Over a series of solo and group acts, performative speech and demo sessions, a two-day festival of ideas at Adishakti challenged notions of theatre and experimented with a range of aesthetic formats.
The baseCollective research festival Truth and Lies in Times of Fake News was as much a challenging experience for the audience as it was for the artistes who were presenting a theatrical debut of concepts and themata evolved during a three-month residency at Adishakti.
The festival started with the lecture performance “The Future-Box”. Two actresses, Ruchita Bhujbal and Susanne Valerie Granzer appeared on stage as blindfolded oracles, who vanish into a cardboard box. Though invisible to the audience, their voices can still be heard.
The spectacle aspect of theatre gives way to philosophical, and even political, thought as ethereal voices of ancient and contemporary philosophers advance their visions of a future for humanity.
For instance, Immanuel Kant’s promise of a future of humanity, in which citizenship will have become a transnational affair.
Or Hannah Arendt’s plea to reflect the abyss that shows up between the rights a state grants its citizens and the human rights, which claim to be universal, despite of somebody’s nationality.
Also to arise is the voice of the tantric master Abhinavagupta with a call to the audience to adopt a harmony of heart and mind and embrace a pluralistic universality by placing themselves into the position of others.
In other words, a call for becoming pluralist, decentred, open minded and heart-minded. Whenever the two oracles exit the ‘Future Box’, the Viena-based philosopher Arno Boehler and baseCollective founder appear on stage to transform these voices of the past into a voice of a promising future.
His appearance on stage was accompanied by a sound carpet, produced by the sound artist Nina Bauer.
“The emphasis, from the opening, was clear that this festival did not intend to entertain the audience. It rather transformed the audience into artistic researchers who were called to sense, and simultaneously reflect their being-in-the-world collectively,” said Arno Bohler, who cofounded baseCollective with spouse and actress Susanne Valerie Granzer.
The subsequent sessions would progressively delve deeper and deeper into the theme of the festival — “Truth and Lies in Times of Fake News”.
Interactive mode
In true interactive mode of the festival format, the audience would continually be invited to discuss the significance of fake news in our post-truth times.
The audience was encouraged to read and interpret texts collectively, listen to a rap song (Niels Wildschut, Nina Bauer), watch a faked Pac-Man video animation (Ruchita Bhujbal) and visit performative installations (Namrata Chhabria Arjun, Nina Bauer, Alla Charnagalov, Lisa Großkopf, Manu Sharma), which involved body exercise.
Sandra Noeth, Professor from the University of Arts Berlin, while delivering a talk, confronted the audience with the disturbing fact that in the context of different migratory movements in the European Union, refugees started indeed to fake their fingerprints by various techniques — transplanting skin from the feet to the fingers; biting up the fingertips; etching them with acid; swallowing chemicals that cause mutation to dismember themselves from their scanned identities. “The word “fake” takes on an entire new meaning in such uncanny gestures,” she said.
Solo performances
Six solo performances were shown in the course of the festival in which the question of fake news became an artistic matter of experimental theatrical investigations on truth and lies.
Ruchita Bhujbal explored the phenomenon in the context of mythological narratives, Prasanna B. Hambarde in socio-political respects, Savita Rani, Anuradha Upadhya and Bharati Kapadia from the perspective of a novice faced with an uncanny bluring of facts and fictions, and also in respect to gender issues.
Varun Aiyer examined the ritual question of truth. Nothing encapsulated the festival doctrine better than a dissection by Soumyabrata Choudhury, professor at JNU, of the problem of truth and lies in relation to the magic power of performative speech acts, according to Mr. Bohler.
Speech acts is where one just declares something to be truth, without considering the facts, or reasonable arguments. If a powerful person, e.g. a Head of State, declares that climate change is no fact, but just an opinion, truth is reduced to a verbal speech act uttered by somebody having the conventional right and power to speak the truth.
Under such conditions, Prof. Choudhury claimed, truth becomes grotesque, because it becomes obvious for everybody, self-contradictory.
