An all-women cast and crew take the stage for Shensemble in Chennai

Celebrate women in theatre with Shensemble, an anthology of six plays written & directed by six women. 12 actors, puppetry & live music!

The first poster for the upcoming all-women anthology Shensemble looks like a magazine cover. Seven women, all draped in different brightly-coloured saris smile into the camera. In another poster, there is an even bigger group of women — the cast and crew.

“Women I’m working with on this told me they haven’t experienced this kind of hype for being part of a project,” says Dakshana Rajaram, curator. Shensemble aims to be just that — a platform for women, and more importantly,a celebration.

Shensemble brings together six women writers and directors from the city with six plays, for a duration of 12 minutes each. Staged by Poochu’s Productions in collaboration with Chennai Art Theatre, Dakshana says the idea for this anthology was born out of wanting to experiment.

“I decided to reach out to six women who I knew would write scripts. I was certain that I wanted all six writers on board to be women, and we then expanded on this idea,” she says. Vinithra Menon, Shalini Vijayakumar, Bhavya Balantrapu, Meera Sitaraman, Sukanya Umesh, and Namritha Kalai Kovan have written, as well as directed the plays.“We realised that on the technical side of things, not many women are involved despite being interested. In every department, fromlighting and sound design to the large crew working backstage on sets and props for Shensemble, women have taken charge,” Dakshana says.

When they were working on their scripts, the directors were given some interesting riders. Each play could have not more than two actors, and the same actor could not feature in more than one play. As a result, Shensemble has 12 different performers across six plays, and Dakshana says that this gave many young actors the opportunity to work with women writers in theatre they look up to.

While one play will dabble in puppetry, another will have a musician on stage with live music. The themes in the anthology are as varied as they come. Bhavya who is directing Puppet Mistress says the play is an ode to one of her favourite sequences from Chicago, the musical — ‘We both reached for the gun’.

“I found two dancers who are perfect for the murder-comedy short,” she says. While Bhavya is excited for the directors, including herself, to finally see each others’ plays, she also emphasises on how supportive and encouraging the experience of working on the anthology has been.