Theatre artists are forced to change their profession due to pandemic. Some are working as delivery person, while some have gone back to their native place and are working on agricultural fields.
Bengaluru: Last 1.5 years have been extremely difficult for theater artists. Many artists lost their job in the pandemic. Some artists continued to work in this sector because of their passion but many went back to their native place as they couldn’t find work here.
They have started working as a delivery person to make two ends meet. Many went back to their village and started working on agricultural land. Now theaters are having only 2 shows on the weekends. Before the pandemic, theaters used to run throughout the week.
Abhishek Iyengar, owner of WeMove theater says, “When the theaters reopened, people didn’t come. Earlier we used to have 20 shows per season but now we only have 2 shows so far. It has caused huge financial loss.”
Vinaya Shastri, performing artist informed that it has become very difficult to survive for artists like him as the government aids aren’t of much help.
Most of the theater work has gone online. But now they must compete with the content on OTT platforms. Sarath Parvathanvi, cofounder of the youandme theater informed that they have started new workshops online but their theater work in not going well as people rather prefer watching shows on Netflix than recorded theater performance.
It’s becoming difficult for artists to perform as theater requires physical presence.
But it also led to their work reaching a wider audience.
