STATE TIMES NEWS
JAMMU: Sangeet Natak Akademi’s Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Awardee, theatre actor/director Chakresh Kumar illuminated ‘Young Voices of Theatre’, a unique National Theatre Talk Show by Natrang with his brilliant thoughts today.
Chakresh Kumar is a theatre actor, director born in Etawah, UP but travelled to many cities of the country in connection with the postings of his father who was in the Army. After completing his graduation from Punjab University, Chandigarh, he established a theatre group ‘Alankar’ to serve and aware the society.
In an engaging conversation with Sangeet Natak Akademi Awardee Actor and Nartang’s senior artist Anil Tickoo, Chakresh narrated his momentous journey of theatre which started from his childhood and never stopped. A theatre practitioner, Chakresh has always endeavoured to learn and explore. With the support of many like-minded people he started the group Alankar out of passion of exploring the immense possibilities of theatre and later enriched it into a professional set up which is doing multi genre futuristic activities for its economic sustenance. Speaking about awards and recognitions, he asserted that it definitely gives a push to your motivation but the seed of that motivation has to be nurtured by your own-self long before you get awards. Speaking about his process of mounting a production, he explained that he does a lot of research, study and consultation about the basic idea of the script which helps him in creating effective theatre productions. He also tries to relate/contemporize the text so that people could relate to it. As an experiment, he takes his actors to a different space (far from their comfort zone) and explores new things. He believes in offering something new to his audience, even if he gets the same audience every time. Empathetically speaking about the present time of the Corona crisis, he invoked artist fraternity to speak to each other at this time of dismay and try to help those who are in need as unfortunately there is no substantial support from the system for the artists who are worst hit.