Inside the whimsical travelling lives of performers

For Kutiyattam performer Kapila Venu, interacting with people from different cultures makes her more aware of her own creative processes, while comedian Sumukhi Suresh mines the touring life for deeply observed comedy—a lonely stay in Oslo in the dead of winter, for instance, became a fresh take on that old comedy trope of the fear of dying alone. Actor Yuki Ellias has learnt that no two days on tour are the same, and you have to learn how to bring a fresh energy to each day. There are surprises as well—sound engineer Anupam Roy, who travels the world with the bands he works with, dismantles the cliche about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

In the hit TV show Hacks, which just won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series, two comedy writing collaborators—one an ageing diva and the other an ingenue—hit the road to try out new material in small-town America. While none of the performers featured in our story have luxury tour buses, they all have stories that are just as compelling and insightful. 

Anupam Roy: Siestas and sound

If there’s one thing a life spent on the road has taught Anupam Roy, it’s the value of time. The 39-year-old live sound engineer has toured the world, working with artists such as Pritam, Shalmali Kholgade, A.R. Rahman, Amit Trivedi, Indian Ocean and Skyharbor. During the gig season—primarily September to February, though he says even off-season is pretty busy these days—he’s often travelling seven days a week, an endless cycle of hotel rooms, concert venues and red-eye flights. “You’re starting your day at 5am and, if you’re lucky, ending at 1am," he says. “You’re doing that on repeat. You have no time to invest in your fitness, your sleep schedule is out of whack. Everything becomes a function of how much time you can get to do a particular job."

As he rattles his way through his task list for an average day on tour, it’s hard not to feel a bit of second-hand anxiety at just how busy and tiring it is. Roy’s method for dealing with the madness is a carefully regimented routine.

There are no late night afterparties, no tales of rock ’n’ roll excess. Even the food he eats is carefully regulated, because eating too much hotel food can get pretty taxing on the body. And he needs his body to be in top form, especially when he has to spend hours every night standing behind the sound console, ensuring the artists he works with can deliver a world-class live experience. “With Pritam, our minimum playtime is two-and-a-half hours, and we’ve gone up to four-and-a-half," he says. “That can be really exhausting. And when you’re tired, you start to make mistakes and cut corners. That’s why I try to make my schedule revolve around an afternoon siesta."

Thankfully, modern technology—and the increasing professionalism of Indian concert promoters—has made that task easier. Back in the day, when everything was analogue, Roy would turn up at the venue in the morning and start from scratch every day. He would have to figure out the placement of the speakers, the acoustic properties of the room, and then set things up accordingly. Today, much of that preparation happens before he even gets to the airport. “The event agency will send a CAD drawing of the venue with all the dimensions; so you can plan ahead," he says. “Modern digital consoles allow you to prepare in great detail using their offline editors. You can take a multi-track recording of a show and run it through the console in a controlled environment."

This means that unlike live sound engineers of the past—who would lug around Pelican cases full of gear—Roy can tour the world with just a pen drive and a travel bag. “I’m like David Guetta," he jokes. There are still plenty of other challenges though, especially when touring internationally. The language barrier is often a hindrance, as is the work culture of sound techs and crew from other countries.

You’re still at the mercy of the sound vendor. Roy recalls one show on a US tour with Pritam, where entire racks of microphones and in-ear monitors failed. The doors had already opened, and Roy was still trying to figure out if the show could actually happen. “That’s the only time I had a panic attack at a show," he says. “It was the most jugaad I have done in any show ever in my life, more than any underground rock show in India."

For all the stress and exhaustion, the touring life does have its joys. Apart from the pride he obviously takes in his job—making sure fans have a great, consistent experience—there are little moments of serendipity and surprise that make it all worth it.

“The first time I went to Oslo for the Infernal Metal Festival with Skyharbor, it was Easter weekend," he says. “Many of the residents were out of town for the holiday, so the only people you could see were black metal fans, decked in corpse paint, leather and corsets. It was like a fancy-dress party for metalheads. It was an absolutely amazing experience."

(Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.)

Sumukhi Suresh: Woman on the go

Sumukhi Suresh has had a super-busy year. The Mumbai-based actor-comedian’s solo stand-up show, Hoemonal, has been the toast of comedy circles, and she began 2024 by taking it to several European cities. In August, she performed at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and is currently taking it across India.

