Backstage, outdoors and center stage at the Shaw Festival with Artist Gabriella Sundar Singh

Multidisciplinary artist Gabriella Sundar Singh recently made a welcome return to the Shaw Festival. She began the season by inhabiting Chitra, a formidable epic warrior princess, at the Outdoors @ The Shaw production of Chitra, a one-act play written in English by Indian Nobel Prize Laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1913 and directed by Associate Artistic Director Kimberley Rampersad. Starting in August, she will play Ela Delahay in the farce Charley’s Aunt by Brandon Thomas and directed by Artistic Director Tim Carroll. Fans of CBC’s Kim’s Convenience who know her as the irrepressible and overly confident Chelsea Chettiar can see Sundar Singh in two roles that are marked departures from Chelsea, and which showcase her performative range. 

For Chitra, Sundar Singh combined her training at the prestigious National Theatre School with decades of training in the Indian classical dance form of bharatanatyam to create a nuanced portrayal of the legendary title character. An adaptation of the story from the Hindu epic Mahabharata, Chitra focuses on an episode from Arjuna’s life during his vanvaas, which is a spiritual exile in the forest. The plot centres on Chitrangada (Chitra), a warrior princess who tries to win Arjuna’s affections. “When I start working on a piece, I’ve got to find the physicality,” Sundar Singh explains of her process of creating this character. “It’s got to get in my body. When I think about a formidable woman, someone who has strength of body but also strength of mind and strength of heart, I can route that exactly inside my body. I act as a dancer. I can be strong. I can be fierce. I can be formidable. I can be graceful and soft and subtle, because that’s what we do.” She smiles: “We have this huge range.”

Sundar Singh is gracious, warm and candid as we chat over Zoom on a late afternoon. Her thoughtful explanations give way to demonstrations of corresponding dance poses, which correlate with changing expressions in her arrestingly eloquent eyes. She explains that the recent reopening of live performances has prompted performers to adapt how they prepare and rehearse. Certain shows began rehearsals over Zoom, but director Rampersad preferred in-person rehearsals for Chitra. The actors were masked during these rehearsals, but their physical proximity was crucial to the process. “You need the personal connection for this piece because it’s epic language. It’s epic imagery,” observes Sundar Singh. “To be there with each other speaking the words in person, to be able to tackle it together was of the utmost importance.” 

Waiting until in-person rehearsals were permitted meant that they had less than a dozen rehearsals to put the show together. “Our whole season, our whole process is truncated. We’re working with schedules that we are not used to here at the Shaw, but everyone has risen to the occasion!” And for Sundar Singh, this meant tapping into certainties and confidence born from her extensive dance training: “Given the time and adapting to the outdoors, instead of getting panicked, I thought, ‘what can I rely on?’ I can rely on this body. I can rely on the way that I know how to stand to look like a warrior. And I also know if I want to play a more demure maiden, I know what those eyes are. I know how to move’. I know that I may not be able to control the rain. I may not be able to control the motorcycles passing by, which often happens, but I can control that I can rely on this body that knows how to move and knows how to deliver texts. So that’s been my approach to the piece so far.” 

Chitra marks the second time that Sundar Singh has worked under Rampersad’s direction. In her first season at the Shaw Festival, they worked together on O’Flaherty V.C. Sundar Singh’s eyes flash as she recalls how Rampersad gave her “one of the best notes I’ve ever gotten from a director: the thing that was the most helpful and really uplifted me”. The note? When they were working on the character of Teresa, Rampersad told her to use her “dancer eyes”. Sundar Singh had been in television and other theatre rooms where what she brings from bharatanatyam and other classical styles are deemed “over-the-top expressions”. She had often had to “dampen that, temper it down, because it doesn’t suit that particular style.”  Yet “here was a director saying, ‘use your eyes, I know you’re a dancer’.” The amazing thing? “She’d never seen me dance. She was trusting that I had the training, and that I could bring it out. She said, ‘go out there and for this character, use your dancer eyes’.” The moment was profound for Sundar Singh because “That’s so me! And because we have that relationship, we brought that into Chitra as well. If I want to use those expressive eyes, she encourages me to use the expressive eyes.”  All in all, powered by this familiarity with one another, it was “a really fast, quick process – but so incredibly rewarding.”

As part of the Outdoors @ the Shaw series, Chitra unfolds on the Shaw’s grounds in the garden behind the Royal George Theatre. The site is uniquely conducive to this story about a princess who is a skilled hunter. Chitrangada (Chitra) is the daughter of the King of Manipur. As his only heir, she is brought up not as a princess, but as a soldier whose “hands are strong to bend the bow”. One day while hunting in the forest, she meets Arjuna (Andrew Lawrie) and falls in love with him. She appeals to  Madana (Sanjay Talwar) the lord of Love, and Vasantha (Marie Mahabal) the Lord of Spring and Beauty, to make her beautiful for one year to woo Arjuna – a wish she is granted. 

“There’s something incredible that really clicked about doing this piece in the outdoors,” Sundar Singh observes. “We are working with the elements.” So much of the imagery in the piece, “about love, being like the blooming of a flower or that of the decaying of the leaves and like the seasons of love….It’s there in front of you! You don’t have to imagine it.” This is Sundar Singh’s first foray into performing outdoor theatre, and having the “imagery and the backdrop of nature right there has been so incredibly helpful”: “When we talk about the southern breeze blowing past and putting me to sleep, when we performed it at the opening, at that exact moment, this breeze blew past, blew this lovely kind of weeping tree in front of us, and I just stood there for a second and took it in.” 

