A teacher with a difference
Devendranath Sankaranarayanan teaches the multiple aspects of being a human through his theatre workshops
I help people improve their performances in real life DEVENDRANATH SANKARANARAYANAN
Devendranath Sankaranarayanan’s CV describes him as a performance researcher first, an acting coach later. And, he is particular about his profession. That’s because he hasn’t just trained Hyderabadis to become good theatre actors (today, you can find at least one of his students in every play being staged in the city), but has also made better employees and individuals out of bus drivers, sweepers, working professionals, kids and now, senior citizens. At his workshop, Inside Outside, at Our Sacred Space, the ‘ tutor’ is currently helping nearly a dozen pensioners to “tap into inner creativity”.
“As a teacher in the theatre department of Delhi Public School, I had to help school bus drivers develop a healthy relation with the students. So, I started role-play workshops. Drivers had to present their working conditions and had to enact the characters around them in that work space/place. It made them realise their duties better.”
“Drivers think their jobs are menial. But it is a job after all. Then why not perform it to the best of one’s capabilities? This is something I do for nonactors. Improving their performances in real life,” adds Devendranath, who specialises in education methodologies and psycho-physical training.
He got drawn into the world of performance when he won the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship of the European Union in 2008 and studied in the universities of Warwick, Amsterdam, Helsinki and Tampere and later worked at International Choreographic Art Center-ICK Amsterdam.
Devendranath admits that the teacher in him took over the actor he wanted to be when he joined University of Hyderabad in 2001. It was only in the last two years that he joined TV and films in his native state, Kerala, and even won the best actor in a negative role in the Malayalam serial Kumkumapoovu.
On initiating a workshop for senior citizens, he says, “My father is a farmer, so we were surprised when we found a 20page story under his bed. Till then nobody had realised that he had a creative side.”
At the end of each class, he lets the elderly stage a performance. “Inside Outside is not an acting workshop, but a way to explore the multiple possibilities of flexibilities of a human being. That’s what the poster also says,” he says.