Solo Theatre: Living Tradition of Story Telling

This paper is focused on the elements of the traditional and contemporary art of storytelling and its presence in the solo theatre forms. Storytelling is a primitive phenomenon of sharing and expressing an individual's desires, dreams, hopes, conflicts, resistance, beliefs etc. it is a survival instinct for human existence. It keeps evolving with time as it is an adoptive social, political and cultural phenomenon. Theatre is also an extension of storytelling as it is an alive human communication process and dynamics and possibilities for humanity lies in this process. People interact and share their stories with each other. This acts as a therapeutic action and response, which is greatly under threat nowadays. In today's digitalized world where information is shared fast and furiously has affected this art of storytelling and killed an important and valuable human living process. Even though the passion of storytelling hasn't dried out fully, the contemporary solo theatre is emerging as a practice bythe revival of storytelling and its elements. In this paper two case studies have been taken up, which are, folk solo theatre of well-known Pandvani artist Teejan Bai and contemporary solo theatre piece ‘Note on Chai ’by Mumbai based artist Jyoti Dogra. These two cases have been taken up to explain how the storytelling tradition and its elements are existing in the theatre forms at present.