Would I Lie To You?:
A Course on the Use of Documents in Theatre
The entry point for documentary theatre practice is, as the name suggests, a document. The nature of this document is varied, complex, amorphous, and shapeshifting. As an entry point — a memory, a metaphor, a gesture, an image, a site, an artwork can all be considered documents. The nomenclature of the “documentary” is overloaded with truth claims, that are constituted through the permeable border of reality and fiction.
In the symposium, titled CONNECTING REALITIES curated by the facilitators of this course, theatre scholar Rustom Bharucha stated that approaching documentary theatre through aesthetic-formal definitions will always fall short, if one does not consider the different institutionalized frameworks of cultural funding. In the spirit of this reflection, our course will set out to nurture organizational architectures that fuel this form, for which a blueprint may not exist.
We will do so in a time when almost any pursuit of truth, intermingles with (social) media`s performativity—destabilizing the logical contradictions of truth-lies, fact-fiction, and real-fake. In our times of ubiquitous computing, real events instantly transform into media and data, housed on servers. Eventually, almost all human expression becomes storage, and an object of computable manipulation—beyond the control and knowledge of the entity, classical philosophy referred to as, “the subject”. What does it mean then, to tell stories under this condition of a shifting idea of subjectivity?
Our course will equip theatre-makers and artists with techniques and aesthetics to deal with an updated notion of the document in our digitized age. The methodological starting point for the course is rooted in practical experiments, while theoretical frameworks and texts will have an interpretive function, to enable and inform understanding. In addition, there will be curated conversations between invited international artists that the participants are mandated to attend.
PARTICIPANTS
Anoushka Zaveri, Literature & Drama MA student and Communications Specialist
Elroy Pinto, Filmmaker and Researcher
Laya Kumar, Theatre-maker, Writer and Teacher
Mayura Baweja, Theatre-maker, Performer (Educational Theatre)
Meghana AT, Theatre artist (performer/writer/director/producer/journalist)
Najrin Islam, Critical Writer (Film/Photography/Performance) and Performance-maker
Nishna Mehta, Theatre-maker for Young Audiences
Oishorjyo, Interdisciplinary artist
Priyanka Chhabra, Independent Film Director, Editor
Radhika Roy, Social Design Researcher
Ranganathan Rajan, Contemporary Dancer
Riddha, Theatre-maker and Researcher
Sananda Mukhopadhyay, Theatre-maker and Arts Educator
Santhy Balachandran, Actor
Smita Milind Majumdar, Comedy/Mental Health Educator
Sohini Basu, Theatre-maker
Souradeep Roy, Theatre-maker, Poet and Translator
Suvani Suri, Sound artist
Vedha Poddar, Filmmaker
Wasif Ali, History PhD Candidate
Xun Zhang, Theatre-maker and Performer
TEACHING ASSISTANT
Manish Ruparel
GUEST SPEAKERS
Zhao Chuan
Siting Yang
Eisa Jocson
Johanna Freiburg
Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch
~The following are reflections by the participants of some of the course sessions~
1. DIGITALITY IN ANUJA GHOSALKAR AND KAI TUCHMANN’S WORK
Ranjit Kandalgaonkar’s virtual room for Anuja Ghosalkar and Kai Tuchmann’s “Look, here is your machine. Get in!”
Happenstance. Moving away from grand theories and all encompassing narratives about the past, historians nowadays use “chance” to explain historical processes. It was by “chance” that Anuja Ghosalkar and Kai Tuchmann, both documentary theatre makers, decided on using the digital as a performance site. The “chance” which led to this particular decision was the COVID-19 pandemic. Deriving on their experiences they decided to curate a workshop on digital documentary theatre. Being a PhD candidate in the History department at a private university in India, again it was by “chance” that my supervisor forwarded me an email calling for applications to this workshop. I am hammering the point about happenstance because we have this amazing capacity to make meaning out of events, making us too romantic about the past. Having said that, the following is my attempt to make sense of these happenstances of the digital.
