The force of truth and political theatre: Prasanna

Prasanna has always intrigued and inspired me. His theatre career spans several decades and includes seminal productions such as Cupid’s Broken Arrow, Agni Barkha, Dekho Dragon Hindustani, Uttara Ramcharitram, and Akhri Kitab. He embodies a rare balance of energies. His life of firebrand political activism seamlessly dovetails into a refined aesthetic and directorial sensibility. Intellectually towering yet personally humble, his work both in the theatre and outside of it, has been ground breaking.

As a student in college I was an avid amateur participant in his theatre workshops. Many years later I was awed by his involvement with with Charaka and Desi,, a rural women’s co-operative producing and retailing handloom weaves. Bangalore at the time was being ravaged by an influx of business process outsourcing industries operating with little or no regulation. My interest in immaterial labour, such as that of call centre workers, led me to study classical labour movements. Charaka is a case study in things done right and remains a shining example of a contemporary social experiment that succeeded, creating a thriving rural economy, livelihoods and dignity of labour. Prasanna’s Gandhian khadi-spinning ashram in Bheemanakone, near Heggodu demonstrates the viability of sustainable living practices. His most recent campaign, fronted by the Gram Seva Sangha, successfully took on the blanket GST implementation in defence of handloom weavers who would be adversely impacted by the tax. The agitation also included the performance of a play Tayavva, a free adaptation of Brecht’s The Mother, among other activities. In his steadfast intellectual journey, he also published a book titled Indian Method in Acting. The publication is a novel experiment in situating Stanislavskian ideas into Indian performative idioms, and developing an indigenous vocabulary to describe and conceptualize actor training.

Prasanna on a hunger strike as part of Tax Denial Satyagraha Pic courtesy Gram Seva Sangha

I managed to meet him during the GST satyagraha in Bengaluru. As a testament to his energy, he took time away from the hunger strike to give two interviews. I sat in on a conversation between Prasanna and Moodnakodu Chinnaswami, a Kannada poet and Dalit activist. Their debate centered around sustainability and sustainable living with the village as the locus of transformation. Their conversation sounded like a textbook debate between a Gandhian and an Ambedkarite, and after a short break I was able to talk to Prasanna.

RGK: Many of us working in the theatre today feel a tension between our art and our activism. Can you speak a little bit about this tension?

Prasanna: This crisis that you talk about, the crisis that a lot of theatre people, a lot of artists, are facing today – started with art becoming a commodity. The effects of this commodification are felt most strongly in the theater. Unlike other mediums theatre is a very attractive medium, because theatre people use their own body. The expression in theatre is semiotic, and not just intellectual. It is the most potential medium. And they commodified it! They brought in film, television and serials. Today there is no separation between theatre and money, theatre and the market. So with this crisis, a lot of theatre people became uncomfortable. They didn’t mind becoming marginalized, they didn’t mind producing their plays for small communities. They didn’t mind going into schools and working with children. But what they did mind was the fact that, what they were doing in the theatre, was being misused by some idiot capitalist.

I tried to handle this crisis for about two decades by actually training young actors. But then drama school itself became a television or cinema training center. Drama school stopped giving enough focus on vachika, angika and on drama itself. There was a lot of bullshit improvisation. There was a lot of letting your angst come out somehow. Either it was angst or sex that provided quick audiences and we theatre people went into that.

So I said let me go into real life. That is when I decided to go into the village.  And started working with handloom weavers. The handloom weaver, or the potter or the cobbler, they are our cousins, and we have unfortunately forgotten this. Artists and artisans, the artist and the craftsperson are cousins. Even today in our folk art, they are the same. It is the artisan, who during the lean period performs or sings a song or writes a poem. That link has been completely damaged and what I am trying to do is re-establish that link. Today I am sitting on a fast, so that under the GST regime all handloom products should be tax exempt. There should be zero tax on handmade products. Why? Because I don’t want my cousins to die! They are poor cousins but very rich culturally. We are killing them. What is Mr Modi or Mr Siddahrammiah gaining out of this? It is only the market gaining.

In your conversation with Chinnaswami just now, you spoke about how GST will “ring fence” artisans into a marginal space…

The real is being ring fenced and the virtual is being propagated. The ring fencing that you are seeing most acutely in the village, seems to tell the small craftsperson, “Alright you pot makers, all right you cobblers, you just stay in the village. Stay in the village heart. Hum karenge. Hum pura desh or vishva ko chalayenge. Hum market ko chalayenge. (We will do it. We will run the entire country, the world and the market).” It’s the same bullshit. We are not going to allow this to happen. If it means that I have to stop producing plays, I don’t care.

What would your advice be to young theatre people just beginning their journey? How do they orient themselves politically? There seem a vast array of choices and camps to choose from… Ambedkarities, Gandhians… not to mention the various buzz-words out there… It can be confusing.

