‘The political art par excellence; only there is the political sphere transposed into art’- Hannah Arendt (1989)

I write this essay at a time when the term curator has enjoyed a rich and long history in the field of visual arts, deserving little mention in Theatre. Interestingly, Harald Szeemann, a Swiss arts curator, had once compared his work to that of a theatre director (Malzacher, 2019). More recently, art theorist Beatrice von Bismarck likened the process of exhibition-making with that of a theatre dramaturge’s job(von Bismarck, 2012). Historically, theatre has indeed had the work of curation dispersed and carried out by multiple figures without calling it so. The director, designer, and dramaturge contribute to the creation of meaning in the theatre by developing concepts, making ensembles coherent, and in contextualising the work around text, bodies, material, time, and space in a way that fosters an engaging dialogue between the play and its viewers. In other words, the work of curating performers and audiences is what theatre is.

However, the term ‘curator’ remains alien to theatre in India. In the visual arts, the field of curation has accrued a fascinating discourse over the last century, and with it, it has also amassed glamour, power, and criticism. Contemporary apprehensions loom with regard to curators as well. Writer and curator Florian Malzacher (2019) warns us that a curator could occupy the status of a meta-artist (making art without artists), act as a neo-liberal agent (making market deals, keeping prices high), or become a diluted, empty designation (isn’t everyone a curator nowadays?). Must the curator figure/s be interlocked with theatre-makers in the mirrored asymmetries that characterise the visual art world? Do we dare imagine a figure with intellectual force other than the director who has held unquestionable power at the top of modern theatre’s hierarchy? What new merit could a curator offer to theatre?

Beginning to make ground for a pedagogical discussion on theatre curation is perhaps more relevant now than before. Theatre festivals have become prominent in India. For a country that did not have a single annual theatre festival up till the turn of this century, we have over a dozen theatre festivals of varying scale and reach today, each claiming to show the best of national and international oeuvres¹. In the absence of a touring circuit, festivals provide artists with the opportunity to travel, to seek new audiences, to be amongst other artists of credible repute, to be written about, to woo award committees. Festivals are now doing for theatre what exhibitions have done for visual art; they are high visibility concentrated events which bring immense resources and influence with them. It is for this reason that festivals have become the new honours; they are seen to bestow legitimacy on artistic work. But unlike exhibition-making, which invests in the conceptual labour involved in inviting seemingly disparate art practices for the purpose of showcasing them, the work that goes on behind festival-making is not entirely clear.

There are no full-time or professional theatre curators in India. The general practice of organising festivals commences with an open call to practitioners to submit recordings of plays and appointing experts to a panel whose job is to select from what is submitted before the jury. A conceptual note rarely accompanies the final shortlist. Does research shape and guide the selection of works? How are the contours drawn – what should be included or excluded? No serious critique or discussion follows a festival’s closing; no intellectual scrutiny takes place. How do we interrogate the claims (‘best works’) that a jury conferred on its final itinerary? What kind of engagement is envisioned between a festival and its audience? Is a theatre festival simply a collection of plays that come and go? What do theatre festivals do?

Curating Trouble

Talking about theatre curation in a time when constitutional certainties are pulverised poses a peculiar challenge. Just last year (2019), multiple and spontaneous protests erupted across the country against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed by the central government. This significant people’s movement expanded the notion of public within a geographical scope: India as the territory to a constitutional inquiry – what is the idea of India? Thousands took to the streets to protest, paint, perform, sing, to build new solidarities, and to defend their right to equal and unquestionable citizenship. The protests were met with state violence, police brutality, and an arbitrary (and frequent) suspension of democratic rights. Several protesters (artists and poets among them) were threatened, beaten, incarcerated – atrocities that still continues to wield its might as I write this essay. Our democracy is under permanent threat now.

Democracy is not a society living in harmony (that would be a fascistic fantasy) but one which is in flux and that allows the possibility of conflict. According to political theorist Chantal Mouffe, democracy envisions a public space in which reaching consensus may not be necessary or even possible (Mouffe, 2000). The 2019 people’s movement underlined the right to public dissent, but it did so with a remarkable phenomenon – it emerged and sustained itself without a leader. The movement signposts a change in the idea of heroism. It displaced focus from a protagonist to a gathering, from one person to the entire crowd, from one leader for the many to the many who moved together. This seismic shift in the topos of the hero – who, what, or where is the hero – changes that which constitutes the public space, and how stories are told.

The Practice of Festival-making

A theatre festival is in public space, but it is also as public space (Kwon, 2002). Theatre festivals are good at creating specific densities of narratorial complexities. They accelerate, interrupt, exhaust, and enthuse communities. They alter social temporalities. In a world in which space for disagreement and dissent has begun to erode from society, festival-making could become a restorative act. It could return the public to the realm of imagination, to freedoms, to processes and to experiences that are being expelled from society. Festival-making could be a process of offering protection, attention, and amplification to voices, identities, and silences under threat outside. In this sense, festival-making is public-making; it reserves the power to conjure publics pushed out of sight, it can take up the tumult that seethes under state or social censor and give itself the mandate to create ‘trouble’ (hence the title of this essay).