But, you might ask what actually is “digital” in digital documentary theatre? Simply put it can be understood as a digital rendering of the analogue. We can also have a separate debate on what does “documentary” mean in documentary theatre, but let's keep that for another time and work with the documentary as a truth-claim based on evidence. Coming from preconceived notions, digital might feel very recent. Remember though, it was by chance that it gained prominence over the last few years. We have always been digital. Digitality as technology has always been around. Retrospectively, digitality will feel as natural as any other piece of technology we use, like the blue-ray glasses you might be using to read this essay on your screen. This might sound like using digital as infrastructure over using the digital as aesthetic. But, a clearcut demarcation between the two is not possible. These choices are inextricably linked. Furthermore, the space that you occupy and mould with the available infrastructure dictates your aesthetic choices. Hence, there is a direct link between digitality and the space-time that you occupy. In this way your sociality gets replicated in the digital realm. The digital habitus mimics your social habitus but at the same time provides opportunities to mould it and move beyond conventional boundaries. These opportunities will not be equal and access to canonisation skewed based on power hierarchies. But, the digital despite replicating our sociality and its binaries also presents us with ever-increasing possibilities of contaminating them. What follows are descriptions of efforts in that direction.
Dear Dead Doctor by Kai Tuchmann & Kiran Kumar
Digital documentary theatre not only provides a hands-on experience when it comes to producing/curating the archive but also makes explicit the process of evidence creation. “I fictionalise where history leaves me out, while at the same time making the fictionalisation evident”, says Anuja, while talking about her project Lady Anandi: Performing Archival Absence.1 This might make historians feel naked, their trade secret being made public. Digital then becomes a tool to break down false binaries between academic and public history. Looking at Kai Tuchman’s work with Kiran Kumar, Dear Dead Doctor, it becomes evident that the digital also provides spaces for pushing the boundaries of doing documentary theatre.2 This particular work using Infrared technology documents the body as an archive, exploring non-mimetic forms of (re)enactment. Kiran practising dance forms which have been passed down generations provide ways of thinking through the here and now of the performer, their ancestors and future successors. Hence, digital preserves snippets from the ever-evolving space and time when it comes to the here and now of the past, present and future. It becomes a revolutionary archiving tool making legible the embodied past. This project hints towards the possibility of moving away from a conflict-theory based model where the coming together of two antithetical worlds cannot be envisioned. Digitality hence provides opportunities to manifest such possibilities.
Lonely Hearts Club by Anuja Ghosalkar
Living in post-truth societies moving away from mass to digital media, the audience produces their own evidence. The Lonely Hearts Club on Instagram and Zoom, a collaborative effort curated by Anuja Ghosalkar makes the use of digital in turning the problem of audience generated evidence on its head.3 Audience participation then becomes the basis of the documentary theatre mediated via the digital. The digital also provides the participants the agency to choose their digital identity. This digital identity then has the potential to become a weapon against hegemonic identity labels, contaminating the conceptions of real vis-a-vis fake, sacred vis-a-vis profane. On the level of performance it also obfuscates “live” in contradistinction to “recorded”. Look, Here Is Your Machine. Get In!, a virtual theatre space curated by Anuja and Kai on Mozilla Hubs makes you wonder about the meaning of being “alive” in the digital age.4 It attempts to make explicit the dynamism underpinning our understanding of the virtual. This not only at the level of a petty alternate reality but also in thinking about alternative experience of the Virtual. A Virtual which has the potential to be the “really” fake which shall/can not be called out. Digitality then becomes a technology with the potential of deeply human deeds, satisfying our thirst for meaning.
1https://www.hakara.in/performing-archival-absences-lady-anandi/
2https://wiki.theater.digital/projects:deardeaddoctor:start
3https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1GheAheqFw 4https://2021.serendipityartsvirtual.com/project/look-here-is-your-machine-get-in/
Wasif Ali
2. INTRODUCTION TO KAI TUCHMANN’S WORK
RED, Kai Tuchmann’s collaboration with Wen Hui and Living Dance Studio
The session opened up into specific conceptual and technological techniques and methodologies that Kai took us through.
The Principle of Situatedness in Documentary Theatre
Regarding the pain of others— that is the complex space where politics, ethics, aesthetics, intersect. However, there is no formula or recipe of how to juggle these elements. The only principle is that it always has to come from the very concrete situation you engage with. It is particular and different every time. That’s what this seminar is about- to think through developing a sort of sensorium. A sensorium of different strategies that are appropriate, but also politically necessary, when it comes to presenting/ representing the other.
Documentary theatre practice is a practice of permanent case studies. The many cultures of documentary theatre are referred to in different ways across regions and histories. They are situated in different theatrical cultures and practices. What ties them together is that they all (re-) frame real events. But they are different because they keep the memory of their situatedness alive, in that they are particular.
