Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475- 1564) is universally celebrated as one of the greatest artist of all time. He is very well known as an architect, sculptor and a painter, but very few know him as a poet. Michelangelo’s love for poetry has gone through an obscured historical journey. It was half a century after Michelangelo’s death that a selection of his poems were finally published by his grand nephew Bounarroti. While he made an attempt to remind the world of the prosperity and grandeur about Michelangelo as the poet, he also went a long way towards obscuring the quality of Michelangelo’s poetry. He did not publish more than half of Michelangelo’s poems. The jagged fragments were blithely and tactily completed, the colloquialisms of Michelangelo’s poems were banished, metrical irregularities ironed out and tortuous syntax rendered straight forward. Further, even the pronouns in the poems were changed so that to avoid any suspicion of homoeroticism.

It was in this blandified and bowdlerized versions that the story of Michelangelo’s life and his poems survived for next two hundred years. Aesthetics of the Unfinished is a devised performance of Michelangelo’s life using his poetry in its original sense.

Aesthetics of the Unfinished as a theatrical project is an amalgamation of Art, Poetry, Physical theatre and Music.

With Poems by Sanket Angane, Aparna Angane, Pratibha Joshi, Jason Fernandes and Omkar Bhatkar

Arcadia…the promised land is a poetic piece, covering poetries on various aspects of ageing. The piece is an amalgamation of different kinds of poetries associated with gerontology and death, organically created by a team of six artists, who have been able to translate their lived experiences into a poetic form. The poems cover multiple perspectives of all those associated with ageing and death, ranging from the individual, to the family, relatives, neighbors, doctors, surgeons, and the society at large.

Arcadia is a collection of about fifteen poems in multilingual form, with English being the primary thread.

The piece is presented by a team of eight performing artists, and handful of the poems are performed by the poet themselves. Arcadia is a literary theatre piece, that’s neither absolutely theatre nor literature but in a hybrid space between the both. The piece is accompanied by an unplugged guitarist. Post this literary performance, the artists/ poets engage in discussion, interpretation, and analytical dialogue with the audience.

The Salon takes you into the magical world of a hair designer-IGNATIUS; who with his snips, strokes and scissors creates magic of thoughts at his Salon. In this Salon the customers are forced to look at their reflection in the mirror and confront about their adulterous affairs……

What happens when someone could read your mind and know your bedroom secrets? What will happen if someone decides to intervene in your sexual desires?
What will happen when love and lust will intermingle?

Witness the Confessions of Infidelity and the plight of many modern relationships from behind the closed doors of the SALON.

Inspired by works of the Indo Anglian Poetess Kamala Das and French writer Milan Kundera, Bereavement is a socio-literary play dealing with the philosophical notions of life and death.

The protagonist; a nameless old man, who is abandoned by his family is left desolated into an old age home to die. There he dreams of death one night and what follows is a philosophical query into understanding the notion of ‘Death’. Does he understand death?

Followed by that is the dilemma of another protagonist, a nameless woman who desires and longs for love. The love which she couldn’t find in her husband drives her crazy on the streets to find love in atleast one possible man. Does she find love, for which she is ready to give anything in exchange? Where will her search end?

Through these two characters Bereavement tries to shed light on the dark side of life, ‘the lonely self’.

Inspired from Chandrabati’s ‘ Ramayana’ & Kane’s ‘Karna’s wife’

Sita, an embodiment of Indian womanhood, is considered a devoted wife and an ideal mother. Her power of silent suffering with dignity and without asking for any favors is an unsung saga of a divine woman which goes down in the annals of Hindu scriptures.

Sita’s sacrifice is glorified that has come to serve the model of an ideal woman…..what if Sita decides to retell her story!

Draupadi is considered to be the root cause of the magnum opus Mahabharatha. She is stereotyped as “the other woman”. Was she rightful in exacting vindication for the disrobing? Was the disrobing itself so malicious that it lead to a diabolical war between the brothers? These are all perplexing questions whose answers cannot be easily discovered from multiple interptretations that are floating in the socio-cultural fabric. However, there are few aberrational courageous ones who took the plunge and resurrected Draupadi and Sita from the deepest and the darkest corridors of history and presented the unheard yearnings of these two brave souls.

What if Draupadi and Sita is resurrected in postmodern world, where time has changed but women suppression and silencing their voice, continues to exist. What if Draupadi and Sita decide to retell their stories………

‘Resurrecting Draupadi and Sita ‘ is an attempt to view this world as her-story rather than only his-story.