We are faced with discordant notes. We have been taught to look at everything in a discordant way, in a divided way. We have been taught that looking at anything holistically is wrong! For example, for my cousins in the folk theatre there is no distinction between morality and theatre. There is no distinction between God and theatre. When a folk performer performs, he is both performing a religious or a dharmic act and an entertainment. This marriage between entertainment and dharma is so vital and we have lost that link.

Today a theatre person does not know why he or she is performing. We should seriously ask ourselves this question. There is a very simple answer. The theatre person is holding the morality of the society aloft. The theatre person is a critic. But today what should they be criticizing? We have to criticize this discordancy, this fencing off of anything that is real and natural. We have to be talking about it, producing plays about it, singing about it. I think people have started doing this, so I’m not criticizing theater people. Because poor fellows they have to have their two meals! In spite of all these problems, theatre people are doing this. But society is not recognizing this. The society does not want to come to your play if you are not showing them your thighs or presenting some bullshit angst.

So on one hand there is this theatre of gratification and commodification, but on the other hand there is ideologically-driven theatre. It is often the case that agitprop or agenda-based theatre has little aesthetic or artistic merit. That’s not much of a choice.

No no. I am saying we should become Kabir all over again. Kabir was a practitioner and a saint. Theatre people should not feel shy of taking on this. We are shy and feel we are illiterates, but it is good that we are illiterates. We should not shy of become a Ravidas or Kabir. My play should do exactly what Kabir tried to do. He was also shunned while he was alive. Who cares for a weaver? Even in the fifteenth century. But we should do exactly what they did and not bother about how society will receive it. Tomorrow society will realise it was the theatre people who stood up for truth, when everybody else was chasing entertainment, money, and the market. Theatre people stood their ground. Isn’t this a great complement one can have from society, or from the gods?

Could you tell us a little bit about your contemporaries, especially when you just began working in the theatre, coming out of drama school (NSD). What was the situation like in Karnataka at the time?

Look we were all very lucky. Me and my generation. Bansi Kaul, Raina… we were post-Baba Karanth-ji. BV Karanth-ji was elder to me. We were lucky in the sense that when I came out of drama school in 1975, I arrived in an emergency-ridden Karnataka. I was not political in a real “party” sense. But we were all drawn to politics because of the emergency. And we used to go on a motorbike quietly to some party secretary of the Marxist party and we used to discuss things. And then we did plays. You see the 75 – 80 period when we did plays was an amazing time. Because we did street plays for the sake of the poor people who were trapped in the emergency, but at the same time we also did serious theatre, or what you would call the proscenium theatre, the 90 minute play. So we did both the 20 minute street play, and the 90 minute artistic theatre. And that is when I did my best productions. That is when I wrote my best work.

So I am lucky and I want you people to be lucky. Luck happens when you make an effort. See after the 80s, the smiling faced Rajiv Gandhi came to power in Delhi and the even more smiling faced Ramakrishna Hegde came to power in Karnataka. They were the ones who took away the entire artistic crowd, and made them into the zonal cultural center heads or academy presidents and members. And we did not know how to fight them. They would come to you, they were natural, they started treating you with respect. So in some way Indira Gandhi was a better thing because at least she had put the emergency in place! Though I have seen her in her better days, when she used to come and watch plays.

Whatever the case, it was in the 80s, on the one hand when you had these smiling-faced politicians, on the other hand all the channels started coming up. Thirdly, suddenly actors started getting money in Bombay. The crisis for me started then, that is when I said all right I don’t want to get into cinema and television. I don’t want to go to Bombay. Let me go and work with young actors. I had an example in front of me in KG Subramanyam. For decades, KG Subramanyam went, and worked with actors in Baroda school and in Shantiniketan. So I was very inspired by this. It was bad times. But in bad times I said let me at least prepare the young actors to face the bad times and do a good job and make good theatre. Between the 80s and now I kept on training actors. It was one of my best experiences because I could do a lot of young theatre. A lot of my productions in Delhi. Even my Uttara Ramacharitram, my Agni Barkha, Lal Ghas Par Neele Ghode were done during that time.

Once the Babri Masjid was broken, we entered even more terrible times. When you had to ask a question to an actor, “Are you a Muslim by any chance?” You had to ask, “Are you a Hindu or a Christian by any chance?” How can theatre survive in such an intolerant situation. You see recently Prakash Raj the actor compared Modi to himself. He said Mr. Narendra Modi is a better actor than me. What is wrong with that?  Is a Prime Minister a better animal than an actor? If Prakash Raj said this, Modi should have laughed it off. But instead goons came after Prakash and tried to prevent him from getting a small award, which was in Shivaram Karanth’s name!

This is what we have entered into and these are terrible times of intolerance. People just don’t want to listen to anybody’s comments, especially critical comments. And if there is no critical comment, there is no theatre. Theatre is not about kissing or hugging the audience for heaven’s sake. The audience hugs you, but because you have been so critical of them and have made them aware of their own fallacies. They say “Thank you, you’ve made me aware that I am a bloody fool!” Today no bloody fool is willing to listen to theatre. Every bloody fool thinks that he is the brightest, youngest and most energetic philosopher on the Earth.

