This interview was conducted in May.
If you don’t already know the name Pratha Nagpal, this is your chance to get to know her as an artist. I first met Pratha when she was facilitating the StoryCasters Theatre-Making workshop series, which she pitched to Diversity Arts Australia after participating as a mentee in the photojournalism series.
Self-described as a “theatre-maker, writer, and director”, Nagpal began her theatre career at SUDS where she directed her first play. As it was her first work to be reviewed (for Honi Soit), it is said to still be hung on the wall in her room. It was here that Nagpal realised her love for “meaningful storytelling” and specifically, “stories about BIPOC people and brown people in brown communities”.
Nagpal is known for her love for the creative practice itself, and writing and directing new works that are “in service of [her] community, of the brown women of [her] family and [her] lineage, and the brown women that will come after [her].”
“There’s something so beautiful in theatre about writing something and sharing it, and it coming to life in front of live audiences. It’s such a beautiful exchange, and a generous, sacred thing that happens. That’s what keeps me here in the loop of storytelling.”
Nagpal studied a Master of Fine Arts (Directing) at NIDA, where her graduation show Kali – a devised movement piece using Bharatnatyam – was performed. Then came माँकीरसोई (Maa Ki Rasoi – My Mother’s Kitchen), a one-woman show first developed for Shopfront’s ArtsLab residency program and later programmed at 4A and KXT.
In 2023, Nagpal was assistant director for Sydney Theatre Company’s Constellations, directed by Ian Michael, and Sunderella for World Pride, directed by Bali Padda. In 2024, Nagpal wrote and directed عورت راج औरत राज Aurat Raj (The Woman’s Rule) for Belvoir 25A.
Nagpal’s upcoming work, Azadi, will be staged at Riverside Theatre in Parramatta on July 3rd, as part of Supper Club. Hosted by Nancy Denis, Supper Club is a showcase of six works over two variety nights: Thursday 26 June and Thursday 3 July, from 8.30pm.
The synopsis for Azadi reads:
“1947 is known to be a pivotal year in Indian history. It is the year that some may say India gains Azadi from the British Rule and is divided in two nations, one for the Hindu majority, i.e., India and one for the Muslim majority, i.e., Pakistan. It’s a violent affair. No one talks about it.
Qala, born in an Indian Hindu household is taught one thing: she cannot marry a Muslim man. Amir, born in a Pakistani Muslim household is taught the opposite: no Hindu women. Their fated love demands Qala to search for answers from her history where she meets her great-grandmother, Sarasvati, a survivor of Partition. ”
I spoke to Pratha about Azadi, her artistic practice, and the current state of the arts scene.
VC: Your previous works have delved into how culture, familial ties, and womanhood are embodied and passed down through movement and dance, cooking, and visible/invisible labour. How would you categorise and describe Azadi in the context of your past works, and the type of stories you gravitate towards telling?
PN: The stories that I have told before are so connected to the women of my family, and the labour of the women of my family. So it would be trying to make sense of those conflicting truths of my life and of my history. In the same way, Azadi sits in this world where, as an artist, but also just as a human, I’m trying to make sense of my history, and the love that exists in a broken history and two broken nations. It’s a search for truth and answers, which is often where my work sits. It is a bit of a pivot in the sense that previously I have really focused on the labour of women. Azadi is different. While it is told through the voice of a woman, at its core, it is a love story. And that is something new to me.
VC: I know you’ve been working on other projects at the same time but you have said that this work has taken up three years of your life. What did those three years look like for you, and what of them is visible in the final iteration of Azadi?
PN: I deeply believe in marination. I haven’t been actively working on Azadi during those three years. We talked about this alot in the Diversity Arts workshops but you have to live life to make art. So I think the last three years have been so big on feeling the love of the community in South Asia, the South Asian community here, and feeling the love that exists between the Indian and Pakistani community. I’ve gone back to India every single year and the heartbreak of seeing the reality of things on the ground has driven my want to tell this story. All these moments of history that we’re living through in the present add to the work and change it. And even this iteration is the first step to what the work could be. I have written things in my notes app, shared stories, written scenes and thrown them away, and written more scenes.
It’s also been a big reflection on my bloodline. I grew up in Delhi but I’m from Lahore, which is not part of India anymore, so when something happens in Pakistan, it happens to my bloodline as well, just as if something would happen in India. My heart and bloodline are in both lands and I think the more and more we exist in the India of today, the more and more we are forced to erase that truth and it’s a scary thing. So I think Azadi has been a reminder to not forget that at all.
VC: How would you describe your writing process especially as you typically engage in devised works? And would you consider Azadi a devised work?
