I seek stories in which characters’ lives thrill me: Yuki Ellias

Mumbai-based theatre person Yuki Ellias won this year’s Mahindra Excellence in Theatre Award (META) in the Best Actor (Female) category for Elephant in the Room, a play that reinvents the Ganpati myth. The play, directed and enacted by Ellias, also won the Best Costume and Best Light Design awards. The story of Master Tusk, a boy who has an elephant head and searches for his missing one, for Elephant in the Room shows how he comes to terms with his identity. 

Ellias played Hermia in Tim Supple’s exuberant production A Midsummer Night’s Dream and was also the movement director for his opera, Mozart’s Magic Flute. She played Brooke in Atul Kumar’s Noises-Off and Portia in Merchant of Venice, directed by Vickram Kapadia. 

Ellias is currently working with Mahesh Dattani on the film version of his play, Final Solutions, as the movement director. Elephant in the Room will also be staged at the Prithvi Theatre on April 18 and 19. Ellias says she seeks stories in which characters and their lives thrill her. “They thrill me because there is a familiarity in how messed up they are or how much capacity they have to love. It’s the thrill of the humanness of these characters and their rawness that I seek to work with,” she says. Excerpts from an interview:

SHIREEN QUADRI: In Elephant in the Room, a solo show, you play eight different characters. The play is an interpretation of the mythological figure of Lord Ganesha. How different was it thematically and stylistically to do this play? 

YUKI ELLIAS: Elephant in the Room is about a boy in search of his missing head. We’re all looking for something, aren’t we? For me, it was that “missing story”, the missing perspective in the Ganesha myths. I had been seeding the story for a few years. I had many questions about this particular and peculiar elephant-boy. What if he didn’t like his elephant head… what if he went to find his old head...what about the elephant who lost his head for the boy?

I was initially thinking of a big cast for the play and a male actor was the obvious choice for playing the elephant boy. And then Ranvir Shah and Prakriti Foundation reached out to me saying they were looking to commission a solo show for the Park New Festival 2016. My best friend suggested I convert the Elephant in the Room narrative into a one-woman performance. For so long, I had always imagined a male lead in this story that I babbled, “How can I cast myself as the elephant boy?”. And he coolly countered... “why not?” A good question and a three months later, I play all 8 characters in the play — Master Tusk, the elephant-boy, a spider, a hunter, an old elephant, a cheetah, a hyena and the personifications of Day and Night. Thanks to the very generous grant and good friends who put me in touch with Sneh Sapru, a fabulous writer and wonder-collaborator, a seed of an idea grew into a powerful script. Adriel George and Prutu Parab created a musical score that is magical. We worked on every layer of the music, identifying instruments and rhythms for each character and scene. Sumaiya Merchant, the costume designer, and I researched the Asian aesthetic-Taiwanese and Korean dance-theatre robes and textiles ...I knew the colours of the play would be white, grey, red, black and orange. The set was inspired by a series of textile installations I had seen. The choreography and performance came naturally in response to the words and music and costume. Asmit Pathare created a light design that transports us all to that wonderland. When I have to get on stage, I look forward to story, the verse, and the world we create. I carry every inch and word and note of the whole journey in me. The experience surpasses just being an actor playing a role. It’s about the story we have created and how we are sharing it with our audiences. 

SHIREEN QUADRI: Most of your productions are, in a way, commentaries on social conditions. How do you approach theatre? Has education in theatre helped you understand the finer nuances of the craft better?

YUKI ELLIAS: I have made and performed in a handful of plays. In no way do I seek the plays that are commentaries on social conditions. It may have been mere coincidence. I have no agenda with my work as a starting point. I seek stories in which characters and their lives thrill me. They thrill me because there is a familiarity in how messed up they are, or how much capacity they have to love. It’s intriguing why they shut themselves in or when will they become who they want to be. I love madness and passion. I’m also terribly soppy and thus it’s the thrill of the humanness of these characters and their rawness that I seek to work with. 

SHIREEN QUADRI: Your productions also stand out for their innate energy. In acting, how much does a character’s physicality appeal to you? As an actor and director, what are the various aspects of juggling both medium you find fascinating?

YUKI ELLIAS: I love being in my body and it’s when I’m on stage that I get to be most complete with my body. I think everyone in general should be moving with more ridiculousness and sensuousness, both poetically and alarmingly. Luckily, as actors, we have the liberty to be rich with our bodies on stage. It is incredible how we humans have so many ways to move and yet we are so damn boring with our everyday coded way of inhabiting our bodies. 

