Stories are floating all around us. We consume them in the form of books, movies and in fact, even 140 character tweets.  But when it comes to the ancient art of organic, face-to-face storytelling, it has suffered a major setback with the advent of technology. Subverting this technological triumph is ‘Kommune’ - a collective venture by Roshan Abbas, Mini Mathur, Gaurav Kapur, Sandhya Mridul, Maria Goretti and others, that functions as a virtual space for the creative community to convene. Their first project? ‘Storytellers.’We caught up with Roshan Abbas to get all the dope on this fantastic new project…

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“The creative community in Mumbai does not have a place to come together and endow its ideas. What pains me about this city is that the creative community at large is so content only with a great idea that they forget to implement it. They don’t want to invest in the idea” says Roshan Abbas. “That’s where I come in as an implementer, which is how Kommune was born - with an intention to bring together the creative community,” he adds.

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‘Storytellers’ is the first idea implemented by ‘Kommune’. Led by Roshan Abbas, each Storytellers workshop session features selected speakers including Mini Mathur, Sandhya Mridul, Ishita Sharma, Jui Mukherjee among others. Each speaker is allotted 5 minutes to share a story and then the best speaker is recognised. After every five workshop sessions, step two is to take the best storytellers and organise a professional show.

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About the idea behind these workshop sessions and professional shows, Roshan tells us, “We are always shooting our stories, so now after twelve workshops and 3 professional sessions I have a hundred and fifty stories recorded. Now I reject 80% of them because they are workshop stories not professional ones and take the cleaned up 20% forward. We create short form content as we want to broadcast stories both live and digitally. In fact we have even been approached by a lot of independent filmmakers to take the winning stories forward” he says.

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On his future plans for Kommune, Roshan says, “So Kommune is about taking creative ideas, combining them, collaborating them, putting some capital behind it and making it happen. Now we need to start figuring out new performance ideas which the Kommune can curate and can put out there.”

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When quizzed on what’s next in the pipeline for Kommune, Roshan spills the beans, “For Kommune, project 2 there is this crazy stand up idea we have in mind, let’s see how that unfolds. But the sum of all parts is bigger than the one. So Kommune is nothing about individuals, if you come to me with an idea that has you at the center of it then I’d say no because Kommune is all about community and everyone should be able to pull it in every direction” he signs off.

Kommune's next session will take place at the Tangerine Arts Studio in Mumbai. You can RSVP here http://on.fb.me/1IIKIbg

Wish to sign up for some Kommune sessions? Visit their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/KOMMUNEity or watch the videos so far on their Youtube channel http://bit.ly/1dgWnAU