Unpacking the Technology of Documentary Theatre
The fundamental technique of documentary theatre is the art of montage, and the relationship that one weaves between montage and the narrative is the crucial place from wherein unfolds the delicate and complex ideology, intent and experience of the work. It is this fundamental technique/ principle that frees the document from its aesthetic, ethical, political binds and restores the potential for it to also produce another reality, a speculative reality or the ‘promise’ of the real. Even though the weight of life, blood, tears, hopes, fears, struggles is attached to the documents, yet it is within the ambit of theatre, that the document can (re)present reality. ‘Re’ here refers to a revisiting of reality or a return to it, via a détournement.
Diagrammatising the basic technological/ manufacturing process when it comes to the ‘documents’ and the narrative, as elaborated by Kai (below)
Two Instances of Documentary Theatre
To further demonstrate the above, Kai shared the background, context, concerns and processes of two of his works:
Happy that you are here! (Schön, dass ihr da seid!), 2014/ 2015
RED (a collaboration with Wen Hui, 2015)
The Pursuit of Impossible Truth— a conversation between Anuja Ghosalkar, Kai Tuchmann and Kunal Purohit, further dives into both the works.
The first example— Happy that you are here!, was a project in collaboration with the master’s thesis students of anthropology in Göttingen University. The site/location of the project was Friedland, in the district of Göttingen, which has the oldest refugee camp in Germany. Here one could observe the permanent presence of 'others', and how their presence helped the Germans to formulate their own identity by demarcating themselves from the 'others', the 'outsider' or the 'stranger'. Friedland can be thought of as the home that holds the dilemma and anxiety of the inside-out, outside-in. A kind of outside that produces the inside, which then turns over into an inside-out.
Ironically the first others to have ever arrived at Friedland, were Germans themselves, that is the imprisoned German soldiers, mostly imprisoned by the Americans, but also by the Russians. They returned as strangers to what they had left once as the insiders. From then on to now, refugees from diverse locations came in and from one day to another,the people inside the camp changed completely.
The project intended to analyze the function of Friedland in the German nation building process post 1945. The question it held was- how did the city in Göttingen receive and represent these strangers? Whom did they openly welcome? Whom did they not? And why? What does this tell us about German society?
The snippets of the film (document) about the making of this project shared glimpses into the artistic research process. It provoked the thought of what it is to research materials, collectively and discursively, to then share this research, select the materials and assemble them additively.
During the production, a tactical twist was to not narrate the presences in the camp chronologically, but in reverse chronology. The play started in the present moment, with the 'strangers' that are present now, and ended with the Germans being the first strangers arriving at that camp.
The second project, RED premiered in 2015 and also explored this relationship of the inside and the outside. But this time it was about memory— the memories that a society nourishes, and the memories that a society doesn't engage with. The historical context was the cultural revolution in China which lasted for about 10 years, and the living memory of it, abundant with contradictions, gaps and questions.
RED was based on The Red Detachment of Women— one among the eight model operas during the time of the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76). To produce material, interviews were conducted for a period of three years, with dancers, choreographers, eyewitnesses. These also segwayed into the people that were actually close to the students movement and that cannot enter China anymore. Thus, something like a living archive was generated.
“We based our memory, or our excavation of an alternative memory of the Cultural Revolution on that ballet piece. By working with dancers who danced in that back then, by interviewing people who saw that, who choreographed them.” - Kai Tuchmann
The idea piercing through it was in 2014, the Communist Party would celebrate the 40th year anniversary of the Red Detachment of Women, and there will be an official memory. But this project entered into the interstices of the memories that would be 'outside' of the officiated ones.
A major dramaturgical decision was to bring an intergenerational communication, lacking in the everyday families, as a model on stage. The intent was to explore possibilities of communication between the people who experienced the Cultural Revolution and those who did not.
The model book was a primary document to establish and develop this project. As a model of the staging, the happenings in the act, the dresses, the movements, the text, durations where everything used to be fixed and written down, the Model Book became the document to take off from.
A deeper exposition of RED is the post-dramatic anthology edited by Kai.
Open access, can be downloaded from here.
Suvani Suri
3. INTRODUCTION TO ANUJA GHOSALKAR’S WORK
From Anuja Ghosalkar’s presentation about her practice
The Inventive Artist - Anuja
In the interest of transparency, my association with Anuja goes back to 2005 when she taught Introduction to Cinema during my undergraduate studies in Bombay. When Anuja first reached out about the Would I Lie To You Documentary Theatre workshop, I felt this could be a renewal of inspiring and enriching exchanges that we’ve had over the years.
