DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (Autonomous), Narendrapur
10th Inter-University Students’ and Researchers’ Conference 2024
November 19—20, 2024
Off the Stage: Performance Practices in Postcolonial India
The post-Independence Indian theatre has been largely influenced by the realist theatre tradition of the West with some persistent exceptions in different regions across India, that are committed to revive, explore and establish the Indianness of Indian theatre, however complex the notion of ‘Indian’ may be. As the nationalist movement in colonial India had gained momentum in the first half of the twentieth century, theatre practitioners attempted to decolonise Indian theatre by imbibing indigenous cultural forms and expressions beyond the Proscenium. In fact, the postcolonial intersection in Indian theatre was ushered in by rejecting ‘the modernity associated with western modes of representation’ and by asserting an ‘alternative postcolonial modernity based on premodern indigenous traditions of performance’ (Dharwadker 2019, 22). The concerns raised in the First Drama Seminar in New Delhi in 1956 on the need to create a ‘new’ theatre for the ‘new’ nation, that was self-conscious and self-reflexive, found expressions through movements such as People’s Theatre (already practised by IPTA), the Theatre of Roots and Third Theatre. Various forms of folk, traditional and regional performances were also revived to strengthen the drive towards Indianness in performance making—in terms of the use of performance elements, performers’ training, selection of performance space and content for dramatization. These performances have been mostly addressed to the commons of the society, where the issues and concerns of the grassroots are primarily explored.
One of the most significant engagements in the postcolonial Indian theatre has been with place as performance space, where place and person intersect to allow place to be a potential actant in the playmaking process as well as its meaning production. When a performance embodies social or historical situatedness beyond the Proscenium stage, it attains a wider provision to intersect with performance of protest, narrative of resistance, sociopolitical activism and unorthodox conditions. The environment of an open-air unorthodox performance space surrounds, sustains and contains the performance and contributes to its meaning production—creating an embodied experience for the spectators.
Postcolonial Indian theatre has also witnessed the rise of applied performance practices where a play is developed through participatory workshop with non-actors belonging to a particular community in focus. Such productions are mostly research-oriented, workshop-based, community-centred and purpose-driven, where the entire playmaking process is shared by the participants, collaborators, facilitators or performers. Sometimes the barrier between the performers and the spectators becomes fluid and an intersection of body, space and environment is observed. Although the community performances in unorthodox performance spaces in local communities broadly diverge from the commerciality of the Proscenium convention, the lack of consistent financial support and enthusiastic collaborators poses a constant threat to their survival in India.
In this background, the conference seeks deliberations on the non-Proscenium forms and practices of theatre performances in postcolonial India, which shape a distinct Indian identity in terms of performance making. The performance forms and practices may be examined through diverse cultural, theoretical and theatrical discourses in the postcolonial Indian context. The seemingly overlapping performance practices and ideas listed below are only indicative and not restrictive in nature.
People’s theatre: Nationalism, Cultural activism and the Mass
Indigenous performance: Folk, Traditional and Ritual
The Theatre of Roots: Rooted, Uprooted or De-rooted?
Street theatre: Politics, Propaganda and Social activism
Performance of protest: Art, Dissent and Performativity
Applied performance: Therapy, Education and Engagement
Participatory performance: Research, Workshop and Collaboration
Intimate performance: Body, Space and Proximity
Ecological performance: Ecology, Climate change and Green dramaturgy
Organic theatre: Nature, Embeddedness and Organicity
Site-specific performance: Art, Aesthetics and Environment
We invite abstracts of not more than 300 words from college/University students, research scholars and early career researchers to be emailed to the conference convenor at english.rkm@gmail.com. The names, contact numbers, email ids and affiliations should be clearly mentioned in the abstracts. Please write “SRC2024 Abstract” in the subject heading of your email.
Important Dates
Last Date of submission of Abstract: Friday, 20th September 2024
Notification of acceptance of Abstract: Wednesday, 25th September 2024
For queries: english.rkm@gmail.com
Convenor: Pranab Kumar Mandal, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Ramakrishna Mission Residential College (Autonomous), Narendrapur
