Acting for Cinema
Acting for Cinema, an in-depth training course, creates immersive learning experiences for artists, to strengthen rigor and innovation in practice. Continued professional education creates space for dialogue, critical examination of one’s practice, and refinement of one’s craft. The course also encourages coming together of like-minded individuals creating a network that offers support, guidance, and expertise.
Projects + Process
Anything done well must have a story to tell about its making, a process that allowed for it to evolve and realize itself into its final form; be it a musical composition, a painting, or simply the making of a delectable meal. We usually experience and admire the end product and most often remain oblivious to the painstaking, often devotional journey of its making; its process from concept to completion; the rigor and passion that it must so relentlessly involve.
This makes for significant archival material and if shared as stories, are critical to: learn from, aspire to and bring hope and reassurance, especially in a world that increasingly looks to instant results and instant gratification.
Projects + Process, an artists presentation series, brings together artists, performers, theatre makers, designers, and creative professionals. Each session involves 3 multidisciplinary artists to talk about the significance of process and its relevance to project-making in contemporary India, and share insights into the development of an ongoing or a recent piece of work.
You can view the past sessions here.
Virtual Cinema Club
52 weeks. 52 filmmakers
Cinema and the moving image is central to our lives even more today than ever before. It touches our lives intimately and profoundly. It can shape our ideas, thoughts, and values. It also has the power to change our ways of seeing and thinking.
This is the language of cinema and we are here to talk about it. How the various elements, the images, the sound, the narrative, and the performance, all come together to bring life to the words, characters, and places. As we look closely, what threads do we begin to see across a director’s work: similar themes, a signature style, or perhaps the evolution of an idea. Cinema has the ability to raise many powerful questions and we’re hoping to ask the right ones. Every Saturday, how the various elements, the images, the sound, the narrative, and the performance, all come together to bring life to words, characters, and places through cinema.
Every fortnightly Sunday, Ishan Benegal (Associate Artistic Director, G5A) and Neeraj Jain (Cinematographer) discuss the films and filmmaker’s work online on the G5A YouTube Channel.
These sessions are interspersed with conversations on elements of filmmaking as a craft as part of VCC Intermissions.
View some of our previous sessions here
Writer’s Lab Mumbai | G5A x Soho Theatre
We recognize that inspiration for storytelling often comes from personal experience. This project will encourage young Indian writers to tell their stories, share their opinions, and engage with different perspectives on their families, traditions, cultures, values, histories, and present. It will bring together young voices from diverse communities and socio-cultural backgrounds to reflect on and share stories of heritage, identity and belonging. Writers will be asked to consider the challenges and celebrations that come with their heritage, how they integrate and balance these traditions while living in a contemporary and increasingly global city.
Working in collaboration, G5A academy and Soho Theatre developed and delivered 6 digital workshops for young people aged 18-25 – supporting young writers in exploring and sharing these stories in a safe space, while developing their creative writing skills. The project will give young people tools and techniques to explore their voice as writers and will culminate with each participant creating a short script, submitted to G5A and Soho Theatre.
Led by theatre professionals and members of Soho Theatre’s artistic team and G5A, Writers’ Lab Mumbai will be designed to support writers to hone their craft. By bringing together a diverse range of voices, and encouraging the development of the new writing scene, we will create work that is authentic and distinctive.
This project will also initiate a long term artistic collaboration between G5A and Soho Theatre. Both theatres organisations are committed to discovering and nurturing the talent of tomorrow, whilst introducing their work to new audiences.
The Seeing Hand
Drawing at its best is not what your eyes see, but what our minds understand. – Artist, Millard Sheets
The Seeing Hand, a workshop series, provides insight into the minds of visual artists, and explores how the craft of drawing by hand helps shape and refine their vision and process, bringing together the eye, mind, and hand.
Imagined as a series of interactive live workshops held at the G5A Study, the series helps us develop a better understanding of the journey between our ideas and our expression, by exploring how drawing by hand shapes how we review our own ways of seeing and drawing. Through these sessions, we aim to reconnect with the craft of drawing, renegotiate its relevance in the context of modern and contemporary art, technology, and its application in art-making today.
The Lecture Series
At G5A we felt a strong need for conversations around how artistic practices have shaped and been shaped by time, technology and multiple thresholds of transitions. The idea of studying socio-cultural (micro and macro) histories in conjunction with the development of various art forms and disciplines over time is integral to our understanding of the contemporary.
Through this series we bring together established professionals from diverse disciplines: music, theatre, literature, visual art, architecture, environmentalists and more. Exploring histories of form, the evolution of their craft, and looking at socio-political contexts and ideas through the lens of their practice, these renowned professionals will delve into critical questions that could define contemporary arts practice in the country.