The seminar at Ninasam was a real eye-opener.
It was everything a seminar should be - a place for sharing ideas, a place where the desire to shoot and choke someone to death is legitimate and a place where there is a lovely forum to slug, sludge and smash each other to pieces within a constructive framework.
Having said this - here are my (two bit) observations:
1. The defining moment for me was the address by P. Sainath - responded to by Shiv Visvanathan.Of course it's easy to fall over and slobber over Sainath and the towering individual/superstar/icon that he is, but for me the gripping rejoinder by Shiv was what made the argument balanced. (I was reminded of the classic Brutus versus Mark Anthony - head versus heart clash - but that's just my cheesy brain making the arbitrary connection.)
I've been whining about icons, how there are no role models, how there are no more mighty heroes that we can look up to. Well I just met two pure blooded Titans at the seminar - Shiv and Sainath.
Individually they didn't make complete sense to me. Sainath hammered us with sentimentalism and emotional blackmail, slammed dismal facts in our face and generally made us all feel like myopic urban armchair intellectuals – even going so far as to prescribe the appropriate individual responses to his speech. Shiv reduced things to processes – speaking of the insidious transformation from victim to patient in the public forgetfulness of tragedy via the Bhopal disaster – literally giving emotion a tight logical-slap in the face. For me these two heroes emerged from this fusion –
the clash of the Titans. Two individuals who were saying the same thing, asking the same questions (and holy crap those are tough questions):
Who benefits? Who suffers? Who is excluded from this lovely thing we call progress? (Ironically neither of these Titans are theatre practitioners, which bothers me a great deal. But more on this later.)
These two individuals are asking such staggering questions that I feel it is almost imperative to react… When the great minds and thinkers of our times are asking us such hard questions, how in hell do I respond with my art? Can my art even begin to answer the scale of these questions? Can my theatre effectively respond to this towering duo - this journalist and sociologist?
2. Theatre practitioners are woolly headed wimps.(I include myself in this happily irresponsible generalization.) If I am to receive this accurately: According to Makarand Sathe's interview of Vijay Tendulkar, Tendulkar says that it is innately natural for a man to want to hit a woman. Sathe goes onto qualify that he does not believe that to be true and elucidates this further in his play (which I missed) but is left-hooked by woman in audience (I don't know her name) who objects strongly to her body (woman's) being used as a battleground for aged men's' sexist agendas. Put this argument next to the magnitude of the Sainath-Shiv struggle and we suddenly want to innately hit all three of these people. I'm not junking their debate – I'm stating the absurdity of this argument, timed as it were, just after the Shiv-Sainath statements. My point is that while the non-theatre crowd is gripped in such compelling contemporary debate, I found the theatre crowd screwing around with abstractions, advancing the incredibly irritating liberal humanist agendas that we seem to have hard-wired into our court-jester skulls.
3. Theatre practitioners are woolly headed wimps.Yes, this deserves additional qualification since this is something I am personally grappling with. There was a really funny agit-prop piece that I saw that was apparently written after the Gujarat disaster – Yeh Dil Mange More – if I remember correctly. It was so funny. The actions revolved around a bunch of goofball fundamentalists (abstractions of the VHP, Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and so on…) who were building the ideal Hindu Rashtriya who did many silly things – the funniest being repeatedly kick one character's bum (Bahubali! – thum gadhe ho!) whenever he messed up. I loved the performance, but I hated with a vengeance the black-and-white-intelligence that surrounded the piece. It was like resistance for dummies: Fundamentalist = BAD, MNC=Pepsi+Coke= EVIL, GUJARAT = tragedy = national shame.
With all their dramatic weaponry wielded, the best they managed was reductio ad absurdum.
I think what I am personally struggling with is this: is that all we can come up with? As artists – even at the agit-prop level, what dramaturgical engagement can you cite that is more comprehensive than expression of sentiment, what can you deliver that is more than just biting satire, what can you personally do, that takes your piece above textbook resistance and into incisive dramatic insight? I loved the piece that was performed, I was so very annoyed that the piece played absolutely safe and never once took any risks. Which brings back the question to self: How is my art effectively responding to Shiv and Sainath?
4. What good is a liberal humanist agenda?I've run into this debate on more than a few occasions and have managed to pin down a few thoughts. At the International Residency we all wrote down a list of verbs that (as writers) we wanted our plays to perform on the audience. We then ranked what were the most important verbs personally and as a group. It was a lovely exercise, some of the ones I remember were: entertain, educate, mesmerize, provoke, challenge, smash, brutalise. I think "entertain and educate" produce Broadway/West End Musicals and I think that "smash and brutalise" accounts for writers like Kane and Barker. I think I was hovering around the "provoke, mesmerise, challenge" area. What I'm getting at is "entertain and educate" can easily turn into "avoid confrontation and placate all parties…" in which case one might as well be writing episodes of Friends. I think I need to be working a lot harder to respond to these questions, and I mustn't give myself the luxury of "Let's keep it simple and funny." Of course I could give myself that luxury, but then I’d just be a woolly headed wimp.
5. There was no young urban voice in the seminar.I had to keep pinching myself to convince myself that the year was not 1986, especially when some speakers were talking about IP, the impact of television on theatre and contemporary theatre practice with such outdated arguments that I really began to wonder how much of a yuppie urban techno-brat I am. I really respect my seniors in theatre, but I think I'd like to volunteer for the job of whacking some of them over the head with my plays to remind them of some of the problems of the 21st century! (And I pray that someone will be around to do the same for me.)
While some of them stand around squeezing tomatoes and ejaculating over King Lear, Mr. Sainath is asking me what I was doing when farmer suicides crossed the 400 mark in Vidharbha, while over 500 journalists were busy elsewhere covering the Lakme Fashion Week. And while Mr. Shiv is slapping me up with this brain busting observation:
"The socio-drama of India lies in the eventless events – erasure, displacement, obsolescence and triage. Democracy needs to constrict them in new ways beyond the standard theatre right and left." – A senior theatre practitioner had this gem to offer:
"Is TV a torchbearer of late capitalism parallel to the role of the novel in the 19th century?"
Well that's enough of a rant. I wish we had more time to attend more of the sessions, but anyway the show went down well. Creeper raised more than a few eyebrows I suspect. Time to take another whack at Into Stone…
Important note to self: I am not a woolly headed wimp.