Is there anything that defines your intellectual position? Some years ago in Heggodu, we were at the khadi ashram and I was asking you about your intellectual journey. You said something that quite struck me as far as political philosophy was concerned. You told me that you actually came to Gandhi via Marx…

I would like to reframe that statement. Because I think, I have a better definition of what I am today. I want to reframe it as green socialism. We were all red socialists then. Today we are green socialists, and when I say this I do no simply mean that we looking into environmental issues or the forest. It means that you bring both the father and the mother in you. You bring both the purushaand the prakriti in you. You want to change, but you also want to retain tradition. The question we are facing today is what is tradition? Is the so called Vedic tradition the only tradition, or is it THE tradition? It is not. In India, for thousands of years people have recognized only one tradition, the tradition of the handmade. If you delink the karma, and the dharma, you are destroyed. Today we are delinking the two and we are supporting something which is supposed to be dharma but is actually most adharmic. Dharma is nature. Nature that you acquire through karma.

You know when you use these terms, you are also likely to run into trouble. You might be accused of disregarding secular language and being an advocate of Hindutva ideology!

We should be honest about this, and we should give credit to the Hindutva fellows. It is they, who told us that there is something called tradition and that we had better link up with it. We need to give them credit for this and then criticize them for showing off something as tradition that was not exactly tradition. So first I want to bow my head to all these reactionaries as we call them, whether they be Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist fundamentalists. They have shown a fundamental truth. We modernists had completely gone overboard on modernity, on “the machine”. It is they who pointed it out and now we have to define what is the true tradition. And what is the linkage between tradition and modernity, or tradition and contemporaneity. That we must do through our plays, our poems, work. That is the great task we have in front of us.

So in this push and pull of defining tradition and contemporary, you see political radicals advocating for tradition? Is that their role?

I want to call them (these radicals) intolerant. And when I say “You don’t be intolerant.” First of all I have to learn to be tolerant. If I become tolerant, they will shout at me and they might try to kill me, but eventually they have to become tolerant. Our plays have to become tolerant. We should be critical, but not intolerant. And this question of tolerance has to be treated philosophically. It has many dimensions and layers. We have been talking of tolerant as “me” and intolerant as “him” when both of us remain fighting. We have to go beyond that and explore this notion.

Isn’t tolerance some kind of intermediary stage before absorption? Someone like Rajiv Malhotra might argue that we are tolerant of someone only up until the point we can convert, co-opt or absorb them into our own type of thinking.

Well we have also got our definition of tolerance. This is where we simply do our work and don’t bother about the results. Intolerance comes when we are too eager about the results. There is a perceived result that we need to achieve and that is the source of the intolerance. Today I am sitting on a satyagraha, I should actually enjoy my hunger. Today I am experiencing hunger. Let me tell you the on the first day of the satyagraha, you suffer the worst pangs. Because your own system is telling you “Come on man eat, eat, eat. The second day, it pulls you, but a little less. By the third day, it settles and your system says, “Ok this man is not going to listen to me, so let me become natural.” Animals go hungry for many days, and they recuperate through this. There is everything to learn from them. If you do a play, you should enjoy the play and not bother about whether it will become a success. The result-oriented thinking is what is producing so much of intolerance. Tolerance is to just enjoy the work and let yourself go with the work, which is what Krishna is supposed to have said in the Gita, when he said “Karm karo, magar phal ke iccha na karo…”

One enduring facet of your work has been this metaphor of “the machine”. This was beautifully expressed in a public lecture of yours I attended in 2013. When you speak of machine culture and mechanization, I see it as a critique of modernity… But there’s also this nagging doubt that you can’t be a Luddite in this day and age. Can you really expect to reject the “machine” in totality?

Let us understand what we are angry about. What is this machine? What is this historical situation which we have reached. One is not angry with a machine for making things easier for us, which we can enjoy. But today the machine is environmentally destructive, and morally destructive. We need to come back to the real, the village life. What we are angry about is the disconnect a machine causes between you and your experience.

Well that’s alienation in a nutshell…

Yes, but let us look at it as an actor’s experience. You can call it rasa. But what is that moment of experience on stage? What the actor experiences on stage, looking into the eyes of the audience. It is the audience which is giving you your experience back. So there is an organic linkage between actor and audience. Between the play and the experience. Between the experiencer and the experienced. Machine breaks this link. When the audience yawned or cursed you, you would have corrected yourself. Actors crave this. This organic connection…

Prasanna thank you for this conversation and for agreeing to it despite being on a fast! I think your work is very interesting in this ever-green debate between juggling political and artistic impulses. Now there is another phrase that you have used “green socialism” which is stuck in my head…

[laughs] I am still very very red. I am still a very intolerant person, and I say this as a self-criticism. I don’t claim I am a saint. Long way off. Especially in the theatre when our deadlines are so severe, sometimes you lose your cool, and shout and lose sleep. Today I am on the satyagraha, but I want to talk about theatre today because I am in the other space. The best space is when you are not in the theatre space, to talk about theatre. When you are in the theatre, performing on stage, you talk about the real space or political space, or real life!