Anuja’s introduction provided us with reasons for why the workshop was created and talked about her role as a researcher, educator, and theatre maker – becoming one of the many nodal points for Documentary Theatre in India. Framing her practice as distinctly feminist and inter-disciplinary, she shared her personal journey as an artist in a way that made it difficult to distinguish between the art and the artist. There is a remarkable breath of honesty in her work that was refreshing.
That breath also became a form of recurring motif in which Anuja punctuated her presentation with pauses of breath that made the presentation very self-referential. She also raised a very potent metaphor of how the audience was connected to the breath, giving us ideas on how to compose a piece. The metaphor of the breath is well known in every major religious and philosophical teachings.. Mostly formulated by men, in the Buddhist worldview the breath connects to how all that is sentient, non-sentient, and that which is neither sentient nor non-sentient come together in an interconnected way of causes and conditionalities. There is no creator nor a grand design but that which comes together is subject to death and decay at every given moment. The breath is also a source of creation and destruction. In the Gwalior gharana of Khayal vocalism we are taught the importance of the breath through the concept of phoonk. The ability to control the breath is intimately tied to one’s ability to project a note in a gliding form. The breath perhaps most significantly represents a beginning, middle and an end.
A few of her thoughts remained long after the session was over:
Layering: Anuja provided clarity on how every performance is layered on multiple levels, it’s not just the visual that offers potentiality of layering. The screen, the projector, the subject all provide opportunities, so does the sound, we have plenty of opportunities to indulge in what we know as the vertical montage. The extensive use of such techniques also moves closer to what we understand of the hallmark of the digitally rendered cinema.
Metta-Friendship: Anuja spoke of how she built her community through kinship that goes beyond the familial. The idea of Metta in Buddhism - kindness and fellowship - is a very potent term for all historical tribal cultures because only by not killing the other that is not part of the tribe that friendship is put into practice. For Anuja, friendship is also reflected in audience building.
Collaboration as a series of I’s: To use Anuja’s term, her work did not aim to reflect the work of a singular author but a series of collaborating ‘I’s’. Essentially allowing for a voice of plurality to be reflected in the piece of work that speaks of equitability and also multiplicity. It also allows for a clear breakdown of the grand narrative and instead ushers in a series of narratives that occupy an equitable space.
Anuja had also carefully utilized her own position and resources to create one of the most diverse and ambitious workshops.. Her presence continues to stimulate discussion and her many provocations have spurred much debate and enriching conversations.
Elroy Pinto
4. ZHAO CHUAN:
WHOSE NARRATIVE BECOMES THEATRE AND HOW IS IT REALISED?
Zhao Chuan’s session on September 9, was the first among the series of thought-provoking guest lectures which peppered the WILTY course work. Zhao Chuan - a writer, theatremaker of deeply political inclinations is usually based out of Shanghai, and shares a long history of both kinship and thespian dialectic with both our key facilitators Anuja and Kai. Naturally the session on September 9 began with a spirited introduction by Anuja in which she contextualized some of their compelling collaborations, alongside warm smiles and a palpable sense of excitement across the room.
Zhao Chuan immediately drew us into the sessions - beginning with a series of participative exercises which helped break the ice. As a group of workshoppees we were also relatively new to each other at the time, and the particular exercise in which we were asked to ‘say something about the room’ we were in, allowed us for the first time, little windows of familiarity into the lives of our fellow participants. Another following exercise where we initially used red and green papers to demonstrate definitive ‘yes’ and ‘no’ as answers, progressively got murky, as the questions Zhao Chuan posed became more layered and complex. We moved from unambiguous reds and greens to greys, purples and yellows - once again holding space for the complexities held within the participants themselves. Camaraderies were just beginning to form across the room, but Zhao Chuan’s exercises made sure that they were not based on similarities alone.
World Factory by Zhao Chuan
Thereafter Zhao Chuan took us through some of his more path-breaking works, each of which held within them deep conundrums and political practices of theatre and artmaking that not only questioned, but made sumptuous attempts to subvert prevalent power hierarchies. The conversations began with reflections on creation of space, production of community and the structures and solidarities embedded in his practice of ‘social theatre’. Zhao Chuan took us through some of the crucial elements that delineate his work - concepts like Aftertheatre where (at the end of every performance) the audience is called upon to participate, often bringing forth a range of reactions and emotions. He further contextualized some of his deeper personal personal politics influenced by the workers movements in China, through productions like World Factory where for the first time urban audiences in China witnessed a production about workers. As the conversation moved to narrative creation, Zhao Chuan underlined his work as a dramaturg - “I found that my work, is to actually figure out where the connection is between different ideas.Then from a ‘you’, or ‘me’ or ‘he’ or ‘she’ (or they) it becomes us.” The conversations then veered towards process and ethics, burdens of censorship, physicalities embodied on stage, dramaturgical tools and possibilities of both popular and not-so-popular art practices, as well as the nuances working with and thereby supporting the creation of a factory worker’s theatre group - North Gate’. Questions about his own positionalities followed, elucidating his own nativities and attempts to break the power hierarchies - “maybe one day the workers bodies will also become our bodies”, he added.
