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Cultures of the Left at PSi (Performance Studies international), Hamburg June 7-11

Our partnership project was featured in two curated panels: Cultures of the Left: Aesthetics and Politics and Political Theatres and Performances of Resistance

Aesthetics and Politics

Participants: Dr. Trina Nileena Banerjee (JNU), Aastha Gandhi (JNU), Dr. Ameet Parameswaran (JNU).

Chair: Prof. Janelle Reinelt (Warwick)

The panel explores how tendencies within Left praxis interrogate and offer a redefinition of critical historical events in independent India through the lens of performance. The panel does so by bringing to centre-stage, the significant problem in Left praxis, that of the spectacle, whether it be that of scenography involving revolving stage, promenade, installations, gigantic sets and visually stunning lights, architectural spaces, video projections or that of bodily practices associated with ‘collective’ such as circus. By problematising the central categories in Left praxis such as people and labour as linked to the staging of spectacle, the three papers foreground how one might conceive an alternate historiography wherein the historical events could be seen as broken histories- spilling over as well as rupturing the historical narrative. The panel addresses the conference theme of ‘Overflow’ by interrogating the staging of excess and abundance as a productive category in Left aesthetics.

  • In her paper, The Art of Staging: Spectacle, Realism and the Idea of the ‘Minimal’ in Left Theatre Aesthetics in Calcutta, Trina Nileena Banerjee focusses on certain key moments in theatre history to engage in a historical and theoretical unpacking of the tensions between minimalism and the element of spectacular in the conventions of stage design that have operated on the Calcutta stage. Beginning with the debate around the revolving stage in the production of Nabanna (1944), her paper moves towards discussing the subsequent debates in leftist political theatre and the need for/extravagance of ‘spectacular’ staging in the plays of Utpal Dutt in the late 1950s and 1960s. Through analyzing these critical productions and discourses surrounding them, the paper addresses the larger question of the relationship between the paradigms of Realism, the concern with the representation of the ‘masses’ in what ostensibly aspires to be a ‘people’s theatre and the visual politics of minimalism versus excess on stage.
  • Aastha Gandhi’s Circus Performer at the City Centre- A Case of Shifting Spaces and Shifting Ideologies analyses Abhilash Pillai’s upcoming production, The Tempest (2016) that involves circus artists, in collaboration with urban theatre artists to interrogate the idea of citizenship at play underneath the ideologies in the Cold War and neoliberalism. Highlighting the social and economic deterioration of the Indian circus in the last two decades with the change in performing animal protection laws (2001) and child labour laws (2011), Gandhi analyses the process through which the director brings the two groups together- marginalized, skilled circus artists and urban theatre actors questioning how their identities are at play, underneath their performance and behind the stage. Analysing the process of earlier patronage to circus by the Indian state in its relationship to Cold war politics, Gandhi contextualizes the complexity of the identity of circus as ‘socialist’ in a Third World space. What is the mode of survival for these artists today, in the very absence of this support, in the neo-liberal era, when the middle- class audiences, the state and its laws have turned a blind eye towards them?
  • Ameet Parameswaran explores how an emergent tendency in theatre in India involves the spectacular staging of the event of post-coloniality as mediated through iconic art works: novels or the practices of modernists that brings to fore the crisis of the newly formed nation following a state-led developmentalist path after the independence. The performances move away from conventional theatrical structures by bringing together structures of promenade, installations, architectural spaces, video projections and huge ensemble of performers foregrounding their labour of acting, dancing, singing, acrobatics, and cooking. The paper specifically analyses the performances Khasakkinte Ithihasam (2015) by Deepan Sivaraman, Midnight’s Children by Abhilash Pillai (2005) and 409 Ramkinkers (2015), a collaborative performance by theatre directors, installation artists, academics as dramaturgs including Anuradha Kapur, and Vivan Sundaram New Delhi, showing how the performances becomes a ground allowing the overflowing of the original work/event, what he calls a scenography of ‘abundance’.

Political Theatres and Performances of Resistance

Participants: Prof. Bishnupriya Dutt (JNU), Dr Urmimala Sarkar Munsi (JNU), Dr Silvija Jestrovic(Warwick); Chair: Dr Milija Gluhovic (Warwick)

The panel explores methods of locating political theatre within other instances and forms of political resistance. It is especially interested in the ethos and cultures of the Left as a means of formulating current resistant practices both within the context of political theatre and within other performances of dissent against the backdrop the rising Right. The resistant performance practices will be explored both as context specific and comparatively through three presentations:

  • Bishnupriya Dutt’s ‘Cultures of the Left: Resonance of a political past in the present, a seditious play, an installation and growing unrest’ explores how political events and connotations resonate, through their fragmented archives, in present works. It focuses on two examples: a play on the naval mutiny of 1947, staged amidst controversy and censorship of sedition laws in 1964 (Kallol, Calcutta) and a contemporary art installation by Vivan Sundaram to commemorate the naval mutiny (2016, Bombay). The theatre archive, featuring prominently in the exhibition, has merged with historical archival material from the mutiny—aesthetically falling back on imagination of Socialist artistic forms— and juxtaposing two histories within the contemporary scenarios and debates on citizenship, freedom of speech, and colonial sedition laws.
  • Urmimala Sarkar Munsi’s ‘Draupadi travels: resistive acts across time and space in the times of overflow’ explores a historical and political resonances of Mahashweta Devi’s novel ‘Draupadi’, where a tribal woman from Bengal refuses to put on her clothes after she has been repeatedly raped by soldiers of the Indian Army. The paper traces the various resonances of this Left leaning text including its adaptation in 2000 by the Manipuri director Heisnam Kanhailal, who staged nudity as a form of resistance; the 2004 protest of the Manipuri women, who stood naked in front of the Army garrison to protest the rape and murder of a woman by the Indian army; and the most recent performance of the play at the University of Haryana and subsequent attack of the right-wing ruling party on the faculty.
  • Silvija Jestrovic’s ‘Bringing the Left Back: Radical Performances of Dissent from the Remains of ex-Yugoslavia’ explore the re-emergence of the Leftist culture—as a mode of resistance and a search for an alternative against the expansion of global capitalism and against local jingoistic forces—by looking at a range of performances including political theatre of Croatian director Oliver Frljic, activities of groups such as Anti-Fascist Front of Serbia and Women in Black, and various single issue movements in the region that have displayed overtly Leftist approaches in their manifestations of resistance.
Tue 25 Jul 2017, 17:59