Award-winning poet Dr. Sharanpal Ruprai, Associate Professor and Chair of UWinnipeg’s Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, has been accepted into the highly competitive Playwrights Lab at the Banff Centre in Alberta, where she will continue the development of her new theatrical work, Bollywood Basement Boutique, over two weeks this month.
Already a successful poet, Dr. Ruprai’s project is a new creative direction that began in 2019 and 2020 when she served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary.
Dr. Ruprai writes all her first drafts by hand. While handwriting in a coffee shop in Calgary, her characters started to materialize and her playwriting began.
As a child I longed for stores that carried Indian clothing with proper fitting rooms.
Dr. Sharanpal Ruprai
“I turned to the door and all of a sudden, all these characters walked through the door and started talking and I started writing,” said Dr. Ruprai. “I wrote the first act of the play in that moment.”
The story line was inspired by her personal experiences as a child while shopping in South Asian clothing stores.
She recalled that, growing up in Winnipeg in the 1980s and 90s, there were maybe two stores and their “fitting rooms” were the often storage areas or washrooms.
“As a child I longed for stores that carried Indian clothing with proper fitting rooms,” said Dr. Ruprai.
Instead, she had to endure changing in bathrooms, in front of strangers, or even in the backrooms of garages. “These were not The Gap changing rooms with mirrors and a door!” she said.
During her UCalgary residency, she kept returning to the play, and in 2021, the first act of Bollywood Basement Boutique was selected by Theatre Calgary’s Page to Stage New Works Festival for development and online reading.
Dr. Ruprai has now completed the play and is progressing through the process of bringing the script to the stage.
The Playwright Lab trip is very timely. The residency provides time, space, and resources for playwrights to experiment, rewrite, and explore their plays. It also brings playwrights together through facilitated conversations and shared creative practice, fostering a dynamic and collaborative atmosphere for artistic growth, with guidance to get the play onstage.
“The lab will allow me to connect and work with leading directors across Canada and internationally,” Dr. Ruprai said. “I will be working with Filipino Canadian director Nina Lee Aquino, Artistic Director of English Theatre at the National Arts Centre, and with Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who is the international faculty playwright mentor, this year.”
About Dr. Ruprai
Dr. Sharanpal Ruprai is a writer and Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at UWinnipeg. Dr. Ruprai’s debut poetry collection, Seva, was shortlisted for the Stephen G. Stephansson Award for Poetry by the Alberta Literary Awards in 2015. Her most recent collection, Pressure Cooker Love Bomb, was shortlisted for the prestigious 2020 Annual Lambda Literary Awards.
As an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, her research and teaching interests include Indigenous and critical race feminism, religious and cultural studies, and artistic practice.
