---Sunil Sharma
I was watching the Chinese opera last evening in an open-air auditorium in the suburban Mumbai. The February weather was mild. A cool wind was blowing off from the nearby river that flows into the Thane creek, creating a pleasant ambiance The 90-minute performance by the visiting troupe left the audience stunned by transporting us into a different region. It also showed that good theater can transcend linguistic and geographical barriers easily. We did not know the Chinese; they did not know Hindi but the performance spoke directly to us. Pantomime, Kung Fu, song and dance were all part of this old Cantonese drama put by 27 artistes wearing dainty costumes and minimal make up on a bare proscenium in an Indian urban location. The music--- largely flutes and cymbals and drums---was haunting. There were no props. Not even scenery. Just a flood-lit stage dominated by the slim and pretty artistes gliding in the air in perfect sync with each other. Acrobatic and dramatic skills were highly evolved of these young artistes.
They were able to transform this corporate event into high performance art by their mobile facial expressions, body language and nimble footwork. An ordinary landscape was turned into a fairy land; an ordinary evening into a sublime experience through their stylized acting, singing and dancing.
They were able to transform this corporate event into high performance art by their mobile facial expressions, body language and nimble footwork. An ordinary landscape was turned into a fairy land; an ordinary evening into a sublime experience through their stylized acting, singing and dancing.
We were taken back into the past and a China not found elsewhere in newspapers and books.
We were travelling autonomous art realms defying all logic of time and space. Past and present collided into each other, forming a continnum.
The imaginary never looked so real. That is the power of true art. It can make the unreal look real for the audiences everywhere.
That is public theatre--- a grand spectacle, involving music, acrobatic and acting skills, dance and powerful dialogues. Basically, it is oral communication and designed to be seen and heard. In other words, it lends itself more quickly for dramatization than any other genre; it is more liable to be staged successfully rather than other cultural forms like a short story or novel that demands to be read in solitude.
So theater is public; fiction is private. Theater is older; fiction in its developed form and finesse is newer. The early Greeks knew that plays were to be staged for the public. So did early Indians. Theater was mass. So is the cinema---thereat improved version for an industrial/ post-industrial, high-tech society. But fiction is historically meant to be consumed in private. To read your Tolstoy or Marquez, you need a quiet room; to see Seneca or Shakespeare, you need to sit in a big auditorium along with others, willing to participate in the common viewing of a common act. The requirements for both the genres are different. One is communal experience; another individual. But the person who likes Tolstoy and Shakespeare both can, given the different contexts, become a communal spectator or a private reader equally fast. Both public and private compete for his/her attention and the reader can effortlessly exchange the solitude for a public participation as a spectator in a cultural event that, as a staged performance of a team in a hired place designated as auditorium, can obtain full closure only with the participation of the citizens as willing viewers. In fact, the production is successful only when people turn up in large numbers to see the performance by paying for tickets in a special area famously called Broadway. In some cases, entry can be free. But the point is, free or paid, larger participation makes theatre a true theater and relevant also.
Sadly, the theater in the West and in India lost this original function and insight. Now, they are losing their audiences as well. Any theater that becomes the private property of few hundred clients in a closed space tends to lose its vitality and then, slowly, its appeal.
Let us take up the Indian folk theater like the Yakshagana. When I watched its open-air public performance for the first time---few years back, in another Mumbai suburb, on a street, late night---I was mesmerized by this spectacle put up by travelling amateur actors. There were a thousand people present for this performance on a makeshift stage. Again, the language was different---Kannada---but I could get the main drift of the action. The whole thing was sponsored by an Udupi hotel. There was no ticket. Everybody was welcome. And the diversified audience maintained discipline and decorum in that long performance that relied on elaborate make-up, gaudy costumes, fake mustaches and jewellery, and, loud dialogue delivery. A later identical performance in an upscale Mumbai auditorium failed to impress due to the congruity of the folk theater and its urban stage with sophisticated lighting and pit orchestra---an appropriate setting for more metro themes.