Let me take as example my experience around curating the recently concluded International Theatre Festival of Kerala (ITFoK) held in January 2020². For the purpose of this essay, I set aside the pragmatics and economics behind the festival (that is for another article)³. Instead, I will highlight how the process of festival-making became a resolute effort in inter-weaving continuities and disruptions, ‘directing’ the event into myriad speculative ‘scenes’ which unfolded day after day⁴. Could festival-making pursue public-making without producing a ‘centre’ (read ‘theme’)? Could it transcend borders formed by discipline and claim philosophical kinship across multiple art forms? Could it not be overdetermined from the start but remain open to a speculative inquiry about the kind of ‘acts’ that might be understood as theatre and performance today?

SCENE I

A panoply of plays which explored defiance, unrest and turmoil were invited to the festival. ‘Silver Epidemic’, a play by Cia Mungunzá de Teatro (Brazil), entangled body, gesture, and coins in thousands, juxtaposing ‘the elites’ against the disenfranchised, the outcasts, the people of ‘Crackland’ who repeatedly get attacked by the police. The actors painted their bodies with silver in order to mask their fate, to inhabit a ‘silver universe’. They performed a disturbing doom: eating, drinking and shitting silver, broadcasting themselves helplessly, still failing to find witness in their surrounding world. ‘Eidgah Ke Jinnat’, a play by Abhishek Majumdar, brought to stage the conflict in humanity amidst the Kashmir crisis. Several intersecting narratives presented a traumatic landscape without a chief character, in which each part, every role, no matter how small, needs to be engaged with to stand with a land, its people, and their sovereignty. It is important to mention here that this play had been banned previously at another theatre festival where it was set to premier, for reasons an Indian reader can gather very well. Coriolanus, from Iran, a 20-actor ensemble placed Shakespeare’s text onto a treadmill from which the despot ‘runs’ his people. But soon enough, his ‘false wounds from a war’ get exposed and he is cast out, leaving him running away to save his life atop the same treadmill which itself runs out of control. The ensemble dedicated their show to the protesting and grieving people of Iran, and in their gesture, we extended our thoughts to the undying courage of pro-democracy protestors in India.

While plays organised popular discontentment into neat scenes, the town of Thrissur was also rife with anti-CAA protests. Several civil organisations approached us hours before the inaugural, urging ITFoK2020 to include the staging of their protests as part of the festival. The festival team decided to open out the program and weave in additional time-slots arranged in a manner that paid attention to the demands for space and equipment (megaphones, speakers etc) that were required by half a dozen citizen’s rights groups. The intention was to create a passage that flowed seamlessly between plays and public dissent, advocating participation and discovering eventually that many joined the acts voluntarily. Are collectivised actions not urgent forms of theatre? Do they not carry an immediate political charge using performance-as-vehicle? ITFoK2020 had begun to collapse the binary between inside-outside, fiction-reality. It had also begun to probe deeper into the politics of performance, of performing protests, and of protest in and as performance. A theatre hall has architectural limits, but the stage is an expandable, portable, ethereal platform.

SCENE II

Benedict Anderson, in his 1983 book ‘Imagined Communities’, reflects on the origin and spread of nationalism, a notion that has become highly contested in India. I imagined ITFoK 2020 to disrupt the oppressively popular formation that nationalism has come to be. To unsettle the categories of citizenship and nationality is also to dislodge the boundary between performance and spectatorship. Performer and poet Inua Ellams staged his bare piece ’An Evening with an Immigrant’ in a dozen or more poems. In a moving autobiographical account, he recited his life of migrating from Nigeria to U.K., becoming a performer, having wine with the Queen, and pursuing his quest for defining ‘home’. He transited effortlessly between being a performer, a migrant, a poet, a travelling artist, and a man without a country, with devastating wit and self-reflexivity.

The famous performance poet Kunchan Nambiyar is believed to have used public spaces called Kalathattu as his stage for Thullal performances, a composite tradition of theatre and poetry. Kalathattu refers to a wooden leaf-thatched open platform that served as resting stations for pedestrians and travellers in Kerala. Over a spread of 9 days, ITFoK2020 featured 16 eminent Malayalam poets from all generations, who inhabited an architectural echo of a resting place and brought the memories of Thullal to bear upon emerging forms of performance poetry⁵. Poems, like people, need resting places; like people, poems too need to travel to survive.

Audiences travel from one performance to another. This collective movement, specific to each festival, creates its own shared rhythms. How a festival begins and ends matters, like it does in writing a play. There is such a thing as festival choreography. Which work follows what, and how performativities get entwined, builds unexpected narratives. Visualising how people engage as they spectate or participate, how they might ‘move’ and be ‘moved’, what the potential realms of affect are that might get generated is an endeavour that shows regard for spectatorship.

