India Art Fair 2022
How can we conceive the relationship between performance and archives such that the acts of research like recording, storing, indexing, and redistributing may be interpreted as the archive’s own mode of performance, its own singular event? Can the archive be considered a performance site; a space for alternative interpretations by bringing together an amalgamation of facts, anecdotes, fictions, and myths to re-interpret moments of the past? Considering theatre a social document constructs a lens to read and interpret history. It situates the medium within the parameters of the social, the political, and the economic, and exposes it to cross-cultural and interdisciplinary readings. Can a theatre archive reveal evidence recorded in theatre scripts, photographed bodies in performance and in set designs, journalistic records and ephemera, which might otherwise go unnoticed in traditional and conventional narratives of history?
This series of photographs from Ebrahim Alkazi’s historical productions and the archive of the street theatre group, JANAM (Jana Natya Manch) are documents of specific sites — cultural, historical and public — which allow us to read the shifts in the landscape of Delhi — both in terms of utilisation, as well as symbolically — where the context, scenography and meanings of urban sites (its people, of processes and participation) have altered with shifting economies, policies, politics and governance.
Inspired by the spirit of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA), Jana Natya Manch (JANAM) was founded in 1973 by a group of Delhi-based radical theatre enthusiasts. JANAM’s aim has been to make theatre accessible to the common people. Some of its best-known street plays are ‘Machine’ (1978), ‘Aurat‘ (1979), ‘Halla Bol’ (1988), ‘Gopi Gavaiyya, Bagha Bajaiyya’ (1994), ‘Vo Bol Uthi’ (2001), ‘Ye Dil Mange More Guruji’ (2002), and ‘Andher Nagari’ (2021). Its best-known stage plays are ‘Moteram ka Satyagrah’ (1988), ‘Satyashodhak’ (1992), ‘Shambookvadh’ (2004) and ‘Char Rang’ (2010). This group of self-trained actors has done over 8,500 performances of over a hundred plays in over 250 cities in India. The group has been invited to leading theatre festivals in India, and has performed in Palestine, South Africa, Britain and the US. JANAM began a bilingual theatre quarterly, ‘Nukkad Janam Samvaad’ and also instituted the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Lecture series, both in 1993. In 2011, it set up an independent theatre space, Studio Safdar, named after JANAM’s charismatic leader who was killed in performance when the group was attacked in 1989.
The paradoxical relation between theatre and photography reflects a shared connection between the mediums, where both stand on the common ground of ‘staging’ and share conceptual frameworks like theatricality, performativity, authenticity, and liveness, which act as important points of reference that “come into play, alongside ideas relating to gesture, stage, apparatus, situation, documentation, construction, re/enactment and re/presentation.” (Anderson, J. & Leister, W, ‘The Theatre of Photography: an interdisciplinary duologue’, Sens 2019, pg. 6).
Since the Alkazi Theatre Archives seeks to connect families of vocabularies by proposing new linkages across different creative practices, ATA initiated the Theatre Photography Grant in 2020.
In the process of recreating her episodes of sleep paralysis, Reshma Teelar refers to a journal where she has documented her hallucinations and dreams, often illustrating them. She uses amateur models for her photographs proposing specific gestures, mise en scène costumes and props and by drawing connections to her actors’ lives and realities. Jury member Monica Narula observes, “the way she (Reshma) is addressing the question of the nightmares, which emerges from the deeply personal but is really about the larger…Like something deeper is being tapped into — which feels of the time…the greater sorts of anxieties we are enveloped in and how they find themselves bubbling onto the surface.” In addition, juror Munem Wasif notes, “the way she (Reshma) was photographing her experience, there was a certain sense of horror, which is very evident in cinema, but not really present in photography, at least in the context of South Asia.”
Taking his cue from Sangam literature, Sridhar Balasubramanium situates his project in the five kinds of landscapes in Tamil Nadu — mountains, seashore, croplands, forests and drylands — locating the increasing distance between the landscape and the body. Tracing performing bodies through the Dravadian landscape, Balasubramanium develops a script based on which he has worked with folk artists, engaged in forms such as katta bommbai attam, tholu pavai koothu, and vali thirumana nadagam. Additionally, in encountering mask making traditions during his four months long journey across Tamil Nadu and especially being influenced by Tholpavakoothu artist, Lakshmana Rao, Balasubramanium incorporates the use of traditional goat hide masks in his work with contemporary actors and folk artists. The core idea of this project has been derived from the Manalmagudi Theater Land, a Tamil Nadu based theatre group that explores bodies, history and rituals through performance.