Hoemonal is a show centred around the experience of being a single woman in her 30s who, after being told to stay away from boys all her life, is suddenly asked if she is “meeting people". It is also about body image issues, something Sumukhi has always dealt with frankly in her work, tackling subjects like polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)—not quite the stuff of regular comedy. “So that’s what Hoemonal is all about— being hormonal and being asked to be a hoe and not knowing how to go about it," laughs Sumukhi.

Travel is a killer when it comes to managing the condition effectively. “Stress and lack of sleep are major contributors of PCOS, and I’m a classic case," she says, adding that she is thinking of launching a campaign to rename PCOS as “PolyStresstic Ovary Syndrome". “Travelling is great—it makes me happy that I am able to take my work to different audiences, to different cities, but yeah, I’ve had to learn to take care of my body. It’s something I started only in the last couple of years," she says.

While there is stress and sleep deprivation on tour, being regular with workouts has helped. “I’ve made friends with my body, which I was dismissive of my whole life." Her Europe tour in January and February, when she travelled solo to Dublin, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Munich, Amsterdam and Zurich within a couple of weeks, was a challenge. “Europe in winter goes into hibernation mode," she says. “I travelled in the harshest possible climate—that kind of cold, which pushes people to stay indoors, is not great for an extrovert like me. I thrive on social interactions, I thrive with people, I become better with that," she says.

She revived when she had to be on stage— “that was the rush I was craving"—but outside, it was tough. The days blurred into one another as she lugged two suitcases around the continent, from one flight to another or from one train to another, “sitting for two hours, thinking that you’re gonna get work done, but you can’t because you’re just drained".

The Oslo leg of her tour was particularly brutal. She was in the outskirts of the city for four-five days in an Airbnb, feeling cold and lonely. She remembers calling a friend crying, saying she was sad and didn’t know why. “But then I got up and cooked a meal and ate it, and felt better and all grown up," she recalls.

As with all good comics, it became material. “That Oslo trip added a lot of things to my show, because the overall umbrella of my show is that I’m at that age where everyone has started telling me that you’re going to die alone, so get ready. So what I’m doing is, I want to make dying alone cool—my entire show is an appeal to the public saying ‘can we please make dying alone cool, so that I’m really looking forward to it’?" Oslo gave her a taste of that, and now she is really committed to the cause.

Going out for a drink and a meal after a performance is a major stress-buster for Sumukhi, and she is looking forward to checking out Bengaluru’s bars when she is in the city for her show in November. “The day of the performance, I work out, I write for a bit, make sure I don’t nap —naps make me really uncomfortable—and afterwards my team and I go and eat some kickass local food," she says.

Some performers like to recharge their batteries in between shows, but Sumukhi likes them back to back. “It’s better to be in that zone and do the shows one after another rather than taking a long break because then your body just calms down. When I’m in that rush, the adrenaline is high—finish the show, then crash. That’s better."

(by Shrabonti Bagchi)

Also read: How 2024 became the year of re-released films 

Yuki Ellias: Movement becomes art

Postman Aunty is a sincere worker. She lives on a war-torn mountain with a pet goldfish, and delivers letters from the living world to the after-life, sending out the message that connection trumps conflict. This heartwarming play was performed most recently by actor Yuki Ellias, who also conceptualised, wrote and directed it, in Bengaluru. Ellias, 44, who lives in Mumbai, and runs the theatre company Dur Se Brothers, frequently finds herself on the road.

In her two decades as a performer, she has travelled around the world, largely with her play Elephant In The Room (2016). The one-actor play, which explores the idea of identity, has Ellias playing eight different characters and carrying around the main prop, which is a cloth that’s close to 50 metres long and is used to create different sets. “Theatre organises abroad are sticklers for safety rules. We had a lot of materials that needed to be fire-proofed. You can imagine the number of cans of fireproofing we needed, and it took us several hours to get through that," she says.