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This article first appeared in the e-Rang Theatre Newsletter and was made possible with the kind support of Mallika Prasad, a long time collaborator of Prasanna. 

Writing for young audiences

Writing for young audiences is a specialised aspect of theatre making. While the sense of timing required to write good comedy is held up as one of the greatest challenges a writer can set themselves, writing for young audiences is even tougher, as one is far less likely to get away with sloppy dramaturgy. While adults might indulge a flaccid piece of theatre out of politeness, young audiences tend to be far less forgiving. At a recent workshop on writing for young audiences several of the challenges faced by playwrights made their way into discussions. I had a sense of deja vu in the process, since the issues that came up seemed to be truly evergreen. The same sets of preoccupations seem to circulate and recycle for every new batch of thinking people. Here I offer up a few of the debates of the process and some that never seem to go out of style.

The first and thankfully strongest impulse for writers was dissatisfaction with existing work. Many writers complained that plays written for young people did not reflect the lived reality of India. This problem is summed up as the Enid Blyton syndrome. Children growing up reading about scones, muffins and outings to Brighton Pier naturalise these realities. Power cuts, gully cricket, and plucking mangoes tend to be somewhat under represented in this fictional world. The more insidious aspects of this are when young people internalise existing social biases through the stories they read. When young people begin to believe that princesses must be fair skinned, or a certain community will always be the bad guys, we must begin to questions the stories we are surrounding young people with. Perhaps this is a malaise more apparent in narrative fiction and less apparent in dramatic writing, but the issue remains nevertheless.

The second challenge was that playwrights complained of the sickly sweet narratives that dominate stories for young people. Arguably, the Disney corporation is the master and prime culprit of the story drenched in sugar syrup. In the enthusiasm to tell a story for young people, there is a tendency to strip it of anything objectionable. The result is often saccharine sweet narratives that vacillate between the suffocatingly moralising or the nauseatingly emancipatory. This is of course a cynical view. Fortunately, there were discussions on those stories for children’s that didn’t duck from darker elements. A fact that almost all good writers will admit to but few pedagogues will acknowledge, is that childhood is also about cruelty, nastiness, misery and hardship. (Just think Roald Dahl!) Narratives that sensitively engaged with these elements without fleeing for the cover of political correctness were highly valued, more so because of truthful engagement with a subject. While everyone would like very much for their children’s shows to be their popular “cash cows” this results in writers shying away from taking creative risks, and remaining within “safe” topics. Saving the environment, familial relationships and being nice to each other were easy wins, while politics was a big no-no.

So then what is the guiding framework we subscribe to anyway, in this thing called theatre for young audiences? There are many systems and philosophies that explicitly engage with young people. Some of these like the GRIPS theatre emerged out of counter-culture movements in 60s in Europe. Other systems derive from reform movements within education such as those based on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, or what is called Waldorf education. Closer home the role of Krishnamurthi and Aurobindo educational philosophies have a role on the way we envision the values we put into theatre for young people, not only in terms of the content, but the process of making it. At this point one might envision various dreamy hippie-communes introducing young people to the joys of egalitarian existence and bohemian bonhomie. However the bubble-burst when it came to the role of technology in young people’s lives. While engagement with all-pervasive technology was a lived concern for everybody, there was a shy reticence on the part of the pedagogues in active engagement with this problem. Most critiques were couched in a vague notion of putting people before machines, and adopted a vague disapproval of technologies that were radically altering the way young people made sense of the world, and their relationships. But nothing much more. No surprise when one is trying to deploy flower-power philosophy in the age of AI.

There were also some other thematic questions that consistently remained. Who are the role models for young people today? Invariably the list has a few pop stars, sports icons and the occasional social activist. A surprising new addition to these lists over the past few years has been the technopreneur. Another evergreen topic is about value systems. What good values should we inculcate in young people through the theatre? Here too it was gender that dominated the conversation, but that didn’t seem to proportionately reflect in the work out there. At some point in the conversation I came across a curious dichotomy, that while playwrights were extremely glib in their conversations around caste and identity politics in India, there was an odd disconnect with the topics that they were actually working on – many of which remained “safe”. I became puzzled by this double-speak and this led me to thinking about writing for young people from a guiding principle that has not let me down yet.

So much for writing for young audiences makes them the “object” of the play,  the thing that one is trying to enfold within the dramatic experience. While there is a lot to be said about this from the developmental psychology standpoint, the fact is that young people are smarter than you, and as a result expect you to up your game when engaging them in the theatre. The quicker one gets to the realisation that young audiences are the thinking and feeling subject of the play and the experience, the better!