The world as open-air stage vs. enclosed space binary also plays a crucial distinction in the production and reception of plays.
A similar 10-day, open-air production of the epic Ramayana also highlighted this factor vis-à-vis the effect of the popular theater There was a large crowd of spectators. Some were sitting on the ground, some standing near the VIP enclosure. It was a kind of the Elizabethan stage where the commoners and the nobility met in the democratic and liberating theatrical space. Only difference was that this time the designated space was sacred as compared with the secular Elizabethan theatrical space. The story was well-known to everyone. It is in our cultural DNA. But the entire action was being lapped up hungrily by the quiet audience. There was lot of slapstick comedy and crude humor thrown in as comic relief by the cast of travelling amateur actors. Loud acting, costumes and music were a common staple. Dialogues in verses were for the actors playing the gods and prose, for minor characters. Ramayana and Mahabharata are the two epics that lend themselves easily to stage adaptations in every language of India and other languages of the world, including English. They contain all the elements that define and appeal to the folk psyche.
These are the master narratives that contain the entire civilizations in them. Their enduring beauty is that they still speak directly to us positioned in a completely different era.
As the folk theater the production of such narratives becomes more flexible, open and supple. Artistes are free to innovate. The carnival nature of such village productions even to-day enables the critique of the official culture---entrenched feudalism in developing India in all its patriarchal and ugly manifestations---of power abuse at every level of society: educational, religious, political, panchayati, state, police by the troupes of wandering or resident artistes. Through humour, official order gets inverted. The power structures get lampooned and relief is provided in a grim social situation. Satire, burlesque and farce are other related developments of this flexible form.
It is a powerful medium of communication for a society---the public theatre where entire community or village participates either as spectators or actors and relevant meanings are socially produced, appreciated and dispersed collectively. The stage belongs to all. There are no hierarchies, no barriers. It is employed to question, educate and entertain the masses. The common public is both the creator and consumer of these public texts circulating in the rural areas: the ownership is common, so is its consumption. The role of public is important---as it was in the Athenian drama.
Modern theatre is private. And very pale vis-à-vis the more robust public theatre. The trend started in the eighteenth century Europe and climaxed in the twentieth. The royal patronage was gradually replaced by the individual, with the ascendancy of the middle-classes everywhere. Patrons, as individuals and a collective, became the deciding arbiters and end-users of a system designed to bring profits from theater as a commodity. In India, Anglicized upper-middle-class, in order to show the superiority of taste and their cultural exclusivity, came to patronize English theater in the 80s and 90s of the last century. The disconnect with the general mood was complete. English theater became elite. It reflected the aspirations, tastes, concerns and values of the power elites insulated from the problems and struggles of both middle-class and the toiling masses.
Theater had become artificial, effete and extremely private, out of bounds for the general public.
With further competition from TV and commercial cinema as sources of mass entertainment, the theater was rendered redundant and became finally extinct---or, almost. It lost its roots in the public place and vitality. Right from the Athenians down to our age, theater as a public form---street theater, for example, in our age---interacted with a live public and shaped up responses to major issues affecting entire communities. But privatization of this form and its patronage by the elites as cultural trophy suffocated this ancient form of communal communication, a kind of pluralistic artistic endeavor at producing, receiving and dispersing meanings and values, within the public art space---very much like the epics. The privatized theater produced tortured private visions in a dark Europe of the 40s and 50s and radical 60s. The English theater in metro India echoes Eugene Ionesco…and his famous play, the Chairs. By the second decade of the 21-century, English drama had exhausted its original creative spirit, its spark and got lost in the desert of puerile plots and inane dialogues that appealed to nobody in particular. The plot was lost completely. It was like the accumulating chairs on an empty stage, in an unidentified setting, where audience is expected anytime and chances of communication are difficult. Finally, when the audience arrives, it is not visible and the person called to deliver message is deaf-n-dumb! The old man and woman commit suicide from the tower by jumping into the sea. The effect, writes Ionesco, is to produce a sense of emptiness. Theater makes a rapid descent into bleak and cynical absurdity from its glorious heights achieved by Shakespeare and Ibsen. And nobody remembers their remote ancestors Sophocles or Euripides.
