India through the eyes of Flying Fish

A German theatre company seeks to bring India closer to Europe through improvised skits, short plays and a juggling act.

Harry Fuhrmann is a long way from home. He landed, with his theatre group Flying Fish, in New Delhi last month, for a year-long tour of India. The entire group, apart from Ashwath Bhatt (assistant director and actor) is from Germany.

Fuhrmann, the director of the group, trained at the Academy for Music and Theatre in Berlin; Kashmir-born Bhatt trained at the National School of Drama in Delhi, and later at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts; and the other members of the troupe, (actors, musicians, dancers, a puppeteer, jugglers, acrobats and two stage and costume designers), have left large theatre groups in Germany to be part of this project.

None of them seem in the least homesick. I meet them on the day after their arrival, and Fuhrmann and Bhatt have been sitting in interviews for the most part of the day, but apart from looking a little tired, this has not managed to dampen their enthusiasm for their project. They talk enthusiastically of the places they are to go, the people they would like to meet, and what they want to accomplish.

For Flying Fish will tour India, not in the air-conditioned halls of the metropolises to play to a bejeweled audience (although they will show in a couple of big cities, Delhi, Bangalore and Kolkata for instance), but in small rural villages "" in community centres, marketplaces and schools, for the local populace and amateur theatre groups.

"We wanted to meet people," say Fuhrmann, "tell them our stories and listen to their's "" in fact, have a cultural exchange. India is the perfect place to do this; cultural traditions have developed here without the influence of the West, there will be a lot to take away!"

The end result of this tour will be a play that Flying Fish will take back to Germany, about life in India, pieced together from the stories they have heard. Fuhrmann wants to show this play at festivals in every part of Europe.

"Globalisation means that you can go everywhere very quickly," says Fuhrmann. "But much of this is superficial. There is little real understanding of different cultures. I know, from the people I have spoken with, that Europeans feel this.

There would be a deep interest in learning about the real way that people live in countries such as India, and I'm sure people here would be interested to know how we live."

It is apparent that this is not a troupe that has come to India with preconceived notions of its "exoticness" and Eastern mysticism. Some actors have already been around some of the villages in West Bengal (which will take up a month and a half of their itinerary this year).

"We want to reach out to all classes," says Fuhrmann, "not just people who are involved with theatre. For instance, when we were last in Bengal, we went to a tiny village outside of Kolkata called Satkanya.

This is a tiny village, which we reached by cycle rickshaw. The people there are struggling, are poor "" but still they find time to form an amateur theatre group! This group, "Abong Amra" ("And us" in Bengali), put on a show for us, they had a little makeshift theatre and they even had costumes. They just wanted to make themselves heard "" that's what their name meant, don't forget about us, we exist too."

A supplemental part of Flying Fish's itinerary will be to help these rural theatre groups out, not simply by the richness of cultural exchange, but by doing concrete (literally) things such as building new spaces for them to meet and work.

"Our aim," chimes in Bhatt, "is to exchange lessons, not to teach. The beauty of the theatre lies in its simplicity. All you need is an actor and an audience "" no gimmicks.

If an actor portrays real feelings on the stage, it doesn't matter what your audience's level of education is, what his or her social background is, how different he is from you. Your message will get through."

"To me," says Fuhrmann, "theatre is about an exchange of fantasy. Even in Germany, it is interesting to have different fantasies come together. So in India, where the social background is so different, it will be much more interesting and educational.

A large part of this workshop is to learn definitions of roots, of what it means to have them, roots to your home, your country. These are not simple questions, they are quite intricate ones, which we are trying to answer through the deceptively simple form of story-telling and theatre."

Flying Fish will tour India, Nepal and Pakistan. Their India leg will include Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Rajasthan, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.

At the end of all this, they will probably be able to tell not just Europe, but even those of us who live here, what India really is all about.