PN: Azali is the first text-based work that I am writing since Maa Ki Rasoi. In recent years I’ve been focusing a lot on movement and devised work, and it’s been a great exploration of dramaturgy. It’s been really interesting to come back to text-based works after having such a deeply devised practice, and I think that will still remain true for Azadi. This has been more of a solitary project, and I have gotten dramaturgical help from peers and mentors, but I have largely been writing it alone. With that being said, whenever I take a script to any room, I always love being very open to input. How can we shift this? How can we make it richer? How can we make it deeper? So I think any work that I make to some extent will always be devised and made with deep collaboration. But obviously it looks a little bit different with text-based works given that you need to have more time with yourself to create something from scratch, and then take it to people.
VC: How was the process of pitching Azadi and forming the creative team to bring it to life?
PN: It was a very funny process pitching this because Phil Spencer who’s the creative producer at Riverside National Theatre of Parramatta, came and watched Aurat Raj. He really loved that show and we ended up grabbing a coffee afterwards. He just wanted to read some of my writing, and I had written 2 scenes of Azadi. They’re so distant from the work now but he really liked it. And then, when they were planning this Heartland festival, he reached out to me about Supper Club, and we had a chat. I never shared this work in hopes of pitching it. It happened quite organically. With the creative team, it’s quite small at the moment but I always try to find people who will push me out of my comfort zone and challenge me to write better. Yes, they need to understand the vision that I have for every story that I want to tell but also continue to push me to become a better artist and find more interesting ways to tell the stories that I want to tell.
VC: Azadi broadly translates to freedom. How did you play with form and content to explore the notion of ‘Azadi’’?
PN: Azadi carries this meaning that we can live in a micro and macro chasm. The fight for Azadi existed before, during and after Partition. It very clearly exists today. And then there’s the Azadi that you want every day, and then you fight for it every day. It’s within the title itself, this continual fight for freedom of love and freedom for love, an expression of love through history. That’s why I was so naturally drawn to the word Azadi with the form and content of the work. The story is about the freedom to love the people we want to love, and how matters beyond us stop us from doing so. The form lives in how it’s an epic story of history but also in a very simple way about two people falling in love. I am still in an explorative space with the work, so the form and content will evolve over time. But for now they’re like this. It is this zooming in and out of how significant and insignificant we can be at the same time. How Azadi, or that fight for Azadi, remains the same.
VC: The story follows a romance which due to the history of India-Pakistan relations becomes an act of rebellion. How do you balance the depiction of a romance and the historical context?
PN: Often the way that we think about history can feel very dense and convoluted and built with facts. I think that is such a colonial idea of history. To me, history is stories. History is tradition. History is ritual. In that way, balancing romance and history is so natural and organic. Every story that has come before us, every story that our parents tell us about their childhood is filled with love. It is an act of rebellion against what people or textbooks tell us how to define history. It’s also an act of rebellion against the majority voice that exists when we think about history. In the context of Partition and India and Pakistan’s history, all of it is so new. My grandparents were young when Partition happened. The access to history is only through stories.
VC: With regards to bilingual or multilingual work, how do you make decisions regarding the different audiences, and the extent of which they understand the dialogue?
PN: I love playing with language, and I love the isolating impact that language can sometimes have on audiences. I love that the use of different languages can invite you in or shut you out. There’s something so playful about that that always draws me to keep doing it as I’m writing. Azadi has both Urdu and Hindi in it. I’m not so sure yet if there will be any translations or not. None of my other plays have ever had translations and they’ve worked well. I enjoy when plays don’t have translations because then it’s unapologetically owning that the beauty of this language can only be understood in this language. I’m so sorry to English but the beauty of Urdu and Hindi cannot be captured in English. I haven’t made any hard choices just yet about if I’ll have translations or not. But the work definitely has multiple languages.
VC: Azadi is not going to be performed until July 3, but given the current political climate and war between India and Pakistan, what do you hope that people take away from your show?
PN: I don’t think I could have ever predicted that this would be the climate in which the reading would be happening. It has made it a lot more difficult in a way to write the work given suddenly how relevant it’s become. I hope when people come to see it, they understand or at least walk away with a desire to interrogate their histories, and to eliminate some of the hate that our governments are trying to embed in the people. I am so so so confident in the belief that the people of India and the people of Pakistan have love between them. Maybe not all. But there are people that have love for the community, and love, not despite our differences or religions, but for our differences and religions, for the coexistence of those identities. I know those people, and I am one of them too. So I hope that the people who watch this can either feel seen, or this urge to interrogate their history and find the fight in them through that love to oppose the actions that are happening between India and Pakistan, but also beyond it as well. I hope it ignites a kind of burning.
VC: You have participated in a variety of programs including Fresh Ink National Mentoring Program, the International Festival of Theatre Schools (IFTS), and Staging the World Mentorship Program? How would you say these experiences show up in your work?
