Day 3

17th May 2019

Activities:

1. We began our session with a conversation about the intersection of art and academia. Since all our projects engage with social, cultural, political, and economic matters, we discussed the need to inform our projects with research.
2. We discussed Carver’s story, “The Bath,” again, and tried to pin down its premise, which is a basic rendering of the story’s narrative arc that takes this structure: x leads to y. The challenge was to keep its premise specific to this Carver story, and not so general as to be applicable to a number of similar pieces.
3. Then, we did a short writing exercise, where we were asked to come up with a premise for our plays. We were told to write continuously for five minutes. At the end, each of us read our premises out to the group.
4. After that, we explored some online archives (pad.ma, theifaarchive.org, etc.) and considered the vast variety of material that we could to use, as inspiration, as found text and material. We related this to our conversation of creating personal archives for our projects, and the importance of research in creating the foundation for a play.
5. Finally, we watched Girish Karnad’s 1984 movie, “Utsav.”

Questions considered:

1. What is theory’s role in the creative process? What are the things that you want to say that theory does not? How do you balance the act of research with the creative impulse to follow your intuition?
2. How does the personal interact with the universal in creative processes? How can we maintain the specificity of lived experience in the process of creating globally resonant art?
3. How do you put the traditional in conversation with the modern? In relation to Amit Chaudhuri’s essay, for example, how do you repossess tradition?