YUKI ELLIAS: With Tim Supple, I learnt tremendous tools with which to discover a text and its richness. I also learnt tools which help bring the scenes from the pages on to the floor. His direction embodies a lot of improvisation and exercises and is extremely specific in leading us through processes. He doesn’t pontificate with the actor. He works with the actors on the floor and with the word and the body. 

SHIREEN QUADRI: Tell us something about your directorial debut, Charge (2015), a sci-fi comedy which showcases our addiction to virtual reality. 

YUKI ELLIAS: Charge was the first play I directed. I happened to read it online while I was looking for monologues. I found a monologue which was really beautiful and decided to read the entire play. By reading the monologue out of context, I had never imagined how amazing a play it was. It took me by surprise. Absolutely nothing was predictable about it. But that’s exactly what I enjoyed. Charge is a story set in the future. Two humans have forgotten the difference between and reality and virtual reality. They never leave their beds and are always wired to this ‘machine’, completely dependent on their mutating robots. The life the characters of this play lead was eerie. This eerie way of creating fake lives is already so close to where we already are today. I wrote to Eric Kaiser, the writer, and asked if I could do his play. He encouraged me to do the play and interpret it the way I wanted it. He was thrilled by the production design. There’s a sense of camaraderie with Eric. We have since been friends on social media, but I am hoping to finally meet him this year in August. 

SHIREEN QUADRI: Yatagarasu, your experimental dance-theatre show about seven classmates coming of age, deals with issues that kids struggle with. How different was this to do? How was it received in schools?

YUKI ELLIAS: I always wanted to work with dancers and thought that dance-theatre was fun, entertaining and poetic way of telling stories. I also wanted to create a children’s play because by far my audience has always been adults. Even as a performer, I had never acted in a play for children. I thought of combining the two ideas and creating a dance-theatre show for children. I wanted to tell the stories about growing up — the transition from childhood to adulthood, which is the most vulnerable time of a child’s life. I wanted to work around adolescence and about the things that confused us when we were growing up: when and why we were made to feel that we didn’t fit in, the guilt of not reaching up to our parent’s expectations, the rigidness of teaching and learning. All the stories were explored based on the dancers’ own childhood. The stories dealt with many issues — learning disabilities, body shaming, anger management — stories that were real for the dancers, where each one had lived through these dilemmas and anxieties. Thereon, we compiled these experiences of being at school, being at home and threaded it with a Japanese myth that they learn in school about the Yatagarasu bird — a three-legged bird who guides a lost traveller out of the jungles by reminding her about the courage, wisdom and compassion she has within her. Although the issues are very poignant, we used a lot of comedy and dance, and sheer exuberant energy of the performers to inspire hope — that we should build rather than bully, talk rather than impose, see the best in each other, and remember the three-legged Yatagarasu. 

SHIREEN QUADRI: In your other production — Dying To Succeed — Shakespearean characters are portrayed in a corporate world. Could you share something about the play?

YUKI ELLIAS: Dying to Succeed, written by Saudamni Kalra, is about Shakespeare’s iconic characters in today’s corporate world. Iago is upset that he has not been promoted, Macbeth wants to become a CEO, Portia is a woman trying to get past the boy’s club and the glass ceiling. I performed this play in a stand-up and interactive solo performance/act format. I even got to perform at the Karachi Literature Festival. My mother tried to get me to censor my own show before the Karachi audience... of course, before every gag I told them that my mom doesn’t want me to do this next bit, but here we go! We loved and laughed together about Macbeth and Iago and our relationships with our bosses, managers, colleagues and moms! For that evening, no politics could keep us from laughing together at our own common frailties. It was such a lovely night to remember.

SHIREEN QUADRI: Shakespeare, of course, holds immense influence on theatre practitioners worldwide. How have his works affected you as an actor/director? 

YUKI ELLIAS: I didn’t enjoy Shakespeare when I was in school. Unfortunately, it is taught in the worst way in schools. You need someone to open it up for you and make you enjoy and understand the characters and what they are after. The deliciousness of Shakespeare for me is that the character tells you explicitly how much they love or despise or long for someone else. There’s no holding back and they bare themselves completely. Yet the language and imagery are so masterful. Reading Shakespeare, you learn to taste the many layers of writing, word by word. It takes time to savour it all. I’m a slow reader, but I read a passage at a time and enjoy it bit by bit. It’s intense and fun like wasabi. 

SHIREEN QUADRI: What are you currently working on? 

YUKI ELLIAS: I’m currently working with Mahesh Dattani on the film version of his play Final Solutions. I will be the movement director on it. Elephant in the Room will also be staged at the Prithvi Theatre on April 18 and 19.