H_ME W_RK
On taking work to audiences outside of traditional spaces
Note:
Happenstance is a publicly funded festival along the Merri Creek trail in Naarm (Melbourne), frequented by families and young people on bikes or foot. The curators had a dream of a zero-waste festival where regular commuters of the trail had chance encounters with performances.
Nithya
In the work I co-created for the festival, the artists devised games, actions and scenes as a response to the subcontinental Akbar-Birbal folk tales from the Mughal courts based on the Muslim King Akbar and his close friendship with his Hindu court adviser Birbal who could solve any conundrum with his sharp wit. We created immersive encounters for young people to problem-solve situations that furthered the play’s narrative. At one point, we had an entire score composed from found elements along the trail to which we broke into a Bollywood flash mob, undercutting low and highbrow performance within the work. The devised work opened up conversations with young people around peace, religious conflict and harmony and care for land and country in a fun and accessible way.
What does our imagined future look like? We dream of running a festival together one day where we can make space for solidarity, alliance-building and alternative futures. When we speak of God or spirituality in the theatre, it is not in a literal sense of harking back to when Christianity informed theatrical decisions like in nativity plays. Nor are we in favour of reprising uncritical notions of multiculturalism on ethnic or religious lines, an outcome of public policy rather than artist-led advocacy. We are articulating a vision for death of ego in a room, for the ability of love to overcome difference and a profound empathy around the human and more than human condition in art-making. How else can we begin to contend with our own complicity as settler-colonisers on this land and understand solidarity in an embodied sense? How else can we fight Islamophobia if there are no counter-narratives to the vilification by media, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11? How else can we have complex conversations around caste supremacy and the need for abolition called for by anti-caste activists? These are big questions with no easy answers but through art-making we hope to try.
In her game-changing 2021 book Heat and Alterity in Contemporary Dance: South-South Choreographies, dancer, choreographer and scholar Ananya Chatterjea puts forward a bold proposition:
I propose a reimagining of the global stage, shored by political resonances, aesthetic distinctions, and a commitment to difference. Unlike the conventional global stage, which is actualized through international touring circuits, and surrounded by gatekeepers and allegiances to value-systems often staked in colonial histories, this alternative global stage might be imagined as one we thread together as different artists share their work differently, via a range of fora. We might imagine this global stage as comprising a series of constantly materializing and dissolving platforms: spaces of nuanced visibility in our own terms, of community and plurality, refusing the perpetuation of oppressive legacies in art and culture broadly. Perhaps strapped for resources, but always materialized by the inventive resourcefulness of South-South artists determined to challenge the status quo, these global stages are spaces, sometimes virtual and dialogic, always rhizomatic, where artists make very different [art] that provoke questions about our world and possibilities of justice and healing; where core concepts in [art-making], such as beauty, line, composition, structure, are dynamized through particularity and difference; where intersectional understandings of identity reflect a complex world map; where Indigenous, Black, and brown bodies play central roles in relentlessly questioning conventions, power relations, inequities, and pathways of desire. These are decolonizing spaces, where [culture] is a practice of reworking our relationship to history, convention, tradition, reflecting on our experience of space and time through ruptures, erasures, hidden continuities, and re-mappings, and desiring and visioning different and just ways of contemporary [art-making].
This is the kind of future we hope to play a role in creating.
As we navigate the constant push and pull between self-preservation and systemic change we heed the wisdom of Khalil Gibran, If you cannot work with love but only with distaste / it is better that you should leave your work. We are still here. But in order to stay in an environment where there can often be competition over camaraderie, scarcity over abundance, timelines over generation, we’ve chosen to keep our own counsel and lean on each other. Sometimes the work requires us to wield the language of the institution, sometimes we can forge new pathways at the edges, and still other times we know we are co-opted by forces bigger than ourselves. Khalil Gibran again: Trust in dreams for in them is the hidden gate of eternity. So, we rely on the audacity of our imaginations to dream even when hope is hard to find. We find ourselves seeking to paint the geography of our discernment. We discover that with each rehearsal room, each conversation and each new work we get closer to regenerating our ecologies.
And when the going gets tough, we find comfort in the wisdom of poets like Faiz Ahmed Faiz reminding us, lambi hai gham ki shaam magar shaam hi to hai (long is the evening of despair but after all it is just an evening). At the end of the day, the best we can do is to show up, as our full selves. To choose love, over anger or hate. To hold steadfast to our inner compass. It is a faith that real change is slow but the knowledge that seeds we plant today will shade someone else tomorrow. To know, as Rumi wrote, whether you are an artist or a producer, the real job is to learn to see the rose in a thorn / because once it blooms / everyone sees it.
It is also the work of a lifetime, and we are only just beginning.
This conversation was recorded in a living room in Chippendale, NSW, on unceded Gadigal land, but has been ruminating in our minds and exchanges through long walks along the Indian Ocean on Noongar Boodjar, voice notes on Whatsapp and ruminations over Shisha in Western Sydney. First published in Routledge Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance in December 2023.
Table of Contents
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
