Kusumaale - The first step
- Vivek Madan
- Sep 21
- 6 min read
Updated: Sep 25
Sathwik N.N., Associate Facilitator at Kusumaale 2025, recounts his journey over 9 days at the first residency to identify and support playwrights writing in Kannada.
The first few days of the first residency of Kusumaale - the Girish Karnad Fellowship for Playwriting in Kannada, felt like peering through a mist. There was something on the other side - faint but discernible, formless but solid, scary but also alluring.
People from varied locations, backgrounds and tastes came together to figure out how to create something that makes sense, something that is important to them.
Visthar - a serene space nestled in the middle of Bangalore - was the perfect setting to start what some of us felt was a huge step toward taking the Kannada theatre ecosystem several notches higher. Toward thinning the mist and making something of the rich, dense, dynamic mass of ideas, traditions, languages that the 11 participants brought with them.
Sounds like heaven for any theatre-maker, even more so for a Kannada theatre-maker because the opportunities for audacious growth are so limited!
A room full of dreamers!
Two days in, us facilitators knew we had our work cut out for us.
All the participants came from very strong influences that had made them who they are. They all had their idiosyncrasies, ideologies and impetuses, the raw material.
To make this residency a palatable feast, we all had to arrive at a common level of understanding of playwriting; easier said than done.
Everyone in the room was brilliant in their own ways - a school teacher with a Deccan Herald Change Maker award, a retired gynaecologist with a hunger to tell stories, a shy young boy from the interiors of Yadgir who didn’t say a word till Day 5, a techie with a theatre background, a young researcher who would unabashedly doze off during sessions but could - at will - send waves of laughter through the classroom. It was a room of people who were all at the edge of that mist, eager to coax it into nothingness so they could look beyond and engage.
Challenges
The biggest challenge we facilitators faced was to help participants look at playwriting as a craft. The practice in Kannada theatre has largely been to ‘write plays based on instinct and inspiration’ rather than look at how to craft a narrative. Moreover, any ‘craft’ is viewed as a hurdle rather than as a tool.
Another challenge was that most of the participants (even from the larger list of applications we whittled down to the final 11) felt compelled to write plays that were either historical or based on the epics.
This made me wonder, had a lack of exposure to craft and technique led to the preponderance of myth-based stories, or were the myth-based stories so rich and available for ‘mining’, that craft and technique were ignored. Probably a combination of the two, one feeding into the other.
Don’t mistake me. There is nothing wrong with waiting for inspiration, or finding inspiration in historical or mythological stories and characters; but the focus of this fellowship was to dispel the mist. To ensure that participants were in a position to make informed choices, rather than lean on what they already knew and enjoyed.
It took patience, listening, empathy for people’s experiences and the occasional banging on a table to drive home the point that craft is an essential part of telling stories on stage, effectively.
Did we crack open the nut?
Looking back, two particular moments that shifted things for the participants come to mind.
The first was a simple exercise of writing a small incident from their own life that they felt was interesting to share with others. In all the exercises thus far, participants would come up with characters and scenarios that ‘felt dramatic’, like the ones in Telugu movies - overt, generic, formulaic and ultimately unreal. Everyone would go for the big moments, the big themes, sweeping statements.
But the stories shared at this exercise were simple and honest; poignant and powerful. When we asked the participants to discuss the pieces they had heard, it was the first visible sign of the mist receding. The realisation that the small things, the incidents from memory or observation; all held nuances of craft, of politics and of social location and vantage points, seemed to have hit home.
The second incident that sharply shifted perspectives was the one-on-one conversations with each participant, discussing their life and their interests and what excites and concerns them, as a way of arriving at the play they wanted to write.
Here again, many came with ideas based on historical and mythical figures, but as we gently probed deeper about why they wanted to tell these stories, they gradually came up with contemporary narratives without compromising on the larger themes they wanted to explore. A phrase that we kept repeating: ‘What is that play that only you can write?’ seemed to be the one that finally lifted the mist entirely and enabled everyone to reach that mass of ideas with joy, restraint and confidence. Come the last day of the residency, every single participant came up with an idea, a synopsis and a scene breakdown of plays that only they could write!
Sharpening our tools
Much of our time together was spent in building skills to write a scene.
Who is in it?
What do they want?
What is stopping them from getting it?
What strategies do they/can they use to get what they want?
These questions were asked repeatedly, both for a scene as well as for the play.
We spent hours reading and discussing plays like Shalespeare’s Macbeth, Girish Karnad’s Tale Danda, P. Lankesh’s Sankranthi, Roy Williams’ Sucker Punch, Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun and others, trying to understand what makes a scene compelling and true.
Conversations and exercises - both written and oral - were introduced at strategic times to explore how to write dialogue so characters don’t sound like the playwright; how to create different, but plausible obstacles for different characters in the play to round out the story; why it is important to outline what is at stake for a character’s journey so a performer and then an audience can feel invested in their eventual success or failure; why it is critical to keep the story engaging and moving forward by imbuing characters with agency, with flaws, with multiple aspirations and emotional states.
Scholar and philosopher Sundar Sarukkai facilitated a guest lecture around ‘What we do when we write’. One particular statement remains with me. He was provoking us to examine ‘who’ is actually writing when we write. Who is the ‘I’ who is writing?
One thing led to another and we were all rather frustrated with this metaphysical, hyper-philosophical question of who is this ‘I’, when he gently broke in by saying, “Most people don’t realise it but when they say I am writing a play, it is undeniable that it is also their teacher who is writing, their tradition who is writing.” And breaking out of that, or quarreling with that to find one’s true ‘I’ (pun intended) is an integral part of a writer’s journey.
Food and Fun
Amidst these intense sessions that began at 9.30 am and went on till 6pm and on some days till 8 pm, we were fed delicious food and copious amounts of chai, coffee and biscuits.
We played volleyball and cricket during lunch breaks. We went on walks, made new friends - two of them of the 4-legged variety - and spent a lot of time arguing, singing old Kannada songs and laughed a lot, usually at very lame jokes!
Exciting Days Ahead!
After 9 packed days, the participants have gone back to their homes and lives to write the first drafts of their plays.
We are in regular touch with them, helping them in whatever way possible - recommending plays to read, listening to their scene breakdowns and helping them overcome blocks and sidestep potential knots.
Hopefully when we meet again for another 9 days in December, we will have a bunch of exciting first drafts that can be further chiseled into strong plays.
Here’s to writing, to playing, to arguing, to finding a community and kinship across boundaries. If theatre transcends boundaries and breaks moulds, can theatre makers do any less?
Kusumaale - The Girish Karnad Fellowship for playwriting in Kannada is a programme concieved and executed by Bhasha Centre.
After an open call which drew in 40 applications, 11 participants from across Karnataka were selected to participate in this extended, intensive programme that will span two residencies and culminate in a festival showcasing the new plays in April 2026.
Lead Facilitators: Irawati Karnik and Lakshman K.P.
Associate Facilitators: Sathwik N.N. and Yeshaswini Channaiah
Programme coordinator: Prajwal S.
The programme is supported by the Prestige Centre for Performing Arts, Samagata Foundation and the family of Girish Karnad.
For more details: www.bhashacentre.com/kusumaale or write to vivek@bhashacentre.com
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