PN: The two ways that are so clear are mentorship and community. With Fresh Ink, Jane FitzGerald was this beautiful mentor and dramaturg who gave us so many tools. She also gave us access to a community, a writer’s room essentially, and the same thing with Mina Morita with Staging the World. Mina had rich resources for making art and being in the industry. The room itself was filled with theatre makers, and in that moment it became a strong exchange of knowledge. It really inspires you to keep doing what you’re doing. With IFTS, there were amazing mentors from all over the world but also all over India that I would never have access to otherwise.
In every work that I make, it’s all an amalgamation of the things that I’ve learned, a sometimes subconscious, sometimes conscious effort to carry the learnings that I get from different theatremakers. All of it makes up my practice. It keeps reminding me how important it is to be immersed in the artistic world, even when it’s not just theatre but also film, music, or whatever it is. To keep engaging with art is to learn about art and how to make good art. Sometimes we forget that immersion has an organic value. It’s just like osmosis.
VC: For aspiring theatre-makers and playwrights, especially BIPOC creatives, what advice do you have when it comes to finding opportunities, applying, and staying motivated to work on their craft?
PN: The artists and the art that I love and admire tell the scary stories. You can see when an artist tells the story that they were the most scared to tell. That’s where I feel the most inspired. I think it’s a beautiful pursuit to keep shifting the world that we inhabit. A career in the arts can sometimes feel wishy-washy. But actually, we play a really important role in being a reflection of the times. We have to keep pursuing that. In addition to that, we have to keep pursuing the rigor of creating good art. Sometimes I think people believe artistry is all talent, and for some lucky people it can be. But a lot of time artistry is rigour and showing up every day. It’s the same as doctors and lawyers and engineers. It requires hard work, effort, and upskilling.
For any emerging artist, I would say to keep being in search of programs that value that rigour and can help you build those skills and to find ways to make it a sustainable career. It’s much easier said than done, but it’s often really easy to feel the despair of this industry. There is hope. There are people who are doing some really cool shit and we just have to keep looking for those people, and we have to keep showing up and annoying them and saying, “take me in”. Definitely making good art, and building a community that not only understands your vision, but you understand their vision means you can share resources, skills, and stories.
VC: We talk all about representation and diversity but often accessibility and opportunity within the arts is not afforded the same room. How do you think that has translated into the types of stories that permeate mainstage theatre in particular?
PN: It’s shifted towards the worse. Some things are more accessible, some things are less accessible. I think there are pockets that are trying to make sure that people, and especially young people or emerging artists, can gain access to theatre. I think it is like an industry wide issue. Theatre, very traditionally and systemically, is elite. I don’t know if I have a systemic solution to it. But that being said, I think, with institutions, sometimes with programming BIPOC theatre it can either feel like a box ticking activity or programmers think that you will bring a whole community of people with you into the audiences. They may also think that there is no audience for this kind of work. As a theatre maker, you have to fight for the right for your story to exist on a stage, and also realistically say this is a story people want to listen to, and that does not promise that you’ll bring every audience ever, part of that is their job.
For theatre companies, it is a big job in the next five to ten years. They need to rebuild their audience space, because, quite frankly, the older, white audiences are dying and there are more and more young audiences from different communities that want to immerse themselves in the stories that they can feel seen in. Then there’s barriers like theatre tickets being really expensive, and I think theaters in general are struggling with filling their spaces. So I think there has to be a change. There has to be a way for them to restructure how they invite diverse audiences into the theatre, because they are ready to come, and they will come. They will show up if you give them the way.
VC: I read a quote where you said that growing up you “fondly remember being exposed to the arts. However, I never really saw myself being an artist.” What feels the most comfortable and best manner to describe yourself now?
PN: That is a crazy question to ask. Do you want me to have an identity crisis? At least when I was young, I thought that creativity and artistry had to look a very specific way. That I had to be this, this, this, and this before I could call myself creative. But in a way I think we’re all storytellers. I don’t make art as an outlier in my family. My parents are accountants. My sister’s a lawyer. Both my granddads were government employees and my grandmas were teachers. All of them are storytellers.
When I tell stories, the rhythm of my voice is the same rhythm as my mom. The way that my aunt moves in the kitchen is how I like to create movement works. I think my entire family is filled with artists, I just had the privilege to make a profession out of it. I see it as a privilege, because I get to watch and examine all of these different ways and forms. Storytelling exists in my bloodline. I am from a bloodline of artists. And I see myself as an artist openly only because I can call it a profession, and that’s the only difference. I think I was always an artist, even as a kid. I just had a different definition for it that was so much more rigid. I’ve unlearned that rigidity.
After our conversation, I found myself looking back to an article by Ismatu G titled, “the role of the artist is to load the gun”, which Pratha had shared during the Diversity Arts workshops. I connected the dots between Ismatu writing that “A (art-making) = B (world-making) = C (truth-telling)”. Pratha’s body of work entails a search for truth and answers that is for and in service of her community.
After all, “all creation pushes on the world, which pushes back on us (A=B=C)”. And Pratha is doing just that.
Tickets for Azadi are available here. All tickets include supper.
