Our History
The Drama School has been an idea 5 years in the making. Understand more about the organisation behind it, and what people have had to say about our teaching history, with the Advanced Workshop Program and the Intensive Drama Program and how they allowed us to create the Drama School, Mumbai.
Theatre Professionals, founded by Jehan Manekshaw and Tasneem Fatehi, is a five-year-old company. We started in 2008, with a six-day acting workshop aimed at performing arts practitioners in Mumbai, taught by two recent graduates from École Philippe Gaulier.
It was our first attempt to bring best practices from theatre into a workshop environment where rigour, discipline and professionalism were sacrosanct. The idea: to create a breed of future theatremakers who see theatre as a whole, who are focussed and regularly create their own works, and who, Eklavya-like, believe in self learning and see learning as a lifelong process.
We have since then conducted more than 50 workshops by some of the foremost theatre trainers from India and abroad. They are all dedicated practitioners who share a pluralistic view of theatre, and who are committed to the same standards of rigour and dedication that we expect from our participants. Anamika Haksar, Naushad M., H. Tomba, S. Raghunandana, Daniel Goldman, Ravi Verma, Aniruddha Khutwad, Geetanjali Kulkarni, Prabhat Bhaskaran, Martin Chalissery and Jairo Vergara are just a few who have worked with us over the past years.
We also streamline our Advanced Workshop Program, organising seasons of workshops at the advanced level. We recently concluded two Season of workshops. The Physical Theatre Season, comprising European physical theatre traditions such as Clown (with Claudio Clavija of Chile), Commedia dell’arte (with Deepal Doshi who trained in the form in USA) and Chorus (with Yuki Ellias who trained at Lecoq and LISPA, London), and the the Season of Voice Workshops for the Performer, starting with the vocal system with voice doctor Dr Sadhana Nayak, scene study with eminent theatre director Sunil Shanbag and Shakespeare with Deshik Vansadia of Shakespeare & Co, USA.
Alongside, we have evolved our flagship programme: the annual three-week long Intensive Drama Program, where multiple trainers work on a collaborative pedagogical approach to train experienced actors. The IDP started in 2009, with 6 instructors teaching 48 students back to back, the programme evolved deeply over the next three years, adding a performance outcome, providing longer engagements with the instructor, building collaborative teaching methods between instructors for a deeper enrichment of the student.
Our last IDP was the strongest our methodology has ever been. We had H. Tomba from Manipur teaching voice, Preethi Athreya from Chennai working on body, and Sankar Venkateshwaran from Kerala and Ben Samuels from the UK bringing these two aspects together using Natyashastra and Lecoq, respectively. The IDP 2012 was a much more refined process divided into three stages: Conditioning and Fundamentals, Ways of Creation, and then Devising. The devising component of the project resulted in a strong assimilation of the learning provided in the first two weeks. In addition, the faculty in their feedback, had opportunity to speak as one voice to the students about the performance lab, giving us complete confidence and sense of strong pedagogical unity, that we had been striving for in the last four years. This is what we bring to the Drama School Mumbai.