A pause, a beat…

What is the difference between a pause and a beat? I was recently asked this question in a playwriting workshop and the answer and subsequent dramaturgical discussion prompted me to write a short note on this topic.

The simple answer is that a beat is equivalent to a pause. However, while both a beat and a pause indicate a moment of change of idea or intention, there’s a little bit more to it. A lot of this depends on perspective of course. Screenwriters tend to shy away from the term beat and prefer to use pause, and that too primarily in dialogue. Actors tend to interpret this from the perspective of psychology. A beat is a momentary unit of action, smaller than a pause. This is interpreted as an indication that something has changed in the mind of the character, or in the exchange between characters. Directors might consider the pause an external cue, whereas the beat might be more of an internal cue for the actor.

While these perspectives may all arrive at a working conclusions the difference is somewhat more pronounced. If we consider the play as operating on units of time – the pause and the beat operate on entirely different aesthetic principles. The pause is generic blank time, that is, multiple units of time where there are no spoken words. The beat however, is a single unit of blank time, and is entirely dependent on the overall composition presented by the playwright. At this point the workshop erupted in heated debate, with various contesting claims.

A little known fact acknowledged by almost all playwrights, but very few critics is that playwriting unlike other forms of narrative writing is about composition. The dramaturgical principles of playwriting because they are concerned with ordering time and space for performance, remain closely connected to musical structures. The unique thing about playwriting is that the basic unit we work with is temporality. A significant number of critics evaluate plays based on critical principles that do not adequately understand this. The dominant paradigms of critical analysis all derive from literary theory, or if one is to update this based on trends in the academy – cultural studies or some variant of deconstruction. Somewhere in the analytical quest to contextualize dramaturgical expression, either against a political project or a commercial paradigm of consumption and reviews, the compositional aesthetics of a play are rendered invisible. The cold logic of content invariably trumps the ephemeral and temporal aspects of compositional form.

The interesting thing about Indian dramaturgical paradigms is that they do not create this dualism. The compositional aesthetics of the Natya Shastra remain rooted in temporality and the core tenets of evoking rasa. Hence the effectiveness of composition tends to favour what is said as much as how it is said in equal measure. This is of course a classical paradigm, and the further investigation of how Indian playwrights have deployed this in contemporary writing is an exciting though underexplored space.

All this of course assumes logical and methodical meaning making. There is a comical anecdote about the origin of the term beat that is worth considering. As Lee Strasberg was engaging with Constantin Stanislavsky’s ideas to arrive at method of acting, there was an occasion where several Russian theatre people were working on a text. The Russian translator would say, “Lets look at this beat here.” The Americans were puzzled by the term. “Now in this beat, there is something different happening.” After much cultural cross wiring, a eureka moment occurred… This very peculiar usage clearly meant that there was some Russian terminology that looked at the text as made up of discrete units called beats. Each beat had a certain intention to it, which translated into an actor’s playable motivation. It didn’t help that the Russian was merely saying “bit” with a Russian accent, but that is one story on how the term emerged!

Is this a matter of splitting hairs? Then perhaps one ought to go the whole hog. A key break from realist dramaturgy occurs with the shift away from psychology/intentionality and towards the play of language. Realist dramaturgy is broadly characterised by a preoccupation with psychology. The assumption in this kind of dramaturgy is that each action carried out by the character expresses an inner state and the text is an excavation of this terrain. However, with the shift to language playwriting, psychology is just one point of focus, as the play is considered for what it is – a language game of signs organised around certain rules. This means the pause is as far removed from the beat, as Searle is from Wittgenstien, as a speech act is from a language game. Certainly, the pause and the beat, when scrutinised at this level of detail, lead to entirely different views on dramaturgy and lift the play from the stolid realm of the literary into the transient realm of the performative.

World Theatre Day 2017: Perspectives

World Theatre Day seems an appropriate moment to reflect on why we do theatre. Of course, people have been reflecting on why we do theatre for a lot longer than 1961, when the World Theatre day was initiated. So it only seems fair to put a spin on the usual motivational tone of why we labour in the service of the theatre. And so, as we take a break from our tireless service in the name of all things theatrical I ask you to consider a few dramaturgical perspectives!

If you were a citizen of ancient Athens, the theatre was first and foremost about ritual. This might involve lots of wine drinking, bad behaviour and riotous activities. (As you can see, we carry on this ritual even to this day as part of our cast parties.) The theatre was the site of great festivals to propitiate the gods. The act of going to the theatre was the participation in this act of social solidarity. The interrupted ritual remains a popular motif in much dramatic work that operates in this tradition. In this motif, some act of omission, lapse, or transgression results in tragedy for the individual or society – think Oedipus Rex or Antigone. It is the completion of the ritual that sets things right again and allows the restoration of peace. A lot of Aristotelian dramaturgy still derives from this basic premise.

