Postdramatic Theatre and India

Theatre-Making Since the 1990s

Ashis Sengupta

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350154094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

This book revisits Hans-Thies Lehmann's theory of the postdramatic and participates in the ongoing debate on the theatre paradigm by placing contemporary Indian performance within it. None of the Indian theatre-makers under study built their works directly on the Euro-American model of postdramatic theatre, but many have used its vocabulary and apparatus in innovative, transnational ways. Their principal aim was to invigorate the language of Indian urban theatre, which had turned stale under the stronghold of realism inherited from colonial stage practice or prescriptive under the decolonizing drive of the 'theatre of roots' movement after independence. Emerging out of a set of different historical and cultural contexts, their productions have eventually expanded and diversified the postdramatic framework by crosspollinating it with regional performance forms. Theatre in India today includes devised performance, storytelling across forms, theatre solos, cross-media performance, theatre installations, scenographic theatre, theatre-as-event, reality theatre, and so on. The book balances theory, context and praxis, developing a new area of scholarship in Indian theatre. Interspersed throughout are Indian theatre-makers' clarifications of their own practices vis-à-vis those in Europe and the US.

1

Theorizing and Contextualizing India’s Postdramatic

Adaptation as contribution

The translation into several European languages of Lehmann’s Postdramatisches Theater (1999), the first systematic theoretical approach to the ‘new theatre’ in the West, had a strong impact on the academic and art scene by 2004, and its English version (Postdramatic Theatre, 2006) entered the English-speaking world and the global South within a year of its publication. It is worth examining how a relatively new European theatre paradigm influenced regional theatre scenes and was in turn influenced by their aesthetic-political logic – in other words, how it went global and, at the same time, allowed itself to be localized by its critical reception outside of Europe and the US. Vlatko Ilić has this to say (about his own Serbian theatre context): ‘The process of generating an art scene in a particular cultural space is a constant work in progress … [and] it seems necessary to re-examine the postdramatic paradigm in regard to the current contextual circumstances (above all, domestic ones)’ (Ilić 2011: 138). Interestingly, Lehmann himself wrote along this line elsewhere later, presumably looking at the changing course of the ‘postdramatic’ in locations beyond his own:

Postdramatic Theatre could and can be (and is indeed) read very differently depending on the culture, the tradition, and the current ‘scene’ of the particular theater of the region: for example, as a critique of the dominant European theater model; or as a practice allied with performance experiments in visual art; or as a critique of a conservative theater practice that remains comfortably secured within the never-questioned frame of a theater of representation … This concept includes now, for example, dance theater, or performance; installation works, or a walk through a city; theater presents itself as close to a rehearsal, as an exhibition, or as a public debate.

Lehmann 2016: online

The flexibility and latitude of interpretation Lehmann awards to his concept of postdramatic in his post-2001 writings might have been caused partly by the shifting political scenario across the world and partly by his increasing exposure to the potential of a plethora of emerging theatre forms beyond Central Europe and the US to add variations to a still-developing performance form. This formal shift, on the whole, has changed theatre-making globally.

The reasons for Indian theatre-makers looking for a new theatre aesthetic, not necessarily postdramatic, are different from those that drove their European/American counterparts to seek out forms of theatre-making beyond the dramatic. Also significant is the fact that long before the publication of Lehmann’s book, non-dramatic, hybrid theatre practices had emerged in India out of different social, political and cultural circumstances, feeding an anti-realist/modernist theatre movement. At the same time, there is no reason to deny that the post-Brechtian, postdramatic theatre –widely practised by contemporary theatre-makers since the 1970s and historically charted in Lehmann’s book for the first time – has impressed Indian practitioners with a greater sense of contemporary relevance and helped them re-territorialize their own ‘field of … practice and theory’ (Ilić 2011: 138). An equation of ‘postdramatic’ and ‘post-Brechtian’ is not implied here. The former does not organize ‘historical reality’ dialectically, as ‘post-Brechtian’ may be argued to still do, but instead flattens it to avoid specificity of referentiality and certitude of action. Nor is this to prioritize one paradigm over the other, or to draw a binary between the West and the East with a view to subjugating the local to the global, or even to imply that the postdramatic in India is an imitation of a Western performance idiom.