While safety and props are one aspect of touring, another challenge is keeping up one’s energy levels. Ellias performed Elephant every day for 23 days at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She explains that Day One energy is different from Day Two and so on: “The first day rides high on adrenaline. We set the stage, check sound and rush to perform. The second day is a little relaxed. We are rested, and there’s relatively more control over everything. It’s a good combination of rest and excitement. But, when there are 23 days, we need to make the show interesting for ourselves, to keep things fresh and to be true to the art of live performance. It helps artists like us understand our craft. When there were days of no motivation, we had to figure out how to use our craft to be the best. It’s like a study or riyaaz. When we’re entering a performance each time, we tell ourselves what we want to explore that day, and we give ourselves very specific instructions towards that direction. It drives us to find that magic, show after show."

Ellias tours once in 2-3 months, and wishes it was more frequent. Movement is central to her artistic process, she says. The best ideas come to her in “a stream of consciousness manner on bikes, riding as a pillion and drawing inspiration" from things she observes. After the Edinburgh festival, she went on a bike tour around Scotland. Driving through “surreal" landscapes, wearing a helmet, jacket and boots, she imagined it akin to travelling in space. Immediately an idea struck her—what if she did a play on women who dream of space travel. It led her to write and direct Hello Farmaish (2018), about underprivileged women in Haryana with ambitions of being astronauts.

The idea for The Far Post came to her on a bike ride as well. “We rode for a couple of hours in Pune, and I noticed a clothesline blowing in the wind. I don’t know how, but it just struck me that the clothesline could be on a border. The Postman Aunty drying her clothes on a clothesline is the opening scene of the show."

Ellias has a penchant for keeping her plays compact, with a few actors. The Far Post, for example, has only two actors essaying different roles by wearing different masks. It’s a bilingual play, performed in English and Lepcha, a language spoken in Sikkim. Sofiyum, a band from Sikkim, plays live as the play unfolds. They didn’t have the travel budget for the band to fly to Bengaluru, so they made do with recorded music. Nevertheless, the play captivated the audience with its richness of language, lyrical music and a story painted with strokes of magic realism. Next, Ellias wants to take the play to Gangtok.

(by Jahnabee Borah) 

Kapila Venu: Living performance

“I feel the most empowered when I am on stage." It’s the magnetic pull of performing for a live audience that has Kutiyattam performer Kapila Venu, 42, embracing an itinerant life. It’s a life filled with travel to all the corners of the world—she was recently in Taiwan performing at the Asia Pacific Performing Arts Festival 2024—meeting new people and exploring new cultures. “I tend to travel with my ensemble of musicians, and since we’ve been on the move for close to two decades now, we’ve learnt to enjoy it," says Venu, over the phone from Irinjalakuda, Kerala.

Venu is one of the foremost practitioners of Kutiyattam (or Koodiyattam), a Sanskrit theatre form that is more than 2,000 years old. It is steeped in strictures and tradition, but Venu, through her experimental projects and collaborations, has broken new ground. And so, from Taiwan to Japan, Britain to the US, she’s introduced the expressive dance-theatre form to new audiences.

For Venu, the thrill of a live performance lies in finding the best audiences “unexpectedly". “Japan is my favourite place to perform," says Venu. As a country with classical theatre practices like Kabuki and Noh, which are similar to Kutiyattam in their sensibilities, the theatre-going audiences are knowledgeable, she says. “People there are used to sitting for long hours or for all-night performances."

It was in Japan that a chance encounter with dancer, choreographer and actor Min Tanaka during a tour in her early 20s proved to be transformative. “(Min) is a practitioner of Butoh, a theatrical art form that started after World War II. His philosophy prescribes living close to nature." From 2005 to 2010, Venu lived with Tanaka and his community in Hakushu village near Tokyo. Life at the Body Weather Farm, as the commune was called, was all about “farming, cooking and dancing together". Years have passed but Venu remembers the time vividly: “All my work, including my traditional performance, has been deeply impacted by my learnings there."

There are more prosaic memories of baggage arriving late, getting lost in a new place and missing flights. But the fact that she shrugs off a question about jet lag with a laugh proves she’s got her travel routine down pat. “As soon as I reach a place, I catch up on as much sleep as I can and drink a lot of water. I exercise and meditate to ensure my body and mind are centred before the performance," says Venu.

With her tours lasting weeks, she has to adjust to living away from family for long periods of time. As mother to a nine-year-old son, Venu admits that there are days when it’s not easy to leave home. “When I am travelling, I make sure to call my son everyday."

(by Mahalakshmi Prabhakaran)

Also read: ‘Talki via Bengaluru’: Six transwomen question notions of beauty in this play