Everything marvellous becomes banal. The joint ownership of the form---between dramatist and live public audience--- becomes obsolete. The joint ties are sundered. Atrophy, ennui, despair, passivity step in and status quo continues with fractured visions. The Hamletian distressed cry of time is out of joint is completely drowned out in the cacophony of commerce.
English theater in England weakened; its distant colonial offspring wilted in an Internet age where amnesia is promoted and pizza and burger joints dominate the public discourses rather than Beckett or Pinter. English drama in India’s short renaissance is also over. The English novel in India is proving a tough competitor. It is an age not suitable to drama itself. A three-hour performance, highly-priced, is watched largely by wannabe actors, critics and writers. The general public is missing from these lavishly-mounted shows.
Any literary form loses its charm, once its historical age of production is lapsed. It gets overtaken by another developing form. Epic and its innocent age once over can never be replicated in the next age. Even if it does get replicated by a genius of Joycean stature, it fails to re-create the freshness and the original charm of the Homeric tales that still talk to us, like our own myths and epics. Theater --first as folk or public form, then as private form of expression of fractured artistic visions---is in critical stage. It has retreated into pricey auditoriums accessible to few rich clients. Broadway and Off-Broadway, street theater are some valiant steps to continue the tradition of dialogue, oral one, with the public, now passive spectators. Brecht did attempt some resuscitation of this passive consumer but after him, the consumer relapsed into a passive state. Theater is the voice of the people as famous Gaddar from Andhra Pradesh in India declares. Unless it returns to its roots and interacts directly with public, theater stands the danger of becoming a museum piece---whatever the coteries of critics, dons, writers, directors and actors might say.
We need another rejuvenating spring for drama---and that includes the Indian English drama as well. India awaits its own Brecht in Indian English. The regional theater has been more vital, complex, real, meaningful and productive. People connect with the themes and productions. Drama needs a big jolt. It is like wearing the theatrical mask of an Athenian or Classical or Noh or Yoruba drama on the stage and start seeing the world differently. A vision from that involved position, from that quick alteration---the rapid transition from person to actor to that character--- can be very uplifting and that frenzied state, that heightened perspective can ensure a revival and renewal of this crossover drama form here in India. Unless it is not done consciously by the stakeholders or its practitioners, English drama in India will remain a metro oddity---very much like listening to the American Jazz in a five-star hotel in Mumbai or New Delhi, along with the Page Three regulars, while rest of the city is in a hurry to catch the overcrowded evening bus or train to a distant home.
We were travelling autonomous art realms defying all logic of time and space. Past and present collided into each other, forming a continnum.
The imaginary never looked so real. That is the power of true art. It can make the unreal look real for the audiences everywhere.
That is public theatre--- a grand spectacle, involving music, acrobatic and acting skills, dance and powerful dialogues. Basically, it is oral communication and designed to be seen and heard. In other words, it lends itself more quickly for dramatization than any other genre; it is more liable to be staged successfully rather than other cultural forms like a short story or novel that demands to be read in solitude.
So theater is public; fiction is private. Theater is older; fiction in its developed form and finesse is newer. The early Greeks knew that plays were to be staged for the public. So did early Indians. Theater was mass. So is the cinema---thereat improved version for an industrial/ post-industrial, high-tech society. But fiction is historically meant to be consumed in private. To read your Tolstoy or Marquez, you need a quiet room; to see Seneca or Shakespeare, you need to sit in a big auditorium along with others, willing to participate in the common viewing of a common act. The requirements for both the genres are different. One is communal experience; another individual. But the person who likes Tolstoy and Shakespeare both can, given the different contexts, become a communal spectator or a private reader equally fast. Both public and private compete for his/her attention and the reader can effortlessly exchange the solitude for a public participation as a spectator in a cultural event that, as a staged performance of a team in a hired place designated as auditorium, can obtain full closure only with the participation of the citizens as willing viewers. In fact, the production is successful only when people turn up in large numbers to see the performance by paying for tickets in a special area famously called Broadway. In some cases, entry can be free. But the point is, free or paid, larger participation makes theatre a true theater and relevant also.