The session was peppered with deeply arousing questions and provocations - “Theatre is not only about the message, but also how we deliver the message”, concluded Zhao Chuan.
The session ended on high note of narrativising lived realities through a lens both deeply personal and political (though not named ‘political theatre’ as such - as Zhao Chuan points out - owing to Chinese government practices), enabling incisive reflections of the socio-political habitus all individuals involved in the art-making process occupy, through processes of inclusion rather than alienation of the audiences and the performers alike.
Oishorjyo
5. SITING YANG:
BUT THERE IS EMPTY SPACE ON THE PAGE
Yang Siting helped me reconcile with my past.
I read Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe as an eighteen-year-old with no academic background in social sciences. Over the next five years, I developed a debilitating distrust of 'Development Studies' and theoretical jargon - of reading itself - that I could not make sense of in real life. It drove me out of classrooms and onto the stage. It took me a few years after graduating to remember that I used to love reading as much as I loved performing.
More than a decade later, I found myself in a course on documentary theater and along came Siting quoting all the names I thought I'd left behind - Conrad, Achebe, Foucault, Wittgenstein - only this time, they made sense.
Siting is, to quote her, pretty naughty. She finds nothing too sacred to be part of a joke, and yet treats every document - whatever that may mean - an existing text, idea, or even experience - with utmost reverence. Playing around with a document requires it to be understood contextually and respected for what it is and is not, for only then can it be layered with meaning and turned into something else. Citationality is integral to her creative and academic work.
A screenshot from Siting Yang’s session
Siting started by making us reflect on why we cite anything at all and then got us talking about Joseph Conrad and Chinua Achebe. Just when I thought I was about to have flashbacks to my college life, Siting shared the story of how she created The Sky Of Darkness. Across time and space, and across socio historical contexts, the writings of those two authors had helped her understand the events and situations described to her by her friend. Through the synthesis of those writings, her friend's lived experiences, and her research, she found a way to comment on the colonial nature of Chinese international involvement.
Siting's lecture made me think about my own creative work, and how it came to be. 'Jai Hind' is a comedy act I wrote to comment on the living circumstances of students on IIT campuses that lead to suicidal ideation - a synthesis of Jesse Bering's Suicidal and my lived experience. 'Where Is My One True Love?' is a comedy act I wrote to comment on the lack of reliable education on interpersonal relationship skills - a synthesis of Bollywood movies, Shrayana Bhattacharya's Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, and my lived experiences. Neither exists in a vacuum, and opens up more spaces for commentary.
We cite a document - whatever that may mean - because it helps us process our experiences and because it provides us frames of references mutual to us and our audience. Sometimes documents can make us question our experiences, and sometimes our experiences make us question documents.
Since Siting's lecture, I have found myself thinking specifically about the spaces between those within academia and those outside and the importance of reducing the opacity of these spaces and simultaneously enriching them through storytelling. It is how I finally understood the idea of documentary theatre and how and where I fit in - as a student of Development Studies, as a performer, and now as a documentary thespian.
Smita Mujumdar
6. EISA JOCSON:
BODY AS ARCHIVE AND EXPLODING THE DIGITAL FRAME
Watching Eisa Jocson’s Corponomy, a performance lecture, redrew the possibilities of the digital in live performance for me. These boundaries were pushed further during the group session with her on 26th September, 2022.
While introducing Eisa, Kai mentioned that he first met her in Shanghai at “Staging Alterity”, an event organised by Zhao Chuan. At this event, Kai remembers, Eisa used her body as a tool, bridging discourse and performance in a powerful way. In her performance lecture, Corponomy, Eisa’s body becomes “an archive moderated through cultural industries.” Eisa’s session and the recorded materials illuminated these abstract ideas.
