It’s like one of those United Nations-sanctioned days of observance that have a nice ring to them, and seek to raise awareness or action about some cause or the other. For instance, the World Wildlife Day (March 3), which pledged to stem the alarming decline in worldwide populations of ‘big cats’; or the World Autism Awareness Day (April 5), whose focus this year is to empower women and girls with autism, or even the self-explanatory World No-Tobacco Day (May 31). There are literally scores of international days to choose from, and among them is World Theatre Day, a relatively low-profile occasion increasingly gaining traction in India, which will be celebrated today by those associated with the stage. It’s a commemoration initiated in 1961 by the International Theatre Institute (ITI), a UNESCO-affiliated organisation for the performing arts that completes seven decades of its existence this year.
Global interceptions
This year, for the first time ever, the much-anticipated World Theatre Day message will be delivered by not just one international personage, but by five sources from across the globe. This list includes India’s Ram Gopal Bajaj, veteran theatremaker and former director of the National School of Drama. The only other time an Indian has delivered the annual message was in 2002, when eminent playwright Girish Karnad spoke of the Myth of the First Performance, as described in the opening chapter of the Natya Shastra , and drove home the idea that theatre might be “signing its own death warrant when it tries to play too safe”. Bajaj’s address doesn’t shy away from platitudes, but the Syria-based Zoukak Theatre Company’s Maya Zbib, in her message, speaks with a passion of how the cataclysms of the world can find an antidote in viable life-affirming theatre. She signs off, “We are many, we are fearless and we are here to stay!”
The eternity of life, and by association, of theatre itself, is a leitmotif we come across often. Théâtre de Complicité’s Simon McBurney, of the United Kingdom, starts his address with a mention of the Haua Fteah, a vast rock shelter near the Cyrenaican coast in Northern Libya, where bone flutes dated from more than 40,000 to 70,000 years ago have been unearthed. As all human communities, even prehistoric denizens had music. To paraphrase portions of McBurney’s message, while the past is obliterated, theatre persists forever, even if every act of theatre lives in the moment, in the ‘here and now’, it is part of an ever-moving continuum. “And if we were to hold the Cyrenaican flute from 40,000 years ago, we would understand the past and the present here are indivisible, and the chain of human community can never be broken by the tyrants and demagogue,” he says.
Theatre and its worth
Karnad is one of the organisation’s World Theatre Ambassadors, a list that included Vaclav Havel and Augusto Boal. The ITI has 90 centres across the world, and its Indian chapter is located in Pune, its president being noted theatre maker Sushama Deshpande. The purpose of World Theatre Day is to promote the art in all its forms, and make people aware of its value. To this end, there is a hubbub of activity organised by theatre organisations around the world. For instance, in Surat, a marathon of non-stop theatre for 24 hours, featuring 280 artistes performing 80 plays, will be organised by the Surat Performing Artists’ Association. Under the aegis of the Theatre Olympics, an international seminar titled ‘Who Shrunk My Theatre?’ on the dwindling popularity of theatre will be held in Delhi, and is slated to be broadcast on the official Facebook page of the festival.
Of course, the death knell of theatre is always sounded from time to time. A day of pride can hardly resuscitate this most marginalised of art forms, but it does somehow signal a show of strength that is almost in variance with this perception of doom. We see a world in which theatre appears to be thriving, and that is also a misleading notion. The truth, as they say, lies in between. One might actually benefit from suspending this preoccupation with the temporality of performing arts, and instead worry about the mediocrity that pervades it, or the systems that fail it, or the people it doesn’t yet reach, and not for want of trying.