Sadly, the theater in the West and in India lost this original function and insight. Now, they are losing their audiences as well. Any theater that becomes the private property of few hundred clients in a closed space tends to lose its vitality and then, slowly, its appeal.
Let us take up the Indian folk theater like the Yakshagana. When I watched its open-air public performance for the first time---few years back, in another Mumbai suburb, on a street, late night---I was mesmerized by this spectacle put up by travelling amateur actors. There were a thousand people present for this performance on a makeshift stage. Again, the language was different---Kannada---but I could get the main drift of the action. The whole thing was sponsored by an Udupi hotel. There was no ticket. Everybody was welcome. And the diversified audience maintained discipline and decorum in that long performance that relied on elaborate make-up, gaudy costumes, fake mustaches and jewellery, and, loud dialogue delivery. A later identical performance in an upscale Mumbai auditorium failed to impress due to the congruity of the folk theater and its urban stage with sophisticated lighting and pit orchestra---an appropriate setting for more metro themes.
The world as open-air stage vs. enclosed space binary also plays a crucial distinction in the production and reception of plays.
A similar 10-day, open-air production of the epic Ramayana also highlighted this factor vis-à-vis the effect of the popular theater There was a large crowd of spectators. Some were sitting on the ground, some standing near the VIP enclosure. It was a kind of the Elizabethan stage where the commoners and the nobility met in the democratic and liberating theatrical space. Only difference was that this time the designated space was sacred as compared with the secular Elizabethan theatrical space. The story was well-known to everyone. It is in our cultural DNA. But the entire action was being lapped up hungrily by the quiet audience. There was lot of slapstick comedy and crude humor thrown in as comic relief by the cast of travelling amateur actors. Loud acting, costumes and music were a common staple. Dialogues in verses were for the actors playing the gods and prose, for minor characters. Ramayana and Mahabharata are the two epics that lend themselves easily to stage adaptations in every language of India and other languages of the world, including English. They contain all the elements that define and appeal to the folk psyche.
These are the master narratives that contain the entire civilizations in them. Their enduring beauty is that they still speak directly to us positioned in a completely different era.
As the folk theater the production of such narratives becomes more flexible, open and supple. Artistes are free to innovate. The carnival nature of such village productions even to-day enables the critique of the official culture---entrenched feudalism in developing India in all its patriarchal and ugly manifestations---of power abuse at every level of society: educational, religious, political, panchayati, state, police by the troupes of wandering or resident artistes. Through humour, official order gets inverted. The power structures get lampooned and relief is provided in a grim social situation. Satire, burlesque and farce are other related developments of this flexible form.
It is a powerful medium of communication for a society---the public theatre where entire community or village participates either as spectators or actors and relevant meanings are socially produced, appreciated and dispersed collectively. The stage belongs to all. There are no hierarchies, no barriers. It is employed to question, educate and entertain the masses. The common public is both the creator and consumer of these public texts circulating in the rural areas: the ownership is common, so is its consumption. The role of public is important---as it was in the Athenian drama.
Modern theatre is private. And very pale vis-à-vis the more robust public theatre. The trend started in the eighteenth century Europe and climaxed in the twentieth. The royal patronage was gradually replaced by the individual, with the ascendancy of the middle-classes everywhere. Patrons, as individuals and a collective, became the deciding arbiters and end-users of a system designed to bring profits from theater as a commodity. In India, Anglicized upper-middle-class, in order to show the superiority of taste and their cultural exclusivity, came to patronize English theater in the 80s and 90s of the last century. The disconnect with the general mood was complete. English theater became elite. It reflected the aspirations, tastes, concerns and values of the power elites insulated from the problems and struggles of both middle-class and the toiling masses.
