‘My textbook has been theatre,’ says Vinay Kumar of Adishakti Theatre

Vinay Kumar, Artistic Director of @adishaktitheatre, @auroville_pondicherry , joined a Communist Party theatre repertory in Kerala at the age of seven. By eleven, he says, theatre had become his textbook. It still is.
Charumathi Supraja spoke to him about how it all began. His mother, the Malayalam writer Sarah Joseph, felt he should study theatre seriously and sent him to the School of Drama and Fine Arts ,Thrissur.
Then he met Veenapani Chawla, and ignored her for three months. That changed when she asked him to fetch something from her room and he opened a cupboard stacked with western classical music. They talked for three hours that day, with very little common language between them. Together they went on to build Adishakti.
He also told Charumathi why every actor should look after plants, why sweeping and watering the land gives him more peace than hours of meditation, and why visitors backstage are surprised to find he is not as tall as he looks on stage.
Read the full interview: https://thefourthplate.com/…/my-textbook-has-been…/