Day 5

6th July 2019

Activities:

We were joined by Iswar Lalitha, a theatre-maker, from Perch, a performance collective based in Chennai. Iswar spent the day with us and spoke extensively about his experiences in creating collaboratively, and pushed us to try our hand at collaborating with one another too.
We took turns to introduce ourselves and tell Iswar about our interests, backgrounds, and projects. In the course of introductions and learning about us, Iswar offered a wealth of material that he thought might be relevant to our projects, from ethno-musical surveys of India conducted in the 1930s to ‘Pabuji ki Phad’—a traditional folk art form from Rajasthan.
Then, Iswar began elaborating on his understanding of collaboration and why he enjoys it. He described Perch as a collective that does not conform to a hierarchical structure of any kind and creates theatre entirely as a team. When making a piece, people find and take up roles within the team based on what they are interested in or what they would like to learn more about, and not based on what they are best at. Iswar said he views the theatre as a complex ecosystem of different ideologies and personalities that have found a way to support each other’s work; a collective/collaborative group of theatre-makers is often like that too, he noted.
Iswar stressed that being part of a group is a serious commitment and requires careful management; he mentioned that when one is a part of a collective, one has to work on the group as much as working on whatever the group is working on.
If it requires so much work, why work with others anyway? Iswar noted that it is important to ask yourself this question. He told the group about a paper he’d read once, where an anthropologist studied what impact the type of crop grown by a community had on how its people thought about social networks. The paper observed that those communities growing rice, which is a water-intensive crop that can only be grown in a small window of time and requires careful collaboration, were stronger than those communities that grew wheat, which did not require as much water and could be planted over longer periods of time. He told us to ask ourselves: what could working in a collective give you that working in isolation could not?
Then, we were joined by Sachin Gujrale (an actor, director, and percussionist who collaborates closely with Perch), and as a group, we were asked to complete an activity. We were given a short story by Daniil Kharms and told to perform an interpretation of the story. After twenty minutes of devising, we performed, after which we had a conversation about what the process was like and whether we found it easy to work with one another.
Then, we were given five minutes and ask to produce a different performance of the same story but in the form of a musical. Again, afterwards, we discussed what the constraint of a defined form and a shorter time period did to our devising styles and our experiences of working collaboratively. We discussed how we communicated to each other, both off and on the stage.
Then, we were given another five minutes and asked to produce a third performance of the same story, but without any speech or sound. After our performance, we noted that this third iteration was the least successful in conveying the story because, unlike with the other two activities, we spent too much time in discussion and did not leave enough time to try acting it out and getting into the piece.
After that, we engaged Iswar in a long conversation about the conflicts that arise when collaborating and how to overcome them. We began again at the question: do you want to be in a collective? If yes, Iswar said, you must commit yourself to learning how to cohabit with other people and argue/disagree constructively. A collective must grow together and must be composed of people who all respect and trust each other to make smart decisions. This means a collective must be careful in initiating people into its community—because compatibility is so integral to the success of this kind of work, it is crucial that when creating a collective, you must assemble a group of people that can play to each others’ strengths and are correct for the kind of work you want to make.
Iswar stressed that, to be happy in a collective, one must be clear on their own personal goals and desires, and one must see how those goals fit into the collective’s larger aims as well.
On devising, Iswar noted that devising is synonymous with change—it cannot be stuck in time and will evolve as the group grows and sees things in a new light. He spoke about the necessity of achieving a balance, when devising, between knowing nothing about what you want to make and having a detailed plan ready to execute; with the former, there is no direction to the group’s work, and with the latter, collaborators might not feel the need to contribute and take initiative.

Questions considered:

What is the community you create with? Do you want to create within a community of collaborators?
What could working in a collective give you that working in isolation could not? What does working in a collective take away from you?
What is devising? When should one devise a performance piece? If devised work is constantly changing, why do you want a piece that can change?