Oftentimes one may find themselves too shy to even admit they want to give something like acting a go, because of all the preconceived notions that cling to the art form. But say you fight those inner voices and arrive at a place of simple wanting: to try acting the way you might try dancing, or singing, or any other art that lets your body and voice hold what your everyday life can’t always express. You make it to that workshop. You stand in front of strangers, you let your vulnerability show, you feel something shift inside you. Then, the workshop ends and you go back to your “real” life.
What does an actor do when the education, or at least that first burst of training, is over? The world of theatre or film is too big and too unstructured to navigate on enthusiasm alone. Which is why a new initiative in Dubai that doesn’t just train people in acting but insists on making them stage‑ready, with a full‑length play and tickets on sale, brings promise.
With ‘Play Lab’, theatre director and National School of Drama alumna Rasika Agashe is taking Dubai-based actors from the rehearsal room of a workshop to a live stage performance in a little over a month, with the first batch set to perform Not A Love Story on May 30.
‘You can’t stay in the rehearsal room forever’
When we ask Rasika what she thinks has been missing from Dubai’s theatre ecosystem, she doesn’t talk about a shortage of talent or venues, but about structure. In India, she continues to run a company where actors train, rehearse and perform in plays that don’t close after three shows. They run twice or three times a month, travel to different cities, and give performers the repetition they need to call themselves professionals.
Here, she noticed, the pattern was different. “Even when a full-length play comes together, it usually runs for just one or two performances before ending. And with short workshops, it often stops there too,” she says. “Actors simply return to their day jobs without any real sense of what the next step is.” The rehearsal room is necessary and deeply loved, she admits, but it cannot be the final destination.
The workshop‑to‑stage format is her way of building a new pattern. Over nearly two months, the cohort has clocked upwards of 90 hours together, even though the initial plan was a 60‑hour course. That extra time has gone into building stamina and learning how to show up after work, how to stay with a scene until it lands, how to survive the whiplash of one rehearsal where nothing works and the next where everything suddenly clicks.
“Actors cannot practice in the rehearsal hall only,” says Rasika, who also runs a Dubai-based theatre group called Dreamtime Union of Artists (DUA) alongside her husband and Indian film actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub. “It’s totally different to be in front of a live audience. They will make mistakes, they will learn but they need that time and practice on stage.”
From first-timers to seasoned performers
This first batch of Play Lab’s actors is not a cohort of drama‑school kids with identical CVs. Some have done college theatre ten years ago, some have been dabbling in community performances, some are complete beginners who simply signed up because they felt the tug of stage for the first time. Ages range from early 20s to around 50. “But the enthusiasm is the same,” says Rasika. “What changes, over the weeks, is the level of confidence and a more honest relationship with one’s own ability.”
For the younger ones, the process is a crash course in discovering what it means to be taken seriously as performers in a city where acting is still mostly seen as an after‑hours passion project. “For some of the older participants, the shift has been big enough for them to dabble with the idea of taking a break from their day jobs to focus on theatre for a while,” she adds.
A city with its own working actors
Underneath the experiment is a larger, almost stubborn belief: that every city deserves its own pool of working actors. When she first started moving between India and Dubai, Rasika noticed that many of the region’s bigger productions simply fly in casts from elsewhere, perform a few shows, get paid and leave.
It’s a familiar pattern in a globalised entertainment economy, but it leaves local aspirants with very little runway. “Every city needs their own artists who can perform in their city, who should get paid,” she says. Only when that happens – when performers have enough work at home to justify calling themselves professionals – can they start thinking of taking shows outwards, to other Emirates or countries.
Her long‑term goal is to build a repertory: a company where actors effectively “go to office” at a theatre instead of a corporate desk, rehearsing different plays and putting on shows regularly, with at least a basic salary to anchor them. It’s a model she has tested in India, sustained by sheer population density and the ability to run plays twice or three times a month, or tour them across cities.
Dubai, with its smaller community and higher costs, is a different beast but she believes the principle can be adapted if enough people buy into it. The workshop‑to‑stage format is a first step towards that, creating a pool of trained performers, mounting a show, then seeing if the production can travel within the UAE, perhaps to Sharjah or Abu Dhabi, building relationships with theatre societies along the way.
Workshop to stage in a few weeks
On May 30, the first batch of this experiment will walk on stage and perform Not A Love Story as a ticketed production where audiences arrive expecting a proper show.
In a city where many are still learning how to take creative risks alongside the rigmarole of nine‑to‑five jobs, a format that insists on seeing actors all the way from their first exercise to opening night on stage feels like a hopeful intervention. And maybe, for a theatre community still finding its structure, that kind of journey is exactly what we need more of.
Source: Khaleej Times