Formalistic and intermedial hybridity characterizes postdramatic theatre. Cross-pollination of cultural forms has been common in Indian theatre. Acknowledging his connectedness to Western dramatic theatre, Girish Karnad wrote in 1989: ‘Oddly enough the play [Yayati] owed its form not to the innumerable mythological plays I had been brought up on … but to Western playwrights whom until then I had only read in print’ (Karnad 1994: 3). The task for Habib Tanvir, another stalwart in modern Indian theatre, was to accept all that can help make theatre of one’s own times – from Western naturalistic theatre to Indian classical theatre to ‘a greater amalgamation’ in theatre of the various arts including music, dance, literature and painting (in Deshpande et al. 2009: 11). However, the basic point of difference my project has with their work is that heterogeneity now aids a sort of theatre-making that is hardly dramatic any more. In spite of the hybridity in the theme and structure of Karnad’s theatre and its multiplicity of perspective, his Hayavadana (1970), for example, employs a text-driven linear narrative and the fourth wall. Tanvir’s Agra Bazar (1955, 1989) leaves the proscenium setting, partly abandons the storyline and fills the space with bazaar noise, different types of speech and song, while his Charandas Chor (1974, 1977) makes use of the Nacha performance tradition to stage a Rajasthani folktale. Yet, in the ultimate analysis, his theatre shows an imposed ‘proscenium discipline’ (Tanvir’s own phrase) and remains folkloric (depending on story and its scenic representation), albeit with a significant presence of non-dramatic elements in it.

In fact, the kind of theatre this book encompasses has the appearance of intercultural theatre but in a globalized space. This is not to identify postdrama with intercultural theatre but to point out the changed cultural space in which the postdramatic began a nuanced dialogue with Indian theatre after the 1980s. While the book recognizes that the cultural imperialist exploitation by Western theatre of traditional non-Western cultures is still a possibility, it also admits that contemporary non-Western cultures no less adapt Euro-American performance aesthetics into making their theatres that would simultaneously seek to preserve elements of indigenous practice. The book equally addresses the rethinking of the essentialist conception of culture, and thereby of intercultural theatre as well, following the weakening of the notions of ‘national’ and ‘indigenous’ in an atmosphere of cultural deterritorialization and a new cultural hybridization stemming from ‘diasporic public spheres’ (Appadurai 1996). This is different from our idea of ‘globalized performance’ (Pavis 2010) but relates considerably to a glocalized management of theatre in a porous world. Equally instructive in this context is Gerhard Steingress’s observation that the concept of interculturality or transculturality has been surpassed by the contemporary concept of hybridization which ‘in a multicultural contact situation … creates a new meaning and a new subcultural community from transgression’ (in Orosa-Roldán and López-López 2018: 40).

Contemporary theatre in India is neither naïvely imitative of the West nor enthusiastically nativist because the very presumption of reductivist essentialism about a particular culture, as mentioned above, proves problematic in our times. Intercultural theatre (the term has not lost its usage yet) no longer worries about issues of legitimacy and ‘representational authenticity’ (Dalmia 2009: 290), as it did in the 1970s or 80s, because cultures are now ‘intertwined’ (Pavis 2010). More importantly, ‘intercultural’ adaptations and appropriations in contemporary theatre mostly remain restricted to what Vasudha Dalmia calls ‘a preoccupation with technique’ (2009: 285) or to what Lehmann describes as ‘inter-artistic exchange’. ‘[W]e are dealing here more with an “iconophilia” ’, as he argues after Andrzej Wirth, ‘than with interculturalism’ as an anthropological postulate. ‘Intercultural’ today, even in Indian contexts, is ‘not just “cultures” as such that meet but concrete artists, art forms, and theatre productions’ (Lehmann 2006: 176). This ensures a different kind of exchange in times of mobile cultures existing in a double bind of particularity and mutual mediation: it is an inter-artistic exchange that must be distinguished from the representation of a culture per se (176). Theatre-as-performance in our times is driven more by hybridity at the formal level of production than by contextual relocation of an ethnoscape. Sociocultural ‘reality’ still has its context and specificity, but no longer immune from extraneous influences. Hence one has to reckon that the concept of intercultural theatre itself has undergone serious changes following the postmodern notion of culture and representation. Rustom Bharucha’s long-standing attempt to disentangle Indian culture from its decontextualized use in the West’s intercultural theatre does not seem much relevant today (see Dalmia 2009: 282–303) because no intercultural theatre in its mutated, or constantly mutating, form attempts to represent or imitate a ‘foreign’ culture that itself has not undergone mediation.

