Collaborative Urge and how to live with one another

I am a researcher, a poet, a fiction writer, a playwright. I can write alone, research on my own, the way a painter or a novelist does.

But my playwriting doesn't work that way. I write a play alone. At times, I research for my writing. But the part that remains, the staging of it, is a whole different process. I am not a director or a performer, but I do end up wearing their shoes for a while. And that's where people other than me, more than me, get involved in making a play.

Even writing a solo performance is never truly solo for me. My writing prompts a director, a lighting designer, a musician, and an audience to think, and to respond. I've come to see theatre as many people shaping one living thing together out of their different thoughts and feelings. That coming together is the very heart of it, for me.

This isn't new. Long before written language, gesture was how we reached each other. Gesture found rhythm and became dance. Dance, in turn, gave birth to drama. Folk forms like Tamasha, Yakshagana, and Kathakali have always been collective by nature. In medieval Italy, Commedia dell'arte performers came together without a script and built a play on the spot, through improvisation alone. Words, gaze, gesture, space, voice, movement, and the audience's presence all come together, and from this, something is born that belongs to no single person.

I've seen this spirit alive in the theatre of Ariane Mnouchkine and her company, Théâtre du Soleil, founded in 1964 and run on cooperative principles. Every member is paid the same, and every play is shaped over months of shared discussion and rehearsal. Her Shakespeare cycle famously drew from India's Kathakali and Japan's Noh and Kabuki. Peter Brook's nine-hour production of the 'Mahabharata' carried the same spirit, bringing together artists from different languages, cultures, and theatrical traditions, with Mallika Sarabhai playing Draupadi, after Brook spent time visiting theatre companies across India to understand their traditions firsthand. For these artists, collaboration wasn't just a method. It was a way of life, a way of growing by learning from one another.

I've experienced this kind of collaboration crossing borders myself. I co-wrote a play, 'I Promise the Bearer', with Bengaluru-based theatre-maker Anuja Ghosalkar, as part of 'White Money', an international project bringing together six theatre groups from around the world to examine the politics behind European arts funding: what temptations come attached to that money, and what pressures shape how complex cultures get simplified for a white audience. The play, built through conversations with designers and scholars of economics and society, premiered at Sophiensaele in Berlin before touring in India.

Anuja Ghosalkar performing 'I Promise the Bearer'

There's another kind of collaboration theatre rarely talks about, the one between playwright and director. Usually, the writer finishes the play at home before the director stages it. But when both begin shaping the work at the same time, the whole process changes. My play 'Sadasarvada Purvapar' grew out of exactly this kind of process with director Sharmistha Saha, telling the story of a search for a lost play rooted in the Mahabharata's Karna and Draupadi. While writing it, I went digging into nineteenth-century theatre history, Vishnudas Bhave's biography, his contracts with actors, and the Satyashodhak Jalsa tradition. We ran workshops with performers, researchers, and students along the way. Old documents came alive through rehearsal. As the writer, I stayed inside the research process itself, responding to the images, movements, and sounds coming up in rehearsals as I wrote. Collaboration here wasn't only among the living. It was between the past and the present.

'Sadasarvada Purvapar' (Playwright: Ashutosh Potdar / Director: Sharmistha Saha)

Sometimes the collaboration happens live, in the very moment of performance. Every Brilliant Thing, staged by Mumbai's QTP and performed by Vivek Madan, is a striking example: a solo show told through the eyes of a seven-year-old whose mother is unwell, where the audience sitting around the performer becomes part of carrying the story forward. Through that active participation, Madan gently opens up a conversation about mental health.

None of this is easy, of course. When people with different ways of thinking, different egos, and different visions come together, disagreement is inevitable. Collaboration, then, isn't just about making something together. It's about the thinking behind it, and staying aware of who we're making it for. And it asks something of us personally too, setting aside our own ego enough to actually listen.

In the end, theatre is fundamentally the art of coming together, and there are many ways to do that. A meeting of collaborators, an exchange between cultures, a dialogue between writer and director, a conversation with history, or the audience stepping directly in: each of these fills the space of the stage with life. In a world that feels increasingly scattered and fractured, theatre keeps teaching us something valuable, that something living and meaningful happens when people come together. That's why theatre isn't just an art form. It's a meaningful rehearsal for how we, as human beings, learn to understand and live alongside one another. #Theatre #Collaboration #PerformingArts #TheatreMaking #Playwriting