THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE STAGERITE SEVEN

When watching a play, sometimes my attention wanders away from the actor centre stage and to some other detail off right or left. Of course it is the skill of the director to keep you looking where you ought to be focussed, but sometimes it is the omitted parts of the frame that clarify the picture!

An under-reported experiment

In the coming months, Writers’ Bloc will celebrate its 15 year anniversary. All power to Rage, the group that has stayed passionately behind the initiative through thick and thin. Needless to say, Writers’ Bloc has been wildly popular, with the who’s-who of contemporary Indian playwriting passing through and with multiple generations of theatre people involved. The commentary around Writers’ Bloc is substantial and rich with insights. However, in this kick-off on the dramaturgy series, I draw attention to a few features of another process which was the first of its kind. This was the process leading up to the StageRite Theatre Festival in Bangalore in 2002. This was my first formal engagement with dramaturgy, as part of the Royal Court Theatre/British Council/Artistes’ Repertory Theatre (ART) playwriting workshop in Bangalore. This process culminated in a festival of new plays called StageRite, and a publication of seven of the plays in an anthology StageRite Seven First in 2002. Curiously, I was also lucky to be a part of the second Writer’s Bloc process in 2006 by the Royal Court Theatre/British Council/Rage in Mumbai.

I am deeply appreciative of both experiences. This is not only because of the life-long friendships and learning, but also because I was able to participate largely due to the generosity and perspicacity of both Arundhati Raja (ART) and Shernaz Patel (Rage). I was very nearly not a part of both of these processes for various reasons, so for a long time I was just glad I had been able to participate. In retrospect, I realise I was the only playwright to have participated in both processes and began to suspect that I might have a unique perspective on things. Anupama Chandrasekhar from Chennai (soon to be the first Indian writer-in-residence at London’s National Theatre) is the only other writer who comes close, but though she was in the inaugural Writers’ Bloc, she only shadowed the StageRite process by virtue of her association with the Royal Court Theatre (RCT).

I now hope to act on my suspicion and hazard three things about StageRite that I believe noteworthy: 1) the critical engagement with dramaturgy, 2) the focus on both writers and directors, and finally 3) the commitment to a textual approach. There are of course wonderful overlaps and I hope to highlight these merits. However, this is not a comparative exercise or a summary of “what worked”. I am a believer in productive failure, and hope that this note will trigger some conversations and commentary that enriches all parties concerned.

Some background based on long memory

In many ways StageRite was ahead of its times. ART was moving into its twenty-first year. ART the theatre group, had not yet morphed into the ART Foundation behind Jagriti Theatre in Whitefield, Bengaluru. The coconut trees in the Jagriti performance space (at present called Lumbini), were a full coconut farm. The rehearsal space called Lumbini was still on Museum Road and every amateur theatre group in Bangalore ended up rehearsing there under the kind auspices of the Rao family (the steadfast and supportive Gayatri and Ashok Rao). The Ranga Shankara had not yet been built. South Bangalore had not yet acquired a snooty disdain for Bangalore’s vibrant pub culture. South Bangalore and Whitefield had not been entirely overrun by IT professionals and companies. Thomas Friedman had not yet driven from the old HAL Bangalore airport to the Karnataka Golf Association lawns imagining himself to be Christopher Columbus. He had not yet seen a Texas instrument sign hanging from a traffic light and leaped to the conclusion that the world was flat. Bengaluru was Bangalore and Whitefield was not yet ground-zero, where the forces of globalisation (or neoliberalism for the harsher critic) had crash-landed and built a gated-community for itself. Fortunately, Mallika Prasad reminds me that before Bangalore got stereotyped as the IT city it was the R&D city, where labs (aeronautics, space, pure sciences) pioneered national innovation. Mallika Prasad, an accomplished Bangalore actor and director in her own right, has witnessed all my dramaturgical experimentation up close and has seen the concepts in action in the plays of AEIF. Many of our plays have also deeply engaged with the city. In any case, Bangalore as a centre of innovation seems a more truthful context, since it is based on a longer memory!