A pre-independence story of a nomadic family was adapted into the play ’Kala Dhabba’ (Avijit Solanki, Bhopal), which staged the horror of encountering a faceless mob, one that haunts the entire journey and stops at nothing till it devours the family without trace. The piece centred around an emblematic cart that shrivelled, deflated, and morphed into smaller carts, carrying the family that itself shrunk and lost – one person at a time – facing unspeakable violence as it migrated. A camera (read media) silently broadcasted the darkness of savagery on a stage even darker. In here, the proscenium boundaries of the stage were done away with; backstage merged with front-stage ‘stripping’ theatre of its conventional scenic features, transforming it into a cataclysmic space, and in one moment, into a paralysing scream.

This is a world in which we will need to search for ways to express grief collectively. A world that needs to remember to speak of loss, of longing, of bodies that persevere. A bird, a dew drop, a step; with Zen-like poise, Phillip Zarrilli and Jo Shapland (from U.K.) held the stage with their masterly bodies in their minimal piece titled ’Told By The Wind’⁶. They kept audiences very quiet, very close, always in waiting, and they performed their piece in an intimate setting. Their performance was staggered across memorable Haiku-styled phrases, evoking a series of metaphors about absence, textured by the fragility of ageing (both performers are over 70 years).

SCENE III

Two plays meditated on the experience, economy, and expression of death. ‘The Director’, a work of documentary theatre by Aphids (Australia), starred a real life funeral director Scott Turnbull, and theatre director Lara Thoms, in which they expanded on the elements of the death industry. They staged a funeral using humour and real life expertise, and invited the audience to participate in a tutorial-of-sorts, to dig a little deeper into what happens after we go. ‘Tree Of Death’, presented by Pijana Sypialnia Theatre (Poland), derived inspiration from the Polish legend of the magical pear tree in which ‘Lady Death’ is imprisoned. Psalms were reworked to sing a critique of shallow customs of death, as performers enacted surreal and absurd scenarios about a dystopic future in which death abandons mankind, leaving people to ‘munch on popcorn’.

Theatre dies with every show (and it vanishes leaving nothing behind), but the social relations that come into being while making theatre have a lasting effect on the lives of those engaged in creating it. Every evening, the festival came to a close with a documentary film screened as the epilogue. I curated eight films, each devoted to documenting theatre-as-community-practice, focusing specifically on social formations that are laid bare during theatre-making⁷. To give one instance, Pankaj Rishi Kumar’s sharp documentary ‘Janani’s Juliet’ follows a rehearsal-in-progress of Koumarane Valavane’s play that explores love, caste, and Shakespeare through an Indian adaptation. Here is a documentary that dovetails the on-stage and offstage lives of actors mired in prejudice and discrimination on the grounds of caste, making it hard to tell where exactly the ‘real’ life lies. This, and several other contemplative films, showed promise of an emerging interest in theatre-documentaries that attempt to archive performance practices by initiating a new dialogue between the medium of theatre and film.

Curating After Everybody leaves

A theatre festival is like weather; it is more vapour than material, a set of multiple atmospheric layers interacting with each other, held in place by the gravity of a curatorial intent. At the core of the idea of curation lies the determination to ‘care’; to protect the intrinsic value of artistic expression, to be attentive to the ways of seeing, to look after the ecology of public space. Curating a festival is to bring a constellation of works together and explore how they seek affiliations with each other in ways their original creators might not have imagined or foreseen. Curation could nudge festival-making beyond the selection of theatrical works and include conceptual inquiries, political provocations, educational opportunities, community-oriented activities, and a pursuit of innovative forms in theatre and performance. It could contribute towards building artistic, aesthetic, and political discourses.

What comes after the end? As audiences recede, as artists leave, as the temporary auditoriums are brought down, and bare spaces reappear, the festival leaves behind resplendent archival material. The biggest theatre festival running uninterrupted in India is The Bharat Rang Mahotsav (BRM). Established in 1999, it has invited an average of 90 plays each year in the last 22 years. The BRM archive is over 2000 plays strong and growing, and is arguably the largest collection of play recordings in the country. It has in its possession plays difficult to be found elsewhere. It is unfortunate that the topic of ‘festival history’ is hardly ever attended to and, as such, is not a subject of research in theatre and its related fields. What concerns me here is the striking absence of archival strategy of festival material – recordings, artists’ interviews, theatre conferences, and so much more – which is not given due diligence for the rich discourse it can generate, and for its potential to engender a new field of ‘Festival Studies’ that lies largely outside of the institution but could draw substantial theoretical continuities between transient festival editions.

Towards the close of the festival, a local auto-rickshaw driver surprised his rider one day. When the rider hailed the rickshaw and got in, he was asked ‘So, how did the show go?’. Thrissur newspapers cover ITFoK by awarding the festival large spreads and multiple scholarly reviews as standard practice. The driver had followed articles on ITFoK2020 very keenly and on that day, he instantly recognised his passenger from the photos of his play in the press. They both rode to the festival together, discussing theatre, story-telling, and the conditions of work. The journey ended with the driver promising to return to catch the evening’s plays.

To promise to return, to remember what took place, to accompany, to be in attendance – theatre festivals produce a temporary vehicle for the present, one which lies in the symbolic waiting of the figure of a theatre curator to steer it, to drive it through trouble.