What if the theatre was not about the act of solidarity, but about participation in a spectacle? Here another tradition takes off, one that finds equal expression in the ancient circus and the modern blockbuster disaster movie. Here the theatre is less about making sure people get along, as it is about keeping the masses distracted from upsetting the peace. As long as we are wowed and amazed by the spectacle we are less likely to be out on the streets challenging authority! At least that’s the idea, since the modern spectacle can take on many different forms, including big sporting events (dare I mention cricket, football and F1?), and even all those alien invasion movies. This tradition sees the spectacle of theatre as performing an important role in the preservation of order. However the problem is, who’s order and on what terms? From this strain of theatre and its associated dramaturgy, we derive the various distancing effects used to push the audience out from a banal engagement with the content, and towards the various hidden forms of oppression operating in society, and as shown in the performance. This theatre is the theatre of protest, of resistance and of agitation.

Then there’s a quieter perspective. Here the theatre is an engagement with the body, the mind, and the emotions. In this kind of theatre, it is the pursuit of refinement that is the shared goal of audience and performers alike. The aesthetic codes of this kind of theatre demand mastery of the emotions in order to render a performance. Here the audience experiences a transformation, as much as the performer. In the rhythms of a Noh performance, or in the eye movements of the Kutiyattam performer we see a profound engagement with craft. It is this dedication that we celebrate, and it is through this selflessness that we are uplifted and transported. Here we are instructed of and through the sensorial experience of the self, the loss of it in the performance, and the mastery that occurs when we exit the other side!

Finally, there’s the theatre that harks back not to the circus, but to the carnival. In this theatre, the normal everyday conventions we are accustomed to seeing and experiencing are inverted, subverted and thrown out the window. In this dramaturgical strain, the theatre is not a reflection of the everyday but its mirror opposite. It is not the noble truths or hard politics of the king, but the looney logic of the court jester. What remains important however, is that the jester was given sanction to say things that were otherwise taboo. This was always a game of cat and mouse, since too much truth spoken to power would often end quite badly for the jester. However, the best court jesters complemented the ruler, and by extension the rule. The ability to poke fun at something, remains and ought to remain a very important part of the theatre. Just imagine a society without humour!

So what is it? Ritual? Resistance? Refinement? Or… randomness?

Today is World Theatre Day and perhaps it is only fitting that we say that it is all of the above that we celebrate. For theatre is best described as all of the above and none of the above. It is more and less than everything that I have described! It is each one of these traditions, each with its own rich and vibrant history.

So today on World Theatre Day, perhaps we can take a moment to reflect on this mystery. This enigma that enraptures, frustrates, uplifts and amazes us!

To management, from theatre, with love… 2017

So often in the arts we are recipients of advice from management gurus. As we start 2017, I am fascinated with how one might reverse this flow of expertise. What insights can theatre share with the management world?

A month ago, I was privy to a wonderful research initiative that was interested in developing people-to-people networks between artists’ collectives working in South East Asia. As with so many arts management initiatives with an internationalist agenda, I had a feeling that this was going to be a bunch of cosmopolitan suits lecturing local creative-types on how to implement proper management practices into their unstructured lives. My heart sank when a distinguished Dutch professor of arts management fresh from his tourist travels in the region and in a loud batik shirt, began lecturing to young Indonesian artists on how they could shape their arts organisations. (A rough equivalent of this would be, to have an English academic wear a sari and tell a group of urban Indian artists about how they could mend their traditional mindsets, having just visited Jaipur palace.) Fortunately, after a little cross-cultural wobbling and adjustment, things settled into a fascinating discussion of how and why artists’ collectives in the region can cooperate and grow together. The discussions were engaging and I was happy to see that artists and managers were able to candidly discuss how best to organise people for certain ends, with both parties on even keel.

There are some self-evident insights of how theatre informs management practices. Theatre people are ideally suited to train managers in presentation skills and public speaking, as well as softer notions of role-playing, team building and mindfulness. Here I present three spaces where theatre and management find surprising intersections, and where management gurus need to do the catching up.

How to give and take good feedback

First off, creative feedback is an area where theatre people excel. Feedback is a delicate process shared between small groups. In a creative process feedback is the intimate navigation of co-intentionality – the slow process of working out how to pull in the same direction.

For an actor and director, feedback is the stuff of rehearsal. Here co-intentionality is driven by vision as the actor’s lines, gestures, movements are all subject to the director’s gaze. The feedback is concerned with shaping the aesthetic, the sensorial and the pre-expressive journey of the actor. Perhaps less well known is the feedback process between a playwright and a dramaturge. Often, the best dramaturges remain neutral on aesthetic or formal choices, and facilitate rather than intervene in creative decisions by the playwright. They are the “sounding board” to the playwright. In both instances this intimate process is the building block for a cohesive creative outcome.