Theater had become artificial, effete and extremely private, out of bounds for the general public.
With further competition from TV and commercial cinema as sources of mass entertainment, the theater was rendered redundant and became finally extinct---or, almost. It lost its roots in the public place and vitality. Right from the Athenians down to our age, theater as a public form---street theater, for example, in our age---interacted with a live public and shaped up responses to major issues affecting entire communities. But privatization of this form and its patronage by the elites as cultural trophy suffocated this ancient form of communal communication, a kind of pluralistic artistic endeavor at producing, receiving and dispersing meanings and values, within the public art space---very much like the epics. The privatized theater produced tortured private visions in a dark Europe of the 40s and 50s and radical 60s. The English theater in metro India echoes Eugene Ionesco…and his famous play, the Chairs. By the second decade of the 21-century, English drama had exhausted its original creative spirit, its spark and got lost in the desert of puerile plots and inane dialogues that appealed to nobody in particular. The plot was lost completely. It was like the accumulating chairs on an empty stage, in an unidentified setting, where audience is expected anytime and chances of communication are difficult. Finally, when the audience arrives, it is not visible and the person called to deliver message is deaf-n-dumb! The old man and woman commit suicide from the tower by jumping into the sea. The effect, writes Ionesco, is to produce a sense of emptiness. Theater makes a rapid descent into bleak and cynical absurdity from its glorious heights achieved by Shakespeare and Ibsen. And nobody remembers their remote ancestors Sophocles or Euripides.
Everything marvellous becomes banal. The joint ownership of the form---between dramatist and live public audience--- becomes obsolete. The joint ties are sundered. Atrophy, ennui, despair, passivity step in and status quo continues with fractured visions. The Hamletian distressed cry of time is out of joint is completely drowned out in the cacophony of commerce.
English theater in England weakened; its distant colonial offspring wilted in an Internet age where amnesia is promoted and pizza and burger joints dominate the public discourses rather than Beckett or Pinter. English drama in India’s short renaissance is also over. The English novel in India is proving a tough competitor. It is an age not suitable to drama itself. A three-hour performance, highly-priced, is watched largely by wannabe actors, critics and writers. The general public is missing from these lavishly-mounted shows.
Any literary form loses its charm, once its historical age of production is lapsed. It gets overtaken by another developing form. Epic and its innocent age once over can never be replicated in the next age. Even if it does get replicated by a genius of Joycean stature, it fails to re-create the freshness and the original charm of the Homeric tales that still talk to us, like our own myths and epics. Theater --first as folk or public form, then as private form of expression of fractured artistic visions---is in critical stage. It has retreated into pricey auditoriums accessible to few rich clients. Broadway and Off-Broadway, street theater are some valiant steps to continue the tradition of dialogue, oral one, with the public, now passive spectators. Brecht did attempt some resuscitation of this passive consumer but after him, the consumer relapsed into a passive state. Theater is the voice of the people as famous Gaddar from Andhra Pradesh in India declares. Unless it returns to its roots and interacts directly with public, theater stands the danger of becoming a museum piece---whatever the coteries of critics, dons, writers, directors and actors might say.
We need another rejuvenating spring for drama---and that includes the Indian English drama as well. India awaits its own Brecht in Indian English. The regional theater has been more vital, complex, real, meaningful and productive. People connect with the themes and productions. Drama needs a big jolt. It is like wearing the theatrical mask of an Athenian or Classical or Noh or Yoruba drama on the stage and start seeing the world differently. A vision from that involved position, from that quick alteration---the rapid transition from person to actor to that character--- can be very uplifting and that frenzied state, that heightened perspective can ensure a revival and renewal of this crossover drama form here in India. Unless it is not done consciously by the stakeholders or its practitioners, English drama in India will remain a metro oddity---very much like listening to the American Jazz in a five-star hotel in Mumbai or New Delhi, along with the Page Three regulars, while rest of the city is in a hurry to catch the overcrowded evening bus or train to a distant home.
(Courtesy: Illuminati, 2012)
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