At the time, Arundhati and Jagdish Raja, the dynamic duo behind ART were tirelessly championing the need for contemporary writing for the Indian stage. The constant refrain, at least amongst the very small theatre community working in English was that there was only so much Neil Simon, Ariel Dorfman, Athol Fugard and Shakespeare adaptations one could do. Where was the contemporary writing? Walking the talk, was Gautam Raja, their son, who was the first playwright from India to attend the Royal Court Residency in London back in 1996. An association developed on the mutual interest in new writing. After several years of proposals and planning, the residency in Bangalore happened. The first part of the process was facilitated by a troika from the RCT – Elsye Dodgson, Dominic Cooke and April de Angelis. Thirteen writers, eleven from all over India and two from Sri Lanka participated. Ostensibly, this was because of a British Council focus on “South Asia”, but that division is as meaningless as “Asia”, when it comes to encompassing the cultural and narrative diversity of anything non Anglo-American or European.

On dramaturgy

We went headlong into dramaturgy. Character, objectives, dialogue, subtext, and Aristotle’s Poetics. It was heady indeed. It was a great relief to be in a safe space, working on playwriting craft. As the lore goes, not like a “play-writer” of feathered quilt, keen observation and deep erudition, but like a “play-wright” much like a medieval English wright or smith (cart-wright or blacksmith) – an artisan and craftsman, hammering and banging away in a workshop. Sessions on structure, character and dialogue opened up exciting possibilities. Suddenly, the adverb was a mortal enemy, as was the Tennessee William’s style stage direction. Dialogue shot to the fore, with an emphasis on the spoken word, and the use of punctuation designed for speech. A neglected piece of punctuation, the forward slash (/), allowed for overlaps and interruptions in dialogue. Pauses and silences were not passive, but could actively be loaded by a playwright. The StageRite process engaged writers in all this dramaturgy with rigour and intensity. Then there was subtext…

It was at this point that I began to feel a little discomfort with the dramaturgy. I have no objection to subtext as a tool in playwriting. It is a strange contemporary playwright who can outright reject subtext, since it is one of the entry points into the psychological world of character. This was of course the Stanislavskian method I had bumped into, as staple a diet for the trained actor, as Aristotlean plotting ought to be to the playwright. As the trained Stanislavkian would probe the lines to reveal hidden subtext, we were being taught to provide it in the first place! Yet, the English insistence on subtext had an odd effect on spoken Indian English, with its particular rhythms, slang and seamless interjections from one or more vernacular languages. I found that the subtextual approach had limits, even as I knew for certain Indians did not often sit at a park bench and discuss the weather as a conversational starter! When the tool takes over the craftsman, it is a blinkered craftsman that is to blame.

My discomfort was vindicated at the latter end of the playwright’s workshop when discussions with Chandrashekar Kambar, Mahesh Dattani and others, exploded with debates on methodology. In brief, the politics of writing back to Empire, post-colonial anxiety over writing in English and garden-variety claims of cultural imperialism were heatedly discussed. I must thank this part of the process for instilling in me a healthy critical self-reflexivity, in what was a genuinely unique moment! I have not seen a similar space when participants, pedagogues and practitioners all spoke with each other. Later on, discussions with playwrights working in other languages at Writers’ Bloc confirmed many of my suspicions as they too struggled to “adapt” the tools to their needs. Yet, I felt playwrights remained largely insulated from critical debates in the Writer’s Bloc process.

On Stanislavskian approaches

StageRite was unusual because it also had a distinct workshop for directors interested in working with new writing. It was a one of a kind experiment. Though the RCT ran playwriting workshops and directing workshops, there had never before or since been an attempt to run both workshops as part of the same process. As a “phase-two” to the training, nine directors engaged with two RCT directors Hettie Macdonald and Ramin Gray on directing contemporary plays. There were directors from Chennai, Hyderabad and Bangalore, including Arundhati Raja herself. Additionally two Bangladeshi directors were part of this phase of training, in another odd “South Asian” moment! Of the thirteen playwrights, nine had managed to produce plays and the directors engaged with these texts over four days. Playwrights and directors were then “matched” and worked together for the rest of the workshop. I was not privy to these first four days of the director’s workshop, but it was a wonderful moment indeed when playwrights wandered into the room full of directors who had been grappling with our work, and the whole room erupted in a spontaneous standing ovation!

What was most beneficial was that directors too had trained in broadly the same method, with a focus on objectives, obstacles and the excavation of subtext. This immediately created a shared vocabulary/language for both writers and directors. Finally, when actors walked into the mix asking, “What’s my motivation?” everyone was pulling in the same direction. Writers might call it “intention”, directors might call it “actioning” but we were all approximately getting at the same thing in psychological terms. The net result was an ease of working, that allowed the text to be the central fulcrum around which everyone operated.