In the field of management, feedback figures in the process of coaching, among others. At some point, organisations realised that they were killing individual creativity and innovation with structure (!!!). A periodic review or performance appraisal was not an effective way of keeping people motivated and performing well in their job roles. Managers turned to coaching methods to keep employees engaged. The feedback sandwich method was the preferred way to guide behavioral change. This involved providing a piece of critical/negative feedback, sandwiched between two statements of praise. In brief – “You’re doing really well in your new role. It helps if you can be more punctual though. Great work on your last assignment.” This method adhered to the idea that positive feedback produced better outcomes than negative feedback.

The fact is neither positive nor negative feedback are as effective as fair and impartial informal feedback given at the right time. This is according to a 2002 study by the Corporate Leadership Council which found that this kind of qualitative feedback increased employee performance by 39%. Perhaps management gurus could consider how people in the theatre talk to each other and why this results in energizing creative outcomes. The short answer to this is that the theatre is a lot more interesting, but the long answer I have just provided is that in theatre feedback between people is co-intentional and emotionally engaged!

Collectives and flexibility

The notion of an artists’ collective suggests a looser grouping than that of a traditional theatre company. As artists, we are not prone to stated hierarchy and quite allergic to rigid structures that bind and fix people. Collectives afford a greater degree of flexibility and play, as members may come and go relative to their investment in the collective. Collectives are not often driven solely by individual self-interest since some common goal or idea binds the group. Sometimes collectives are simply the catalysts for individual projects. This flexibility of organization is something managers can draw on.

In an enlightening moment of the discussion, I came across a local South East Asian concept called gotong royong which exemplifies the kampong spirit of the region. Loosely translated, kampong is a Malay village and gotong royong means “cooperation in a community” in Indonesia. These terms have fascinating historical and cultural connotations, and are sometimes associated with Indonesia’s first President Sukarno. Arguably, this concept was advanced as part of his socialist experiments before a more authoritarian turn in later years. Nevertheless, the gotong royong idea is one of selfless service. In this concept, individuals work together for mutual aid and for the greater benefit of the community. The idea of coming together for a noble purpose is certainly an appealing proposition. There is an appeal to coming together on shared principles, rather than on the philosophy of “What’s in it for me?”

Most modern business organisations must have realised by now that they exist in a society in as much as they do in a market. Business goals pursued without recognition of social responsibilities can prove disastrous. In fact, in the exciting field of impact investing, companies forego some aspects of their profit motives for social gains. The more of this the merrier, since in India an often repeated refrain is that we have economic progress without corresponding progress in social development indicators. This is a point that economists Jagdish Bhagwati and Amartya Sen might both agree on, though they might disagree on their subsequent policy prescriptions!

Networks and diffused decision-making

The most popular modern flexible form of organisation is the network. The digital network is the primary mode of information exchange across distance for many of us. The whole thrust of the research initiative I observed, was on building and strengthening regional networks in the ASEAN region. On one hand I am tempted to argue that a manager can learn a thing or two about how theatre groups in India have leveraged social media networks to build on word-of-mouth marketing in a resource starved environment. However, I’d rather make a more contentious point.

Most early forms of industrial organization were about creating centrally controlled assembly-lines. As early as the 1930s the thinker Antonio Gramsci was interrogating Fordism and its negative effects on working people, as well as society. With the transition to the Information Age, the old machine based paradigms have given way to altogether more diffused forms of control. The recognition at present is that the more centralised and constraining a structure becomes, the less efficient it is at releasing the creative potential of people.

This basic idea of centralised versus diffused control has far reaching ramifications. Managers interested in modern networked organisations can learn a thing or two about how to dodge these constraining structures from theatre people. As disruption and innovation are the current buzzwords, there is a lot to learn from the people who walk the talk. Far more relevant to India at present, how do we devolve decision making from distant power centers to local contexts, where appropriate and sensitive decisions may be made?

What is at stake?

In 2011 I sat in a packed auditorium in the LSE to hear the sociologist Manuel Castells talk about how modern networks had changed the way we participate in political processes. The atmosphere was electric at the time, as Western mainstream media had converged on the idea that the Arab Spring was in fact a Facebook revolution and a triumph of democracy over authoritarian rule. Castells was making a more nuanced point in the lecture, that in a network society, technology is just one of the defining features. Technology was not the catalyst for the social movements, it was the other way around. Social movements adopt technological resources.

However, many media outlets declared that the revolution had arrived courtesy social media, and forgot that there were people on ground mobilising for a cause in local contexts. Cut to 2016 and Western mainstream media is singing a far less emancipatory song about Twitter and Facebook after the outcome of the US elections. The song in fact has reversed, as social media is held to blame for muddling the electoral outcome. India and the United States, as large democracies with significant media freedoms are feeling the growing heat of nationalism stoked by deft use of social media by populist leaders. Should we be satisfied with emancipatory rhetoric, trendy management speak or shrill invective?