And this was not a one-off: “There have been a lot of moments like that in the process where things just line up, whether it’s the breeze or the trilling of a bird. We go, oh, well, this is all connected. We’re working with the elements and they’re providing the perfect soundscape, the perfect lighting, the perfect backdrop for us. That’s what’s unique about our adaptation, and we’re excited to share it because I don’t know if our audiences have seen something like this before here.” 

In addition to Chitra and Charley’s Aunt, Sundar Singh will also perform in Shawground and Fairground, which are hour-long, small-group guided live performances of music, poetry, and  dance that take place throughout the fairground and are curated by ensemble member Sanjay Talwar. “I am truly, truly excited about Shawground and Fairground,” Sundar Singh enthuses. “Sanjay Talwar, who’s also performing as Madana in Chitra, has designed this in a way that if you have a passion project, if there was something as an ensemble member that you always wanted to do here at the Shaw, here’s your chance to do it.” While she is careful not to divulge too many details, her enthusiasm is palpable. She and seven other ensemble members have taken a Shavian text and interpreted it through bharatanatyam as an exploration of these two worlds meeting. Some of the cast are dancers and movers, though none other from her has a training in bharatanatyam. Nonetheless, the way they have embraced the style and are striving for “the utmost perfection” in performing the steps and mudras has impressed and moved Sundar Singh: “They’re just going with it. It’s so sweet. They want all the corrections. They’ll ask me for the correct pronunciation. There’s so much generosity and so much love here. I’m truly overwhelmed.” 

She goes on to describe the first choreographic work which she presented in her first season as part of the Shaw’s Secret Theatre. For her, this was a notable “creative first”. “Our artistic director Tim Carroll is really fascinated with this idea of secret theatre, a series of 13 small theatre pieces we were producing throughout the year. We’d tell the audience where to show up and when, but they would never know what was happening.” The ensemble was in charge of curating, directing themselves, and even pulling other actors from the company when needed. “It was so exciting, and not at all what I was ready for in my first season!” she admits. “On my contract was written ‘secret theatre’, and part of the deal was that of the thirteen works, I had to direct one. I had no description, so I was really thrown into it in my first season.” 

Never having directed before – and given a performance date and the freedom to make the piece what she wanted – Sundar Singh recognized both the challenge and the opportunity. Knowing “the sky’s the limit” “terrified” her for a good part of the year leading up to it, because “I hold myself to a very high standard. I didn’t want to let myself down. And I didn’t want to let my fellow company members down.” She need not have worried. In the end, her contribution was an affecting piece called Sisterhood that she choreographed and performed with fellow ensemble member, Krystal Kiran, who is trained in Kathak dance: “It was incredible! We took our styles of dance, we used Rupi Kaur’s poetry, and some traditional Carnatic music that was played by Patrick Bowman and Evelyn Lukasik. With the time that we had, we were able to create and tell a story about sisterhood to music, poetry, and dance. That was my directorial debut, and I got to do it here!” 

At the time of our interview, Ontario is in the third stage of reopening, which includes the long-awaited return of live arts. Although Sundar Singh has been working steadily in television and digital theatre during the pandemic, seeing her peers once again “do their thing” live moved her profoundly: “I do have to mention this. I just came from watching the dress rehearsal for Assassins. I had to touch up my makeup because I came home weeping from watching my colleagues perform.” 

As we emerge from our isolation, Sundar Singh is energized, but also reflective. Far from emerging from lockdown with bitterness or regret, she refers to it as a time of “beautiful reflection” that artists should not forget. Instead, they should “put it into the art now, in terms of holding everybody accountable for the type of work that we do and who is represented on those stages and the things that we say. We’ve been given the time, so let’s not let it not be for nothing.”

Moreover, she herself will never again take for granted “the spaces that are given to us to create and be vulnerable and be messy. The space is really sacred, and being forced into that space of reflection, I can feel the weight of it. I think our audiences can, too. I want any lover of the arts – or someone who appreciates the arts – to remember and understand and really honour what art does for us. Yes, it is a mirror that we hold up to society: it’s a reflection of ourselves. It’s also the place we go to be entertained: a place where sometimes we go to sit, so we can cry and feel vulnerable and express ourselves in the sacred space of that velvet chair.” 

In the end, the lockdown itself proved the same thing: that this place where we sometimes sit is profoundly necessary: “What did we do to keep ourselves entertained when we were locked in our houses and unable to go see friends and go outside for so many days, weeks, months? We listened to music. We read good literature. We watched movies. We streamed things. That is all art!”  Among that streamed art, of course, was Kim’s Convenience, whose impact on her career and whose resonance with international audiences she is deeply grateful for: “We are all connected by this story of family, and I find it’s so brilliant. This is a testament to the writing, that anybody can watch the show and see themselves in it. That’s great art.”

“Art is there to help us to get through the difficult times,” and as we emerge from this long night,   “let us not forget how important art is, and continue to support groups of artists, and places like the Shaw.” For this is what she most looks forward to: “sharing spaces again, just being in a crowded space with people consuming art, commenting on art, making art, being changed by art.” 

“I hope when that day comes that we’re able to embrace each other again.”

Book tickets for Charley’s Aunt here. Explore all of this season’s offerings at the Shaw Festival here.

© Arpita Ghosal, SesayArts Magazine, 2021