With: Rustom Bharucha, Stuti Bhavsar, Maya Dodd, Lakshmana KP, Sananda Mukhopadhyaya, Ashutosh Potdar, Sunil Shanbag, Brahma Prakash Singh, Suvani Suri, Arushi Vats, Yang Siting, and Zhao Chuan

Further Artistic Contributions: Priyanka Chhabra, Soumyabrata Choudhury, Amitesh Grover, Han Lele, Lian Zikun, Liu Chengzhen, and Sun Yaqi

The term field imaginary describes the ways “in which a given discipline or scholarly field sets its own boundaries” (Christopher Connery). Often these boundaries are the result of invisible ideological labor, that expresses itself in spatial and temporal division. Through our gathering we want to interrupt and push these geographical and historical boundaries that are attached to existing imaginations of documentary theatre. Together with peers from theatre practice and from scholarship, we want to re-organize this prevailing knowledge by applying perspectives that are grounded in practice and research from India and China.

The design of Field Imaginations is an interweaving of performance works, conversations with practitioners, an exchange of research strategies with scholars and agendas and methods of editors and publishers. These dialogues are also aimed at building a Documentary Theatre curriculum, where a future undergraduate or graduate student of documentary theatre might be expected to know something about worker´s theatre in Shenzhen, the concept of experts of everyday life, Ambedkarite Songs as a form of protest, the status of documentary material in contemporary Asian dance, and about the effects that digitization has on documentation, for instance. Since the imagination of a field is also a pedagogical project its opportune that we are hosted on the campus of a well-respected Indian University, FLAME, where we hope this curriculum is seeded and takes root.

This symposium is supported by Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Mumbai and held in collaboration with the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, School of Design, Art & Performance, FLAME University, Pune.

THE SCHEDULE:

JUNE 26th 2023

JUNE 27th 2023

PROGRAM DETAILS

FILM: A MIGRANT WORK by Soumyabrata Choudhury and Priyanka Chhabra:

“A Migrant Walk” is both film and a performance, created as a documentary caricature of Brecht’s radio play “The Lindbergh Flight”. Choudhury takes Brecht’s optimism about progress, the myth of the newly-mobile mankind that dares to conquer the ocean non-stop alone, and juxtaposes it with the reality of the forced mobility and defenselessness of Indian migrant workers, millions of whom move from village to metropole in search of work.

PANEL 1: ON THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY FOR LIFE- UPDATING DOCUMENTARY STRATEGIES:

The documentary form has become associated with acts of remembrance - personal stories, archival gestures, and approaches that utilize bodies as historical archives dominate the documentary stages. This aesthetics mimics the “N(YOU) media” (Wendy Chun), which puts the personal and “authentic” identity of the user in the center of all reception. Thus turning identity into the only currency of public and political action. By evoking Nietzsche`s critical intervention into the fetishization of history and documents (that he published as part two of his “Untimely Mediations” in 1871), this panel wants to ask if there are any useful roles that forgetting and difference could play in documentary procedures.
(The perspective of this panel partly draws from Siting Yang`s lecture during Tuchmann and Ghosalkar`s online theatre course WOULD I LIE TO YOU?)

LECTURE PERFORMANCE: DAKLAKATHA DEVIKAVYA by Lakshmana KP

In the lecture performance Lakshmana will talk about the process of making the play, the texts and documents used to construct the narrative. Through his illustrations of songs and music from the show he will delineate the role of instruments and lyrics in the making of the complex performance, Daklakatha Devikavya among other things.

Excerpt from the playbook of Daklakatha Devikavya:
Daklakatha  Devikavya is an experimental play drawing on the epic poetry and stories from Kannada write and founder member of the Dalit Sangharsha Samiti, K.B. Siddaiah. This experimental piece begins with a re-reading of a cosmogonic myth—from a community that is oppressed even amongst the oppressed—narrating the origins of the world and life on it. The play progresses through weaving and unraveling untouchable rituals, beliefs, hunger and desires through song and storytelling. For untouchable communities nudi (speech, sound, voiceand word) is like breath that cannot be separated from the body. The play uses instrumentssuch as the areye and tamte as vines of nudi that enmesh the narrative and sprout new directions from within. Thereby opening up the untouchable world as a world of deep sonic imprints. In a context such as this, the play confronts what happens when the ‘written word’ that has so far been unreachable collides with and becomes an organ of the untouchable body, giving rise to a new relationship of intimacy and struggle.

WORKSHOP: HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS WHEN PUBLISHING ON PERFORMANCE?

By investigating existing radical experiments in the field of performance-publishing, this workshop sets out to deduce tactics that allow one to extend curatorial gestures into a book.
The background for this is that Kai Tuchmann and Anuja Ghosalkar are currently creating the scaffolding of their newest book on histories and practices of documentary theatre in India. They understand this publication as an expansion of their own curatorial work into the field of writing. While classical performance writing stays within the world of a single play, their curatorial approach is concerned with the orbit of interactions that theatre productions have with their outside. Consisting out of theatre makers and editors, this workshop tackles the question: What strategies allow one to extend a curatorial approach into a book?

TREE WALK: SAHYADRI OVERSTORY by Sananda Mukhopadhyaya

A walk around the FLAME campus, to meet local trees from the Sahyadri range and others who now call it home. The walk will introduce participants to ways to looking at trees, to recognise and celebrate them while also listening to readings from literature about tree life. Having grown up with biologist parents Sananda Mukhopadhyaya developed a kinship with the natural world, especially trees. Through her tree walk titled ‘Mumbai Overstory` which she facilitates in Mumbai, she aims to make people more aware of the trees they share the island with and hope this knowledge brings a spark of joy and wonder to their daily Mumbai lives.

FILM BASED ON RESEARCH: FUCK BRECHT! by Liu Chengzhen, Han Lele, Lian Zikun and Sun Yaqi

In this video work, four students reflect on their relationships with Brecht— including all their emotion, anger, rationality, analysis, confusion, discovery. Under the banner of “misreading”, they juxtapose historical materials with recent productions, combine personal feelings with academic concepts. Who the fuck is Brecht anyway? He is a German who brings us debate and confusion. In the second half of the 20th century, when Brecht entered China, chaos began to ensue. Yes, we need him. His ideology is no problem and contributes to our Communist cause, but this strange western writer… Who is he? What is the alienation effect? How does it create the distance between the stage and the audience? How to deal with the fucking empathy? Is there a real, essential Brecht? We create another “Brecht” and use it to pursue our own political goals. Fuck the real Brecht.            

PANEL 2: THE DRAMA WITH EDUCATION - PEDAGOGIES OF THE DOCUMENTARY:

This panels gathers speakers from various contexts of theatre education. Together they will unpack the following questions: what aspects of craftsmanship and techniques are unique to the documentary form and which masteries of the dramatic idiom cannot or should not be undone?   What are the demands of this form when it comes to curriculum- and syllabus making? How can one institutionalize the autonomy of creativity?