This reader brings together a series of conversations with performance makers working in theatre, dance-theatre and live performance in the subcontinent and the South Asian diaspora. In dialogue with writers and directors working with alternate dramaturgies, informed by tradition, ceremony and ritual, the artists featured are chancing upon new forms of storytelling that are distinctive in voice and deviate deliciously from the Western canon. Touching on themes of mysticism, myth, love, war, gender, sexuality, class, and the socio-political condition, the works discussed in this reader find the universal in the specific. The following text illuminates the processes of creating, rehearsing and producing harnessed by the artists in making new work, ethically and safely.

The porosity of disciplines is inherent to these artist’s practices and many of us are informed by cultural systems that do not privilege one sense over the other, and often deny the nature-culture divide.

This reader is the first of its kind to be produced in Australia. It is compiled by us: Indian-Australian artist-curator Nithya Nagarajan and Pakistani-Australian creative producer Zainab Syed in conversation with the practitioners working in South Asian theatre today. We are also close friends. Within the context of our own homes in India, and Pakistan, this collaboration would have been nigh impossible due to political forces much bigger than us. We don’t take the potential of our collaborative praxis to re-imagine new worlds lightly.

This reader, which is supported by Co-Curious and Belvoir St. Theatre and funded by Creative Australia, is written within the context of Wurundjeri and Gadigal lands, where there is a 60,000-year tradition of unbroken storytelling. It honours the past as a source of ancestral knowledge and archival material. It also understands it as part of a cultural continuum that informs the present in defining a new role for transforming our stages and artistic ecologies.

Structured as a two-part reader that begins with a conversation between ourselves followed by a series of conversations interlaced with our own experiences, we illuminate alterity in storytelling practices and principles. We hope this reader is widely accessible and useful to artists and collectives making new work. We also hope that it resonates with producers in the process of realising interdisciplinary projects, theatre and performing arts organisations that support artistic development and funding bodies that catalyse new work creation.

Given longstanding histories and traditions of reviews and criticism, we rarely get to hear directly from the people making work on their processes and practices, and the relationship between form and content. This reader is brought to life by interviews with artists emerging and established. These artists make work individually and collectively, locally and internationally across a range of interdependent models. The conversations collected here meander in a free-flowing format through the lens of a specific production. They look at new narratives, formal experimentation, alternate dramaturgies, agile producing practices, care work, community engagement, audience development and representation on our pages and stages. They also touch upon pathways, reception studies and the prospect of institutional and social change.

An accidental outcome of assembling this reader highlighted the isolating conditions in which many South Asian artists and arts workers are making new work. Often, they are stuck in a liminal space as outsiders to the traditional working methodologies of their ancestral identities who also find themselves creating in the margins of their contemporary contexts. This position on the periphery of practice allows radical acts of imagination that give rise to new, non-linear fictions. It is also striking that when many of the artists in this reader have participated in public dialogues, questions about diversity and inclusion diluted the complexity of their practice. They were rarely given the agency to explore the depth and breadth of their artistry in the rehearsal room and beyond.

As such, this reader is the starting point for a solidarity network of artists pigeonholed into the broad brushstroke category of ‘South Asian’, whose own voices here reveal their self-determination, influences and entanglements. Initially, we were asked to produce an anthology of PoC artistic practices and processes, anything outside of the occidental imaginary, within so-called Australia. But honing in on the micro and macro conditions for South Asian artists making work locally and globally felt relevant, resonant and akin to our own experiences. It is a context that we were able to speak to, think with and journey alongside with integrity.

You, the reader, are invited to engage with this text in any manner you like. You can chance upon an artist conversation, linger on the words of our exchange or undertake further investigation based on what you encounter within these pages. Although its contents are by no means exhaustive, it serves as a historical record that bears witness to experiences, ideas and narratives that are often absent from the mainstream. It is our hope that it incites you to make, produce or engage with new work. It is often repeated that theatre is a dying art form. This might be true as it is steeped in structural racism and monocultural value systems that are deeply entrenched within our culture, in the Western world. We hope to evidence the many ways in which the discipline is well and truly alive as a field of possibility engaged with contemporary concerns. In the process, we hope to encapsulate what is at stake for the dreamers and truth-tellers of our times, enlivening theatre outside of the dominant discourse.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One
We never talk about God in the theatre. Or, spirituality. Why?
On thinking about audiences at an abstract level
On taking work to audiences outside of traditional spaces
Zainab shares her process of producing Black Brass
Nithya on co-creating Outwitted! for Happenstance festival

Part Two
In conversation with Jay Emmanuel
In conversation with Ravi Jain
In conversation with Shahid Nadeem
In conversation with Jacob Rajan
In conversation with Durga Bishwokarma

Conclusion

Commission by Belvoir St. Theatre and Co-Curios, and supported by Creative Australia.

We thank each of the artists for their contribution, Huy Nguyen for design and Neha Kale for editing.