, Baghdad Wedding), Love, Bombs and Apples is a production of three 15-minute monologues by men in different situations and locations. This play makes a comment on Muslim prejudice with a healthy dose of humour

The Cockroach Collector is a dark and witty play in English woven around three people of a doomed household; the mother referred to as Ma and her two daughters called Alka and Mano, who is the cockroach collector. On the face of it, this is a story of a seriously dysfunctional family. But it is also essentially the story of a dysfunctional world, where horrendous violence and inhuman acts can exist in the crevices of ordinary life.

It has been a good five to six years since psychedelic/blues rock band Parvaaz propped up their own ladder and started climbing up in their reputation as one of the most formidable, unmissable live performers. Of course, this energy has been somewhat transformed equally well in their recorded releases such as Behosh (2012) and Baran (2014), but now there’s their latest live DVD album, Transitions, which aims to capture the four-member band at their trippiest best. The approximately 90-minute film, captured by Bengaluru filmmaker Gokul Chakravarthy and his team, was born out of Parvaaz’s one night only auditorium show at Jagriti Theatre in July last year.

The discourse over the validity of our beliefs — religious, political or emotional — has been raged several times. With the play K-Pax, Tahatto theater group is rekindling the debate once again, albeit, with a difference. Based on the novel On a beam of light by Gene Brewer, K-Pax is a sci-fi psychological drama. It explores human acceptance and how rigidly we hold on to our notions — scientific, moral and spiritual — without allowing space to question those very beliefs, through a character who claims to be alien. But no one would know for sure, if that's the truth.

Nayantara Narayanan 19.3K Total views Share Tweet Email Reddit Share Tweet Email Reddit It’s an unusual collaboration. A laboratory and a performance space, both in Bengaluru, and a theatre group in the United Kingdom have come together to produce a play on a subject as dense as resistance to antibiotics. Playwright Gautam Raja, who is currently based in Los Angeles but has been part of Bengaluru’s Jagriti theatre, said his biggest realisation while researching The Vaidya’s Oath was that it isn’t given the importance it should. “In spite of the seriousness of this issue, systemically, there’s no acknowledgement of antibiotic resistance as something that needs to be addressed,” said Raja. “[Anti-microbial resistance] is not a sudden event, and not dramatic in the way of, say, a new viral outbreak.”

Theatre artistes Roy Sinai, Vandana Prabhu and Swetanshu Bora will present director Arundhati Raja’s production, ‘At Home At The Zoo’, across the City as part of The Deccan Herald Theatre Festival.