Sadanand Menon: When does performance renew itself?

CRITICALLY INCLINED

The Sangeet Natak Akademi (SNA) was set up, in 1953, in Delhi, as one of the early 'policy' initiatives on the side of culture by the infant Indian state. Between 1955 and 1958, the SNA organised four major all-India seminars "" the Film Seminar in 1955, Drama in 1956, Music in 1957 and Dance in 1958. In retrospect, the Drama Seminar turned out to be one of the most influential seminars in SNA's over-fifty years history.

Some 80 of the most prominent personalities across India in the field of performing arts then, attended the six-day Drama Seminar. Among the most influential voices included Mulk Raj Anand, Shombhu Mitra, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, V Raghavan, E Alkazi, Adya Rangacharya, Balraj Sahni, P V Rajamannar and so on.

The SNA could compile and publish the proceedings, in three volumes, only in 2004. In retrospect, it is evident that the papers at this seminar, particularly the dominant ideas of classicists and Sanskritists like V Raghavan, became the unwritten agenda and policy of the SNA. It determined what to support, promote and reward, and what to ignore and discourage. This led to the huge official boost to classical music, classical dances and urban theatre through the setting up of festivals, awards, scholarships and seminars.

Simultaneously, it marginalised activity at the fringes, in particular excluding or giving second-class citizenship to cultural expressions of tribal, dalit and gender assertions. Into the 1990s, it was forced to acknowledge the emergence and importance of 'contemporary' expressions in dance, but still fights shy of opening out the vast Indian representational ledger.

A group of theatre personalities, scholars and activists who had been meeting over the past few years on the initiative of Sanjna Kapoor (of Mumbai's Prithvi Theatre) to look at policy issues relating to theatre, decided to interrogate the implicit and explicit premises and projections of the 1956 Drama Seminar in a seminar called 'Not The Drama Seminar'. The five-day Seminar was held last month at NINASAM, the exemplary cultural institution in Heggodu (Sagar district), Karnataka, which over the past 35 years, has emerged as the comprehensive alternative model to the unimaginative and inefficient official initiatives in the performing arts.

The event, attended by over a hundred participants, generated debates around many critical issues like locales, experiments, assertions, pathologies and new realities, with interventions in new social realities in India from Aijaz Ahmed, P Sainath, Shiv Visvanathan and Prabir Purakayastha.

The debate around experiments led to a heated discussion. 'Experimentation' is a category related to the application of a scientific pursuit, in which a given set of propositions in concept or material are tested out under controlled conditions of a laboratory.

Extended to theatre, this could mean taking to the laboratory the physical act, the word text, the design and scenario, the stage space, the costuming and the relation with the audience. Or, as the more scholarly would like to say "" angika, vaachika, aaharya, saatvika.

My contention is that this happens on a day-to-day basis in science and in the arts, but by itself, need not lead to anything earth- shattering. Every performer starts off with a set of givens and builds upon it continuously. Even the most 'established' of performers or products do not hesitate to explore the possibility of an innovation.

In classical forms like Kathakali or Yakshagana too, one sees a constant attempt to explore. Probably, experimentation happens the most in commercial practices, where every radical idea is cannibalised and tamed and fitted to the needs of the market.

I believe most Indian theatre is experimental. It is, more often than not, produced and performed in abysmal conditions and at less-than-ideal venues. All theatre, during its time "" whether it is a ramshackle Multani Raam-lila or a high class Kalidasa "" produces experiments, leaps, provocations. In fact, Kalidasa was considered so experimental or forward for his time that he had to build into one of his prefaces, the cautionary line: "Puranamityeva na saadhu sarvam.." (Just because something is old, does not necessarily mean it is good).

Performance cannot live in a straitjacket. Being live, there is a daily engagement with renewal. So, I suggested, my preoccupation was not with experimentation but with renewal. What will theatre in India need to do to renew itself? Where will it find the oxygen from, in a polluted, suffocating environment?

We should not behave as if 'Indian Theatre' "" whatever that is "" or theatre in India, has arrived. It is yet on an evolutionary path, still seeking its own contour, still gazing into the glass, still coming to grips with its complex identity. The question then is about what can renew theatre and performance practice. In the Indian context, it is about where to identify and locate these sources for change in a field of activity admittedly broad and diverse.

Unfortunately, our theatre practices suffer from limiting notions. One of the biggest limitations is segmentation. Even conceptually it seems locked into disciplinary insularity. There is a huge disconnect between oral, textual and physical traditions. On top of it, theatre has been poached upon and denuded by cinema. Yet, theatre refuses to learn from the energising integrations of cinema and move on.

These impediments of practice, policy and implementation stand in the way of the vitally-needed renewal, something that daily threatens our performance practice. It will be tragic if another Drama Seminar, 50 years hence, will end on a similar lament.