 "Theatre as enterprise")
Strategic Management in the Art of Theatre (SMART) has been conceived and is run by a core team under the aegis of the India Theatre Forum, and managed by Junoon Theatre and India Foundation for the Arts. Pronoti Datta modulates the conversation between S Ramadorai, chairman of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) and former vice-chairman of Tata Consultancy Services, with Junoon Co-founder and SMART Course Director Sameera Iyengar on capacity building and entrepreneurship.
Pronoti Datta: Why do we need the National Skills Development Corporation?
S Ramadorai: If we look at the youth of this country, 15 going up to 35, the numbers are huge. It is a scale problem; everyone is looking for a job as an entrepreneur. If you don’t address it, then the implications are societal implications. When we talk about capacity building (we ask) how do we create the demand side and supply side through a set of interventions, whether it is digital or physical interventions including classrooms, teachers, certification… Secondly, 93 per cent of the workforce in this country is in the unorganised sector. So we have to move the unorganised to the organised. I think the whole idea is how do you give them setup inputs.
Pronoti Datta: The NSDC is a public-private partnership. There are other successful examples of public-private partnerships in the arts like the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum. Is this a model that should be encouraged?
S Ramadorai: I think the model should be one of innovation. Suppose you take a theater group from here, if they had to perform at the Lincoln Center or the Kennedy Center in the US can we give them that opportunity and what does it take to build excellence? So the aspiration of this theatre group must be ‘I want to be the world’s best’. How do you create that? Can you create mechanisms for financing beyond CSR? If you build those capabilities as part of capacity building where they have that knowledge to seek the funds or generate the funds, that is a very good insight as a management input.
Sameera Iyengar: Value creation is part of what you are talking about. We should say that there is actually no society that can stand without a rich arts fabric. In SMART, we feel it’’s important to give people the skills to also do their own value creation. No one is going to do it for you. We see this as part of management thinking as well, as part of the skill building, I think we have to be concerned about how we innovate thinking.
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Pronoti Datta: Theatrewallahs don’t normally think of themselves as entrepreneurs.
Sameera Iyengar: I think in our country theatre people don't have a choice. They have to be entrepreneurs. In fact, SMART comes out of the recognition that there is entrepreneurship in theatre. Part of SMART's logic is to go back into the field and look for the stories and those case studies.
When this nation started, it started with a lot of thinking about culture and the arts. Somewhere that larger, national conversation got lost. There is such a large amount of living performance in this country - forms born yesterday, forms born god knows thousands of years ago...which other countries cannot boast of. And yet somewhere from 1947 to now, we lost the plot. And we lost the value.
I again come just back to (the point about) capacity building. On the first day of SMART we ask a theatre group why they are doing theatre. In an environment, which is not helping you do theatre why have you taken this up? And that's something I think, when we are talking about skill building, (survival) becomes a very necessary skill for anybody calling herself an artist. There is a slight difference between an artist and an entertainer. An entertainer will respond to the market. An artist has the potential to actually push thought or push expressions or push ideas. I think of it like fundamental research. Fundamental research cannot be driven by market prices. You cannot say that fundamental research and science depends on the market. And you need capacity for that.
I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on that, Mr. Ramadorai. That is what is happening in the world, isn't it? That we are losing out funding and support for fundamental research?
S Ramadorai: Right, today it is all very market driven. For fundamental research, you create a thought and then you want to dig deeper into it to say that something may come up. But nothing may come out. I think funding for that fundamental research is very core. Secondly, when we grow up, let us say in a village where you want to narrate The Ramayana or The Mahabharata, it is through a theatre group. The theatre group is exactly where entire families would go to learn about fundamental concepts. A debate on it was very common. But today you go to a village, nothing exists. So the question we are asking is if there are 640 districts in the country and each of them has a catalog of the kind of theater that used to exist and that (currently) exists, that itself is a phenomenal research. How much (of it) can be resurrected?
Sameera Iyengar: What is exciting about SMART is that you get people from (all over). This year (we had people from) Bareilly, Kanchipuram, Shillong, Baroda as well as the metros. We had Kattaikkuttu (practitioners), which is a form that is rooted (in Tamil Nadu); they have audiences of 5,000. Then you have a young experimental theater guy who has an audience of 30. So the learning aspect is huge. And you hear two different answers to a same question. It suddenly opens your sense of possibility, right?
What we find (through SMART) – this is what last year's SMART group told us and I have a feeling this year’s SMART group might agree – is that you take yourself more seriously.
S Ramadorai: Money is not the key. Money is not a goal. Money is an outcome. But being an artist, being recognised as an artist is what they are seeking.
Sameera Iyengar: We are also about dignity of labour, which is missing in our country.
Pronoti Datta: The thing the two of you have in common is that you went to MIT. It is not only a tech school but also has a strong arts component. How did the experience influence your lives?
S Ramadorai: The reading material they (MIT Sloan School of Management) would throw at you was from economics and other disciplines and the interconnections of these is what we would discuss in the case studies. The team was composed of not just us engineers but (people from) multiple disciplines. You take the discussion to a completely different level as the different aspects and connections between different disciplines (emerges). That’s what MIT taught us. We are so compartmentalised. But if we have to solve a complex problem, it is not one discipline (that we have to draw on). We need dialogue, experimentation.
Sameera Iyengar: What does it do to courage? What about the risk taking abilities? For me, MIT was the place I learnt to ask questions. The current President actually said, “You are the best of the world. It is your job to go find solutions for the planet. How are you going to apply what you have learnt at MIT to find solutions?” That is the MIT mandate. If you try seeing it that way, it manages to make you aware of your responsibility. And in some sense makes you see your bigger purpose.