It is also important to remember that postdramatic theatre, when it emerged in Europe, was a practice in hybridity not in the realm of culture but in that of performance language. The question of inter-/transculturality enters into our discussion only when the practice is viewed in a location beyond its place and history of birth. The purpose of this book is to demonstrate how the contemporary theatre of India can participate in the larger debates on postdramatic practice and contribute significantly to the ongoing paradigm shift in theatre-making in general. In so doing, theatre in India performs a tightrope walk balancing between the changing notion of ‘Indian’ and the equally fluid understanding of ‘Western’, aligning with the traditional in an altered environment and adapting the global to reinvent itself. When it comes to practice, various cultural and aesthetic spaces appear more liminal and mutually negotiable now than they were until the 1990s, although no cultural or performance tradition can ever get totally erased in this new enterprise called ‘glocal’.

Theatre-makers in (urban) India have not certainly built their works on the European ‘post’. None of those interviewed, or whose works I discuss, said that it had a direct impact on their practice. But several of them have welcomed the postdramatic protocols of performative plurality and structural democracy and practised them in experimental, transnational ways. Their primary aim has been to invigorate and pluralize the language of Indian urban theatre that had turned stale under the stronghold of realism as a baggage of colonial stage practice and, at the same time, fairly prescriptive and homogeneous under the decolonizing drive of the ‘theatre of roots’ movement post-independence. Several of them abandoned linear narratives producing a ‘fictive cosmos’ via mimesis as imitation. They also broke with the postcolonial-nationalist tendency to institutionalize through theatre an ‘Indian’ culture in sync with the hegemonic state narrative of nationhood. The ‘transnational’ attempted by them means different things at once – going beyond a ‘national’ ideology performed through a ‘national’ aesthetic, adapting new Eurocentric performance language to a non-European theatre in a different historical setting, and adding new dimensions to the Western paradigm by cross-pollinating it with regional/traditional cultural and art forms. Indian theatre-makers experimented with their new forms not being conscious of Lehmann, but what they did in their own contexts fell much in line with some aspects of the kind of theatre that he highlights while theorizing his ‘postdramatic’. Later, over the last two decades or so, their exposure to the postdramatic theatres outside of India, in conjunction with their training in the flexible and eclectic performance traditions of India, encouraged them to make their own version/s of postdramatic theatre around situations from home and the world. The conjunction ‘and’ in the (principal) title of my book, rather than a straight ‘in’, is a pointer to India’s nuanced and layered relationship with the global postdramatic.

Predramatic and postdramatic

Deepa Punjani, in her lecture ‘Initial Thoughts on the Curious Case of Postdramatic Theatre in the Indian Context’, says: ‘Lehmann’s critical contribution to the discourse of theatre … becomes very helpful … in an upside-down manner to actually appreciate the dimensions of theatre in India that beat homogeneous descriptions. Here, “Postdramatic” can be construed as an overarching term that gives a historical insight into the multiplicity and diversity of Indian theatrical traditions that defy more conventional definitions of drama’ (2018: online). There is no denying that the predramatic theatre in India was performance-centred – the reason why several European/Western theatre-makers or playwrights looked to India (and South East Asia) to radicalize their theatre which was predominantly representational. For example, Eugenio Barba visited India in 1963 to learn Kathakali and take it back to the Laboratory Theatre in Poland. Much of the predramatic theatre in India did employ multiple performance modalities including dance, music, movement and poetry. Indian performance traditions are also rooted in tribal/ethnic ritualistic practices. But one should not conflate (although many do) ‘predramatic’ with ‘postdramatic’ and commit the error of taking the 1990s performance trend as a continuation of unmediated traditional forms accommodating new themes. The 1990s mark the beginning of a new turn to performance. Let us first go to Lehmann’s differentiation between pre- and postdramatic: ‘Ancient tragedy, Racine’s dramas and Robert Wilson’s visual dramaturgy are all forms of theatre. Yet, assuming the modern unders...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Theorizing and Contextualizing India’s Postdramatic
• 2 The Non-Dramatic Turn in Indian Theatre: Early Adaptations and Devised Plays
• 3 India’s Postdramatic I: ‘Telling Stories Across Forms’, Theatre and the New Political, Theatre of Scenography
• 4 India’s Postdramatic II: Monologies and Theatre Solos
• 5 India’s Postdramatic III: Theatre-as-Event, Reality Theatre, Theatre Installations
• 6 Activism in India’s Postdramatic Theatre
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Copyright