The questions are fundamental to the present. How do we talk to each other? Why do we come together? How do we make decisions? Theatre people have an important role in answering these issues, in a manner that educates the managers of today.

The Opte Project’s picture of the Internet (2003)

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The post-factual playwright

I recently discovered an interesting statistic. I have written at least one play a year since 1996. Some of these are school plays, some of these are children’s plays. Some won awards, some were commercial hits, some sit unfinished. Some years were good, some were slow. However, through thick and thin, through exams and through personal disasters, through the IT boom in Bengaluru, the 26/11 attacks in Mumbai and the 2016 US elections, the muse of theatre simply kept prodding me along.

At first this stamina was fuelled by the noble pursuit of truth. The ephemeral kind that happens when a word penned in solitude, somehow translated by directors, actors, designers, audience, becomes the perfect moment. A moment that remains. The English playwright Sarah Kane is quoted as saying, “… theatre has no memory, which makes it the most existential of the arts… I keep coming back in the hope that someone in a darkened room somewhere will show me an image that burns itself into my mind”. We all have those moments in the theatre. I still remember a performance of Khalid Tyabji’s The Fool’s Song at the Alliance Francaise in Bengaluru in 1995, It was one of the reasons I was drawn to the theatre. There is no reason why one should remember any one moment in that play, where Tyabji transmutes from character to character as a fool who has lost his hat, who is thrust into an incomprehensible dream world, which is in fact the real world full of hypocrisy! There is no reason why I should remember a moment when Tyabji transforms into a woman, praying, only to be bothered by a mosquito! Yet, that image remains.

At some point the stamina shifted into a quest to understand the world. The existential search for meaning is all well and good. As long as one is in a comfortable cafe, drinking coffee, healthy and not particularly broke. The injustices of the world require a little more engagement! It requires an understanding of how and why the world is the way it is. How is it that some have so much, while others have so little? How did the 1% get there? What causes war and conflict? Is it the grind of nations and states colliding, or the fundamental nature of violence? Harold Pinter was the playwright that triggered me on this search. In 2007, with ten other playwrights from all over the world, I was part of a heady political discussion on the various social issues with which we were all engaged. In a moment of soaring internationalism Pinter held up a glass of champagne and all of us playwrights toasted to, “The Truth!”

When I began to take on post-modern themes in my dramaturgy, this pursuit too began to waver. I began to question the pact between audience and performers. Truth was no longer singular, it was a matter of perspective. Universal stories were fine, but the universal is not found in some rarified ether stripped of references and markers of time and place. The universal was found in the particular, in the granular, in the microscopic details of a very specific subject.

I began to stress the shapes of my plays with the ideas I was engaging. In one piece the narrative darted backwards and forward in time to show the fallibility of memory in relationships. A new piece of information when it arrives in a scene, changes our perspective on the relationship, on the events prior. What was true and real a moment ago, is no longer true – this is the playing out of betrayal. I began to work with the idea of unreliable narrators and frame narratives. What if the narrator and the sutradhar, those important intermediaries between the action and the audience, were not in fact being truthful! I began to struggle with the problems of minimalism. Minimalism, paraphrasing David Mamet, is the question of how much one can take away from a composition and still have it coherent. How much of the performance can be stripped away? How many of the conventions of what we understand to be theatre, be upturned, while still retaining the pact with the audience?

These questions do not have direct answers, but at this moment one must really think about the kinds of shared experiences we are creating as playwrights. The current global political climate requires those of us working with collective emotions to think about what and why we do what we do. Critical or commercial, traditional or experimental, on the political spectrum from right to left – the drift away from facts and reasoned argument should worry us.

In his world theatre address of 2002, Girish Karnad describes the Myth of the First Performance presented by Bharata, depicting the triumph of the gods over the demons. The Myth speaks much of the hate speech we witness on a daily basis and the quick resort to physical violence that is so much the preferred response to silence dissent. Karnad highlights the many forms of drama present in the world, but says “while these forms can engage or even enrage the audience, in none of them can the viewer’s response alter the artistic event itself. The Myth of the First Performance points out that in theatre, the playwright, the performers and the audience form a continuum, but one which will always be unstable and therefore potentially explosive.”

As I grind into year 21, stamina, quests, formal experiments and searches have given way to the only constant – change. The theatre is the site of transformation. A place where the social continuum reinvents itself, rediscovers itself. Our current media worlds are echo chambers. We hear what we want to hear, and are encouraged to hear and share, more of what we already know. I find myself turning away from the post-isms and the radicals, and back to the Enlightenment philosophers. To listen to the other, to understand a point of view, to debate the facts and to have one’s mind changed… these ought to be the basics of public discourse. It seems odd to think of the theatre, ordinarily a site of passion, as the place for this. Perhaps like the fool who has lost his hat, one has to adapt to the vagaries of the times, incomprehensible as they may be. When the politicians have taken up theatrics and spectacle in new form, perhaps it is time for playwrights to take up informed debate and reason.