Unsent letters find life again at this immersive experience in Hyderabad
Have you ever come across excerpts of letters about love, sorrow or the benign experiences with the universe? The sheer humanity of these texts resonate with us in ways that we hardly experience anymore. Unshared Childhoods, presented by Jaan Theatre, an immersive theatre experience, explores how this vulnerability ties us all together. We talk to Tanvi Shah, the brains behind the project to understand more about it.
Immersive performance blends movement, music, and heartfelt letters to unite strangers
How did the idea for Unshared Childhoods come about?
As dramatic experiment in empathy, I built the show when I was studying in Scotland. I felt like people were talking within their own silos, their own echo chambers and if they were faced with people with conflicting opinions, they were talking at each other, not with each other. I wanted to build a show where we were back in conversation with people about different things and the medium for this was by inviting real unsent letters from around the world. We all lead inherently dramatic lives but we don’t often have the ways in which to express ourselves but when we do, we often do it in the most intimate ways with letters.
We invited people who are not writers to offer these extremely dramatic letters. People sent in beautiful strong pieces of writing and in inhabiting these stories, the show is an immersive interactive experience where the audience becomes the letter writer and the intended letter recipient who never received the letter. In doing so, we would find that more unites us than divides us.
How did the curation of the show take place?
This edition has been running for 59 shows now. We’ve had these eight letters and the entire show is built around them. While new letters keep coming in, our original edition, which is this one, involves the original set of letters. There is also a part of the show where people write their own letters and then we post them or we keep them and they become part of the unsent repository of letters that we hold.
You say it’s a show with lights, food, movement and live music — what exactly do you mean?
The letters themselves have movement and live music, curated, choreographed, and built for them. So the full show has multiple different art forms in conversation with each other. There’s a gorgeous movement artiste Diya Naidu, who has built an entire score around every letter. You might be sitting in a circle, but somebody is going to be moving through the space to remind you to stay in your body and to almost build images and create associations that are immediately going to take you back to your own connections with these letters. The point is to evoke and to create a visual landscape in what is otherwise a very simple format.
The live music, again, is the scaffolding of the show. It underscores all the letters and it creates a soundscape built for each letter. The food comes in at different moments in the show, depending on the letters. For instance, we begin the show with a letter by a Kashmiri woman to her lover, and we have shipped Kashmiri kahwa for that letter.
People sit in a circle with a quilt around them — tapping into these familiar spaces, do you see that psychological effect take place?
Yes 100 per cent. We are reimagining audiences as collaborators, as allies, not as consumers or ticket buyers. The second they enter, they feel involved because it requires a lot of collective accountability and responsibility to build a safe space for one another.
