Bilas Chandrahasan is a dancer, musician, choreographer, theatre and mime actor and voiceover artiste. Recently he turned a film actor as well, with strong roles in two upcoming films - Jayaraj’s Veeram and Sanal Kumar Sasidharan’s Sexy Durga. Sure enough Bilas is beaming from ear to ear. It has not been a smooth journey for the school drop-out from Mumbai who dabbled in music and dance and did several jobs before he found his vocation after he returned to his roots in Varkala. An acting workshop conducted by Abhinaya proved to be a turning point. Eventually, he stayed on with Abhinaya for 12 years. Direction was Bilas’ aim, but D. Reghoothaman, co-founder of Abhinaya, advised him to wait till he had that inner urge before he decided to turn to direction. “But my family was not happy and with hardly any support, life was tough. Looking back, I cherish every bit of that struggle to find my direction. Reghu chettan and Jyothish M.G. have been my mentors,” he says. Abhinaya also introduced him to mime. So fascinated was he with mime, that he went to Kolkata to learn from veteran mime artiste Niranjan Goswami. “Since I was fluent in English and had a good voice, my friends suggested that I should get a job in a call centre there. Thus, without any certificates, I did get a job and took mime lessons for a while. “But the call of the stage was so strong that I decided to come back to Abhinaya after two years.” He worked with some of the best works of Abhinaya such as Sidhartha, Palangal, Bhagavadajjukkam, Sagarakanyaka and Zoo Story. “Jyothish, director of Bhagavadajjukkam, gave me the freedom to speak in any language in the play. I spoke in Hindi, Marathi, English with an American accent, and Malayalam! After it was staged at Prithvi Theatre in Mumbai, veteran theatre person Habib Tanvir who was in the audience told me, ‘You can perform in any language in the world’. Theatre, Abhinaya in specific, changed me as a person. I learnt to speak and read Malayalam, I became mellowed. I am surprised with my fluency in Malayalam now and my friends in Mumbai can’t believe that I speak chaste Hindi instead of the tapori slang!” Teaching is something that he discovered and he regularly holds theatre workshops for children, teachers, techies, autistic and differently-abled children. “Elements of theatre can be applied in any field. My dream is to take a puppet-making workshop for the visually challenged,” he says. An accident in 2003 resulted in complications that kept him away from the stage for a few years in 2012. “I was asked to take a break of at least three years. That devastated me, but I got an opportunity to work behind the scenes at the first edition of Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2012. And at the biennale of 2015, I was back on stage, performing solo for eight hours.” Just when he was looking for an opening in cinema, his actor-friend Parvathy introduced him to Jayaraj who was casting for Veeram, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth. Bilas plays Komappan, a vernacular version of Macduff in the original play. The Malayalam version of the film releases on Feburary 24. In the meantime, he became a regular face of short films. One of his short films, Pu, directed by Bibin Joseph, which recently got selected to Los Angeles Cine Festival, got him a role in Sexy Durga. “Pu is about a man who has a moment of self-realisation when he loses everything, including his clothes and belongings. Working with Sanal was a new experience in that the film had no script. Scenes were decided on the spot and we shot it over 15 nights,” Bilas says. A voiceover artiste in films such as Loham, Double Barrell and Ayal Njaan Alla (he dubbed for four characters in the film), he is now waiting for more roles in tinsel town. So is his family happy now? “Extremely. It took a lot of time, but no complaints...”

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