However, like an arranged marriage coming apart, the matching of playwrights and directors was as much a source of misery as it was an energising combination. Arranged marriages only work if you buy into tradition, and some of us did and some didn’t. If I may be forgiven this awkward metaphor, Writer’s Bloc was more successful in relation, since it worked a bit more like a dating service. There was a bit less pressure to be “matched” and the pairing up of writers and directors was handled more sensitively. In practice, and I may be forgiven my metaphors again, I remember Shernaz was emotionally invested in every writer’s baby-text. Each was found a good home and a good family with a great deal of love and care.

The textual “tradition”

Some of the questions that arose at StageRite have driven my own dramaturgical quests. If Aristotle’s Poetics is the foundational text, then what of Bharata Muni’s NatyaShastra (NS)? How come one classical Greek text had easily journeyed into practical dramaturgy, while the other required a complicated detour into comparative aesthetics and a study of the traditional actor’s performance protocols? If anagnorisis, peripeteia and hamartia could be fashioned into the workable tools of plotting and character (revelations, reversals and psychological-flaws), surely the seven point structure of NS could work in the same way? (At Writers Bloc, the playwright Asif Ali Khan and I made an attempt to do this on the fly!) It was only after bucking against the socialist realism embedded in the RCT dramaturgy for several years that I truly began to engage with the diversity of narrative forms available to a contemporary playwright in India, and what might be described as various post-Stanislavskian approaches to text.

The good news was that it was not only writers that were rebelling against the RCT dramaturgy. Directing for new writing is a specialised skill, and requires a different mindset from picking up the text of a dead, distant or disinterested writer. Some time after StageRite, the RCT discontinued its director training. I have it on good anecdotal evidence that one of the contributory causes behind the closure was a Mumbai director who was “matched” with an English playwright in workshop. The playwright had written a ten page/five-minute scene and the director, an expert at devised work, found the oppression and implicit cultural hegemony of having to reveal subtext and character going beat-by-beat, line by line quite unbearable. So he took the first line of the first stage direction written by the playwright and developed a twenty-five minute improvisation around it with the actors! Clearly dramaturgical indigestion is not a symptom of only a playwright’s bowels!

Less process, more methodology!

Historians generally agree that after 30 years have elapsed, one can write up an event and claim objective distance. We are only about half-way there, so it makes sense that I am only half-objective and that this is only half-history!

I now believe that the playwright’s text, the actor’s embodied presence, the director’s vision, the ensembles’ collective experiences may all be the starting point of a creative journey. In all instances dramaturgy bridges the gap, from creative impulse to performance outcome. I also believe there is a wealth of information about Indian dramaturgy, if one is willing to  let go of Stanislavsky and also acknowledge that contemporary textual approaches are equally engaged with tradition. My own explorations have led me to frame-narratives or stories within stories, counterpoint driven as opposed to conflict driven scenes and even myth based structures. Some of this I teach in workshops, some of this I don’t teach to beginners. Some of these ideas exists in musical theory, some were culled from art history and some from physical vocabularies. There are many ways of play-making, and there are many people invested in dramaturgy. However, somewhere along the way, there is always a text, and there should be. It may not look like a “text”, but some objective ordering of ideas ought to exist. This is because sharing process is only noteworthy if it concerns robust dramaturgical questions. Why?

Many years on and with globalisation in full retreat, the world is quite a bit scarier. Debates are shriller, and less likely to change anyones mind about anything. Anti-intellectualism is encouraged. Memories are shorter, we can’t remember phone numbers, and cell phones constantly encourage us to be physically present but mentally elsewhere. After passionately throwing myself in with anti-globalisation movements, I now guesstimate we are going to be in quite a bit of trouble when it’s gone. I am reminded of the meme where a group takes a wefie and declares grinning from ear-to-ear, “No generation has documented itself so well, achieving so little!”.

The learning from StageRite is certainly worth considering in the coming months. The numerous innovations and trials of this first process are definitely noteworthy for anyone interested in contemporary Indian playwriting. The inclusion of the curious case of the StageRite Seven would also be a more truthful way of talking about contemporary text-based work, since it is based on the longer memory!

Ram Ganesh Kamatham is co-editor of e-Rang. He is a playwright and director with the Actors Ensemble India Forum.

The brave guinea-pigs of StageRite Seven First. From L-R (back): Harsha Dandapani, Vivek Tandon, Ganesh Pai, Jehan Aloysius, Ram Ganesh Kamatham, Delon Weerasinghe, (front) Ninaz Khodaiji, Anushka Ravishankar, Shekinah Jebaraj