The thunderstorm in the background and the anticipated power cut at her home (5 hours away from Manila) caused Eisa’s life and her work to be entangled in very material ways for the 4 hour session bringing an urgency, intimacy and connectedness that is surprising over zoom. Despite the uncertainty of how long her computer battery would last and the collective decision to not take a break, Eisa took her time to talk about her practice and to reflect on the questions asked. The long pauses provided a feeling of ease and heightened presence at the same time. Post session conversations amongst us affirmed that this taking of time and her thoughtful choice of words made her session all the more compelling.
Eisa’s body of work includes Corponomy, The Filipino Superwoman Band, Death of the Pole Dancer, Happyland and Manila Zoo. In Corponomy, Eisa examines the various roles of Pole dancer, Macho Dancer, (Japanese) Host and Disney Princess (Hong Kong, Disneyland) that she has played over the years. These vocabularies and choreographies reside in her body as a result of many hours of training and performing. Her practice seeks to study the relationship between “movement and mobility” and “how these languages are used for social mobility”. According to her, the early training in Ballet and its discipline served her well and at 19 she was introduced to pole dancing by her aunt. In the years that followed, she witnessed the shift of pole dancing from the “red light areas” to the fitness space. She observed that the same movement language with a different audience altered the respect accorded to pole dancers. Gradually these spaces, which were separate, became porous and began to interact with each other! The next step was to take pole dancing out of the enclosed spaces into the very public spaces of streets and promenades. These gravity defying acts, part acrobatic and part dance in these open spaces unleashed more questions about the body of the performer, the audience and the space itself.
Corponomy Online by Eisa Jocson
Eisa’s performances are visually arresting whether she performs indoors or outdoors. She is the kind of dancer that you can’t stop watching. Partly this is because she is exacting upon herself in each of the roles as a performer. But it is the contradictions that the performance underlines that are fascinating to me. As a Macho Dancer she embodies masculinity which is powerful and attractive. Yet the sexualising vocabulary causes it to be relegated to a lower level in the social hierarchy. How does this change when a woman performs a dance usually performed by men? These are the questions Eisa asks herself and the viewer. As a female spectator, I found the embodiment of masculinity in a woman’s body both thrilling and empowering (someone described it as second hand gender euphoria). From Macho Dancer, Eisa moved to learning and performing the dance of Host ( a role performed by Filipino women in Japanese bars) which has virtually the opposite vocabulary of extremely subtle feminine gestures. She took it on at the time to challenge the spilling masculine body of the Macho Dancer that was her. During the intensive training, her body struggled like she had never experienced before, to embody the new vocabularies. This learning and unlearning of new vocabularies inflicts violence on her body that is echoed in her words as Snow White, the Disney princess, “ I am sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you but you don’t know what I have been through”. These words that are repeated with growing anger in her performance seem to capture the pain of this transformation as much as they allude to the oppressive conditions of labour that Filipino women face as contractual workers in the global economy.
By laying open the processes that are relegated to behind the scenes labour (rehearsal, porosity of living and work spaces, setting up of the equipment and testing it for performance) she compels the spectator to do the work of making connections of between the seen (a layered, aesthetic dance performance) with that which is unseen (capital, labour and gender). In both Corponomy and Manila Zoo (parts of the performance were shared over the zoom session) these processes become a part of the layers of the performance. In Corponomy, the spectator sees the various roles played by her being typed out. The cursor goes back and forth correcting mistakes as the words and year of performance appear. I remember feeling as if I was looking over the shoulder of the person typing, unsure of whether this is recorded or happening live. This is the uncertain space that Eisa wants the spectator to occupy. Manila Zoo, described as a work-in-pandemic, deploys the digital in ingenious ways to connect performers in the Philippines with an audience halfway across the world in Europe. Her question, “How do we insist on our live-ness while being manifest in pixels?” resonated with our preoccupation with liveness within the digital realm. The other questions, she asks, are equally urgent—What do we do—as artists in the midst of a pandemic? As dancers confined to these limited spaces (not unlike animals in a zoo)? As citizens of a state that is failing its people? Her answers — being there for each other, to continue making work using available technologies and reaching out to audiences, are not unique but her work is. Manila Zoo is a powerful work that breaches many boundaries. A live performance with 5 performers situated in the confined spaces of their homes (all but one in the Philippines) and a physical audience in a theatre space in Berlin are connected through technology. The choices around the performers bodies, movement and soundscape bridge the physical distance in surprising ways. At one point, the audience is looking at themselves on the screen (a reversal of gaze) and the individual performers' screens appear interspersed amongst them, which is both a wonder (from the technological point of view of how one does that) and a collapsing of distance. As Eisa acknowledges, this kind of performance would be impossible without the funding support that comes from Europe, a factor that we keep returning to in our conversations on artistic practices.
