The Theatre of Veenapani Chawla: Theory, Practice and Performance

Book: The Theatre of Veenapani Chawla: Theory, Practice and Performance
Edited by: Shanta Gokhale (English)
Published by: Oxford University Press, 2014

‘Theatre of Veenapani Chawla’ is an exploration of the different aspects of Veenapani Chawla’s life, covering her early school days, initial plays in Mumbai and finally her deepening relationship with theatre and the formulation of a new language and idiom for theatre that culminated in her establishing the Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Arts (1981) and Research in Puducherry. The book chronicles Veenapani’s pluralistic approach to theatre – that redefined the notions of ‘what theatre should be’ to ‘what theatre could be’ – through a collection of wide-range of writings – essays, reviews, interviews and performance texts, as well as papers by the artist herself. The book, accompanied by a DVD of one of Veenapani’s most complex plays – The Hare and the Tortoise (2007), is a nuanced insight into the artist’s creative process and her oeuvre.

“Adishakti’s aesthetic practice and philosophy of the theatre has emerged out of a considered examination of the three approaches to culture that existed in post-colonial India. In the first, Europe still remained the cultural metropolis, and modernist, rationalist, scientific thought was the only way to view the world; in the second, the world was viewed through the prism of an original, uncontaminated, pure Indian culture, to be resurrected by obliterating the intermediate past; in the third, a marriage was envisaged of all that India had experienced historically, and continues to experience.” (pg.99)