NINASAM's campus in Heggodu, deep in Karnataka's Shimoga District, with its red earth, tall trees and a set of vibrant theatre spaces is a reminder that despite rapid urbanisation, a few viable cultural alternatives do exist in rural India. The national seminar, “Spaces of Theatre, Spaces for Theatre” organised by the India Theatre Forum (ITF) attended by almost 200 theatre practitioners, architects and critics was recently held here.
Six years after its formation, the ITF with core members like Sanjna Kapoor and Sameera Iyengar from Junoon, Sudhanva Deshpande of Jana Natya Manch and K.V. Akshara of NINASAM, has a website, a fortnightly online theatre newsletter e-Rang and a publication on Best Practices.
Undertaken in the best spirit of collaboration and volunteerism, schemes including an online script archive are awaited.
Philosophical quest
A challenging exercise to organise, the five-day seminar yielded some valuable perspectives on the cultural and philosophical questions implicit in the idea of “space” in theatre. However, the manner in which the seminar eventually played out compelled one to question the ITF and its vision for Indian theatre.
At the start though, in a wide ranging talk on the notion of cultural spaces, Sudhanva Deshpande employed the resonant idea of Maharashtra's theatre networks in the “urban hinterland” where spectators, organisers experienced in fund raising and building audiences in places like Sangli, Belgaum, Ichalkaranji and Kolhapur, lay at the heart of theatre activity.
Director Shankar Venkateswaran's account of his experience of space in the inner sanctum of the Shiva temple in Chidambaram was insightful. Founder and artistic director of Adishakti, Veenapani Chawla's thoughtful, though necessarily abstract paper, referred to “the aesthetic space of hereness” which “gave primacy to the live presence of the actor above all other elements in the theatre...”.
In a session on institutional spaces, K.V. Akshara spoke of NINASAM's unique experiment that had made language, literature, film and theatre the basis for the making of a rural community, while playwright Satish Alekar's version of “applied theatre” described what it takes to set up an independent and exciting theatre course at Pune University's Lalit Kala Kendra. Sanjna Kapoor's admission that the Prithvi success story had its difficult and lonely moments was an honest expression of vulnerability on the part of a dynamic arts administrator with a successful track record.
The seminar also had excellent performances including Adishakti's two pieces on the Ramayana and a Taala maddale performance in English. However, these experiences were unable to salvage a seminar beset with critical drawbacks.
For a body called the India Theatre Forum there was the fundamental question of inadequate representation of languages, forms of theatre and regions. The grassroots experiences and perspectives which could have helped us build a more authentic picture comprising the varying concerns and possibilities of Indian theatre as a whole, were missing.
In the context of urban theatre, the seminar offered greater visibility to the well connected, media savvy, confident inhabitants of New India. With links in the cultural establishment and ubiquitous on social networking sites this set is attuned to the methods and benefits of hyper-marketing themselves. Important voices like Kesavan Nambudiri and his colleagues from Kerala who were instrumental in the unostentatious success of the ITFOK festival in Thrissur in December 2010 were on the margins. For them the very premise of the seminar and its often functional reduction to a question of owning and modifying space was problematic.
Rural or non-urban practitioners are used to adapting their performances to the characters and limitations of the spaces they encounter. “Their practices are often encroached by urban practitioners which dilute and distort their own practices and these issues precede the problems of spaces. We had hoped for a wider discussion on cultural spaces and practice,” says Kesavan. But the messily curated and indifferently managed discussions over five days left most people feeling merely exhausted rather than stimulated.
Respecting diversity
When people from the non-urban space like Assam's Shukracharya Rabha who has pioneered theatre in a remote region of his state were invited, the absence of translation support for him was a glaring omission.
“What will be the equation between small groups and an important body like the ITF? Is it an association open to all and what are the criteria for joining?” asks a senior theatre-person who admits feeling confused and alienated by the many missing links and a certain brassiness which lurked beneath the informality at the seminar. An articulation of ITF's politics and views on specific questions of advocacy, approaches to marketing, fund raising, cultural values, internal governance issues would be comforting for all who are being spoken for through the ITF.
For some, the gathering was an opportunity to indulge in some strident and corporate style self promotion with architects and designers from India and abroad. These self absorbed displays took place while students from NINASAM's acting courses and a few from the Tirugata, its travelling theatre company, stayed by themselves in clusters and at the back of all forums. The Tirugata members who tour rural Karnataka for almost five months each year and clock in 120 performances every 140 days, have interesting stories to tell but nobody bothered to even consider if they felt included in the sessions. The ease with which they had been rendered invisible by the strangers who had taken over their spaces was very telling.
Sensitive aspects
The formation of ITF is an important event and its organisers need to be supported but it must first demonstrate a wider and felt interest in the diversity of Indian theatre and the strategies for reflecting it in their organisation and policies. Bereft of these sensitivities there is every danger that the ITF may just close in on itself especially at a time when Big Media and Big Entertainment are rewiring the culture sector and a homogenising of culture is underway. ITF could end up as a powerful body of well-connected members with access to corporate and government support promoting a certain kind of “successful” theatre. In the time honoured traditions of Indian cultural politics, the privileged will only get further privileged.
As the seminar drew to a close, talk veered around to “what we are going back with”. In his concluding remarks, cultural theorist and writer Rustom Bharucha tried to draw attention to the lost opportunities of the last few days by urging delegates to consider for a moment what they would be leaving behind. Given the disturbing glimpses of insularity, he added a warning against the limits of communitarianism and the need to resist cliques. He ended with Samuel Beckett's famous exhortation to “fail, fail but fail better”, a reminder of the primacy of creative struggle and an acceptance of the value of impermanence at the core of theatre and performance. But the inhabitants of urban theatre's charmed circle in contemporary India are not likely to heed such advice. Driven by a clamour for praise they are unlikely to concede that failure indeed can come bearing greater gifts than a predictable, readymade success that is theirs for the taking.