I am left with the many images of shapeshifting malleability that is a part of Eisa’s practice. And the many pauses that it induces.
Eisa Jocson was joined by her friend Esther Kamba, an experimental multidisciplinary artist from Kenya.
Mayura Baweja
7. JOHANNA FREIBURG:
THE CAMERA NEVER/ALWAYS LIES - ALIENATED INTIMACY IN THE WORK OF GOB SQUAD
I was introduced to Gob Squad during my MA in 2019 where my work was said to reflect the DIY aesthetic and a “natural” style of performance and one of the companies I was asked to refer to was Gob Squad. I jumped with joy when I read about their session at " Would I Lie To You " and Johanna Freiburg’s session just reassured me that my work is not “strange” or even new for that matter. I have never had the chance to experience a Gob Squad performance live but one could see me smiling cheek to cheek at certain examples and phrases Johanna said to describe their work.
Seven reassuring phrases from The Camera Never/Always Lies - Alienated Intimacy in the Work of Gob Squad:
A. “Everyone is in-charge”
The true nature of collaborative work and the DIY aesthetic - everyone is in-charge, everyone does everything. Wearing multiple hats is something I do every day, with every project I do whether it is performing in one show and stage managing or lighting another or live streaming a conference. The hands-on nature of their work is inspiring and reassuring that you do not have to put yourself in a box as an artist.
B. “Technology for us, it’s not a gimmick in itself, we are doing it for certain needs”
The collective was started by seven people from different practices within the arts so not everyone was comfortable performing directly in front of the audience like in conventional theatre performances. So technology played a huge part in their work from basic, everyday technology in the beginning to now becoming a Gob Squad signature. Another DIY approach to performance-making that appeals to me - using home technology, technology which is available to everyone - something your audience feels familiar with yet experiences the novelty because you have used it in a performance.
Even though I started as an actor I have always been more inclined towards the making of a show and being behind the scenes while still being able to “perform”. Initially, their work looked “tech-heavy” to me but I saw myself using technology for the same reason - because I wanted to speak to my audience by not exactly being in the foreground.
1984: Back To No Future by Gob Squad
C. “You wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t for the camera”
I am camera shy, I do not like being photographed nor do I aim to become a screen actor but when it came to online storytelling, I went all out - even though it took me many months to adapt to the digital - with props, objects and accessories from around the house. I am aiming to create site-specific performances and it was also reassuring to know that playing for the camera gives the liberty to be weird in public and gives the sense of assurance to the onlookers as well that the performer has a “companion” - the camera and is not talking to themself. What you do in front of the camera doesn’t have to be “real”.
D. “Often the technology has the function to alienate us from our viewers and at the same time it enables us to make these connections to other human beings.”
Safety and privacy are the biggest concerns when it comes to the use of technology whether it is the use of recording devices or broadcasts, especially with the use of the internet. This automatically leads to alienation but doesn’t stop us from engaging with it. Coming from a tradition of live performances with a live audience, it took me a while to get used to the digital. However, I soon realised the problem was not performing for the camera but it was not having the audience in front of me that was bothering me. Performing using video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Team and virtual spaces like Mozilla Hubs and Bramble paved way for a different kind of intimacy with the audience whether it was interacting with the audience via chat or having to move your avatar close to someone else’s to be able to see and hear them.
It was also fascinating to hear about how Gob Squad has been able to engage with strangers on the street to become a part of the performance on camera and make them feel comfortable enough to be accompanied for a while. I often say that strangers are my best friends and it’s reassuring to see how a device as a companion can lead to such trust-building and deep conversations.
E. “We come from a tradition where we didn’t spend so much time in the theatre. We were much more in the places, in the everyday, not in the black box or the theatre”
I come from a tradition of spending a lot of time in the theatre! But I was always fascinated by outdoor and site-specific work. The work that stood out for me in this regard were Calling Laika, which played in a car park with cars creating an arena in which the performance took place with the spoken text broadcasted via radio frequency, 15 Minutes To Comply took place on an underground platform where the audience was on the platform on the other side of the tracks from the performers and An Effortless Transaction, a performance in a furniture shop. I first created my own site-specific walk-through only in 2019 during my MA and since then every idea I come up with is rooted in a landscape or location. The first original play I wrote is set on a hilltop and the dream performance situation would be a hike with the audience followed by the performance, another dream project is a walk-through of a butterfly garden.
