Durga

It has been quite lonely. It's a very isolated space especially as I also live outside of Oslo and it's a countryside but it's not really country countryside. It's a city but it's not a huge one. Norway has quite a fund-based ecology. You get funding, you make work for yourself and whether you are reaching audiences or not, whether your work is relevant to their contexts or not matters little. Whether you reach the audience numbers or not, you just endeavour [to make] the performance and you are quite independent. You don't really work so much collaboratively, or have a hub, or give voice to something that matters. It’s a singular aesthetic that is class-based. Not like our cultures or countries, where art reaches everyone and makes you alive, makes you feel something. Here, theatres are closed all the time. The doors are never open until you have an appointment. I miss that kind of community-based, generated, derived theatre that you are immersed in. There is something that you can always participate in back home.

Here if there is some kind of festival, then you get to see the spaces and see the work. Other than that, [there’s] nothing like a running, living theatre that you can go to. It's an expensive country to go from one location to another. Theatre and performance don't reach the audience that we do back home [in Nepal] and the collective voice that breathes through that meeting is lost. In an environment like this, I find it completely difficult to figure out my purpose as an artist. The kind of a context that I currently work in is very much about an international perspective, how the two cultures meet. We talk about diversity, but we don't talk really about the struggle behind the diversity and so-called divergent lives. We are so happy about diversity. We have to build a harmonious community. But then nobody talks about the friction between two cultures or reflects it in art-making and to the contrary, they passively accept it. I refuse.

These are the things that I bring. I come from the Dalit community, which is a caste- marginalised community and this is another part that I carry a deep responsibility toward. I have my own core research-based arts practice. Besides that, I am a well-trained theatre artist, but people still see me as an outsider, and that's not only me. I think there are many international artists here who would feel this way.

D

In a way, connection with the audiences exists here. There are audiences that are invited, audiences that we share if we do something inside the theatre but then I also work in public space. For example, I bring participatory theatre methodologies [such as in the case of] the Collective Mandala. We were creating a big mandala, almost like a three-meter diagram or something. The whole city could join in the process, chance upon it and participate. I created a place where people can communicate and actually have a dialogue. Children and elders bring their stories and knowledges – anybody that bends and goes onto the floor. How does the vertical body go on the floor? This contains information about culture.

I bring things that are from my core culture but I’m interested in how this works when it is transposed outside of my culture and outside of my territory. How something is seen is a recurring question. Then you understand where to move and how to organise and what kind of people are connecting with the premise, with each other, with themselves. I don't work literally, but I’m interested in spatially imagining places for communing through metaphorical and gestural invitations. For example, I also made a production called See You Again where three other artists and myself were in a shopping mall. People witnessed us being there, having a coffee and making a living room space. They could come in and strike a conversation. It's strangers meeting strangers. I’m not interested in waiting for an audience inside the theatre. I directly try to go out in public space and bring the performing arts or socially-engaged arts practice straight to audiences.

D

Right now, I'm trying to research and deeply think about social hauntology. I have been reading and doing performances of the different texts. One of the special texts I have been very into is this golden text that is Ghostly Matters. This text talks about haunting and the sociological imagination. It is about racism and capitalism in America but the author Avery Gordon also talks about social hauntology, this idea that we never get peace in the world because we are not listening to ancestors or friends that haunt us every single day. We keep moving at these unnatural rhythms, but we are not listening to them and the effects are consequential. She's not talking about haunting as such, but a social-political perspective and bringing different competing issues that can remind us that we have to bear witness to our histories of sorrows, silencing, othering. These are really haunting me. People in my Dalit community die just because of touching water. So where are those bodies? What are they haunting and are we really listening to them? This is what I’m thinking deeply about.

D

I work with this ‘border’ perspective. The border between caste, the border between immigration systems and countries, the border between cultures. Of course, in Norway, it’s like welcome to the bureaucratic world. Immigration here is really mean. They surround you with complex bureaucratic design that wills you out of your desire to be here, that tires you to your bone so that you think you are enacting your agency to leave. You have nothing, they have everything. Norway is built completely by ‘others’ though. Nothing grows here. Everything comes from outside. If all the immigrants and international people leave, they’ll end up only with potatoes. Seriously.

Every year I have to renew my visa to stay in Norway. I had colleagues going to Germany and once, when we were touring, I couldn’t even cross the Norway-Sweden border. I didn’t even know I was waiting on immigration because I had submitted all my papers on time, but I’d call them and they’d say, we can’t find your documents. It was so confusing! And I began to question who is the immigration officer here? I then wrote a long text about what was missing but in slang poetry. That time, I was on time, I was on punctual time… It tells the story of that time and it comes from Beckett. It became an episodic piece that is to be continued. The text has lots of humour. I wanted to do many things, but I was scared. [There’s a fear] of the oppressed body.

This embodied fear then took the text further and I worked with movement. I had ghungroo [ankle bells] on my ankle and my task was to not make noise. I was metaphorically playing with how much control, how much restraint, how much l could hold back and not make a single sound. It was a metaphorical question of what it means to live here, in peripheral zones.

I then made a participatory theatre work with that text. I was the host and in the bar with a microphone asking, is there anyone here from the immigration office tonight? There [was no response]. [Then I would ask] does anyone know someone who works in the immigration office? In all my audiences only one guy said, my mum’s friend’s friend works in the immigration office. I ended up buying him a drink. But the whole impulse for the show was that I want your body to feel this resonance, the anxiety of this condition.

D

I’ve recently been looking at au pair communities and how class functions in this space. We are making a film and talking about how hard the lives of au pairs straddling the spaces of their domesticity and care work within the so-called upper-class Norwegian intelligentsia can be. The film [features] a couple where the girl is from South America and the man is from Norway and how differently their gazes operate within the power structures of the story. How do you make the invisible, visible? Now the au pair visa has been stopped by Norway immigration. People from the Philippines, Brown people, South American people are dealing with unthinkable circumstances, yet peace is maintained on the outside. I’m making it with a freelance theatre company who work with different topics in Norway. But I desire to find an artistic community, to connect with other Dalit artists, to make work with other theatre-makers from the subcontinent. To [use] radical processes to grapple with the urgency of our struggles in solidarity.