Day 9

13th July 2019

Activities:

1. Today, we were joined by Amitesh Grover for a session on theatrical form. Amitesh is a performance-based artist in New Delhi, India and his practice explores intimate performance. We began the day by discussing the difficult nature of adapting Shrilal Shukla’s novel, Raag Darbari, for the stage. Amitesh described the journey as challenging because the book is not at all theatrical; for pages and pages, the author describes the village in which the novel is set and the interiority of the characters, and there is scarcely any dialogue between the characters. He noted that the adaptation required finding new theatrical ways to portray all that information, and really pushed him to explore the limits of the form and experience of theatre.
2. Then, we discussed the spaces in which theatre is staged, and why plays have traditionally been confined to the proscenium where the relationship between the performers and the audience is passive and standardized across spaces. He noted that cinema halls and proscenium stages offer only marginally different experiences of performance, and that as a new generation of theatre-makers, we should question this. He pointed out that in South Asia, our tradition of performance has always been interactive and not passive; take, for example, the crowd participation involved in the sharing of ghazals, or the way in which, when Rajinikanth makes his first appearance on the big screen, the film is paused and the audience dances and throws coins at him in reverence. He emphasized the importance of thinking about theatre as a relational art form, distinct from others like the novel or paintings.
3. He pushed us to think about what is specific to theatre, and how our projects make use of theatrical devices. He noted that it is crucial, when writing, to consider the staging of the play and how we are using space, and how those decisions impact the audience’s experience. Amitesh said that, in his opinion, text is good when it begins to explain the world around us through the lens of fiction, so that we are both able to recognize it but are also show a different dimension.
4. Amitesh insisted that the form of the text too must challenge the traditional structure of acts, and how the treatment of time can be approached in new ways. He also noted the importance of simultaneity so that, at any given time, multiple things are happening on stage so that the audience is able to experience more than just dialogue and is fully engaged.
5. Finally, he spoke about folk tales and the manner in which playwrights often adapt them for the stage; in his opinion, assuming authorship of a folk tale is contrary to the form of the story, which is after all the people’s story and exists in multiple versions across time and space. When it gets written down, that communal ownership is compromised, according to Amitesh.

Questions considered:

1. How do you work with a text that is not theatrical?
2. What is the space of a theatrical experience? How does one engage with non-traditional spaces? How can space be used to encourage audience immersion and active participation? How do you encourage the audience to relate to one another?
3. What does theatre produce that only theatre can produce? What is theatrical? Why should someone come to watch theatre when they can watch television or film? What can theatre offer that is impossible in other forms of visual and performance art?