F. “We like to be confronted by the unforeseen”
This one’s easy - being a solo traveler, freelancer and outdoors enthusiast I live the unforeseen. It is inevitable with site-specific performances how much ever the environment is controlled by the makers but since the site is a character in the show, it only makes for a unique experience for the audience present in cases of the unforeseen.
G. “(She) can be like that, (she) doesn’t need to pretend to be something else”
Johanna shared an anecdote with us of noticing a cleaner vacuuming the stage after one of their shows and how it looked like a performance within the set up which inspired the “natural” performance style in later shows. Especially What Are You Looking At?, a durational performance, which she said to be Big Brother before Big Brother. As a storyteller, I too like to show my audience my “natural” setting and self before I switch to storyteller mode. Somehow it seems to bring about alienated intimacy…
Nishna Mehta
8. YALGAAR SANKRUTIK MANCH:
जागा झाला स्वाभिमान / WE HAVE RISEN TO SELF-RESPECT
Freedom - Equality - Fraternity
The Marxist Philosopher and Historian, Sharad Patil’s pathbreaking research into alternative interpretation of dialectical materialism led him to integrate the Phuleite, Ambedkarite and Buddhist philosophies. But the key to his understanding of culture and ancient Indian history was complete only after he reclaimed the concept of Rashtri Devi - Nirrti – Nirrti who was buried into the subconscious and cast into the role of a goddess of death. Through Nirrti he unearthed the values of Swatantrya (Freedom), Samata (Equality) and Mitrata (Friendship). Sharad Patil’s methodology has provided me with the tools to examine the experience of caste in catholic communities in western India. But more than that, his interpretation of Indian culture, the role of artists, and the revolution of aesthetics allows us to challenge any traditional orthodoxy and provides a creative alternative culture. With that said, let us look into the creative theatre practice and pedagogical activism of Yalgaar Collective.
The session with Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch (YSM) offered plenty of repose and thought for all of us –they were the final guest speakers in a long line of thought-provoking artists. Yalgaar began their workshop by inviting all of us to introduce ourselves by singing a folk song from our region or language. The introduction quickly turned into a wide-ranging series of discussions on language, caste, geography, class, and religion. Perhaps it is only through the medium of sound and music that we can instantaneously reproduce or recreate an archive, a repository of memories or a series of images. This organisation of imagery and lyrics created resonances and dissonances; some borrowed, some sang in broken languages, some sang translations but everyone presented! In many cases, it was the first time we got to hear people sing or perform. At the end of that introduction, Yalgaar offered us a simple observation that folk songs are not just about the fun in music but rather they offer us a deeper glimpse into human conditions and cultures. I would like to offer two reflections on Yalgaar’s creative practice.
जागर समतेचा, शाहिरी जलसा / Jagar Samtecha (The People's Awakening) by Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch
Modernist Jalsa: Without delving into the discourse on the Jalsa form, I urge you to read this entry on Jalsa instead. The Jalsa of Yalgaar is a curious blend of what is broadly known as Ma-Phu-Aa (Marx-Phule-Ambedkar) philosophy. Driven by modernism and offering a critical interrogation of daily practices, it also provided space for discussions, and became a way of preserving historical traditions for the broad categories of Stree-Shudra-Ati Shudra. Jalsas emerged from the parts of society that were in direct confrontation with nature. The Jalsa is a space of modernity, play and dialogue drawn from various singing styles from agricultural contexts. Unlike traditions that claim to be classical in nature, the Jalsa has no interest in universalism and instead allows for a plurality of voices in its formal elements. The Jalsa allows Yalgaar to orbit all political stances while staying broadly between the Ma-Phu-Aa knowledge-base making it an unrivaled and sophisticated form.
Caste: This session allowed for a much deeper introspection that hopefully leads us to think of caste not as an object of study but rather as something that has to be acknowledged around us. By seeking to engage in dialogic, Yalgaar aims to build bridges across communities that enables them to build larger networks of solidarities and an increase in audiences.
Yalgaar’s presence provoked many questions that every artist should be asking themselves- for whom do we create and whose stories we tell? Most importantly, what is our relationship and responsibility to art practice? Does art exist beyond the boundaries of morality and ethics? How do we as practitioners of digital art navigate such conversations while also being able to sustain ourselves financially?
Elroy Pinto
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