All the world’s indeed a stage

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When the impostor chucking bread at the stage turned out to be a performer one evening at the Attakkalari India Biennial 2011, the audience was suitably shocked. Especially since he emerged from their midst. As an audience, one tends to find security in anonymity, numbers and the darkness. But one wonders if the slightly unconscionable dancers peering out of the wings can indeed see you picking your nose. It brings us to the question of spaces not demarcated as performance spaces, which are created, or appropriated for the duration of an act of “performance”.
In August this year, the mammoth UB City mall in Bengaluru was witness to H20, a site-specific performance conceived by Deepak K. Shivaswamy and Veena Basavarajaiah. Positing bodies in architectural spaces built around water, their piece stemmed from the desire to take performance to the audience rather than having them come into the studio. “We tried to answer three questions — who is the performer, who is the audience and what is the line between performing and being “normal”. India has a rich culture of street activity — be it ritualistic dance, theatre or religious processions. Once we decided to talk about water, we faced the challenge of having to make the body relevant within a certain architectural space. The mall is a private public space — you can be yourself but you are still bound by certain norms of civil society. You are under surveillance. Over 30 minutes of our presentation, we were watched by at least a thousand people. Some stayed for a few seconds, others for a few minutes. It was a floating audience but while it lasted, our engagement was very intense because our ‘performance’ lay in the moment,” explains Shivaswamy.
The reasons behind the evolution of an alternate off-the-proscenium theatre scene are diverse and interesting. In many geographically dispersed cities, distance is a prohibitive factor. Then there is the compelling fact that there are more dancers than theatres. Perhaps it is also the need for more fluid performance spaces — there is something imperious and forbidding about the proscenium theatre that every dancer who tries to mount an “interactive” performance, walking through the aisles, acutely feels. It is a welcome change to leave things to chance — at open-air theatres where palm trees sway on stage left, a coconut might make a surprise entry, or in the event of a gale, the sets might be blown into the sea beyond, but the “fourth wall” seems adequately, if only partially, demolished.
Then there is the growing brood of festivals at heritage sites. They serve a dual purpose, promoting art and culture while dragging forgotten monuments back into the popular imagination. Seher chose the Purana Qila in New Delhi as the setting for Ananya, its annual festival of Indian classical dances held every October. The founder of Seher, Sanjeev Bhargava, says that he started Ananya to address the problem of dwindling audiences for dance.
“Performances took place in closed auditoria and this elite culture was the preserve of very few people. We needed to democratise culture by literally taking it out of the closed auditorium to places where anybody could sit down and enjoy it,” he explains.
As for monuments, Bhargava found that the ASI took good care of them - but the public didn’t engage with them as much as they could have. They were well-tended, but not in circulation. “In the seventies, Ibrahim Alkazi was doing theatre at Purana Qila, but at some point, culture disappeared into auditoria — that is how Mandi House came up. This also meant that the audience was very small — not least because seating was limited. So festivals like Ananya give a fillip not just to performing arts but also to monuments. Also, we have been covered by international news channels, hence visibility is high. Shekhar Kapur called me up from Morocco in 2004 to say that Ananya Festival was being featured on CNN there.”
Dance photographer Soumita Bhattacharya comments on the challenges of shooting in unconventional performance spaces. She says, “In India, we often don’t know what to expect because photographers are not called to watch tech runs. So there are instances where the dancer might use the part of the stage that is farthest from where you sit and you end up taking very biased shots.
In proscenium theatres, an aisle seat helps because you can move to an extent. As a photographer, you adapt to various spaces quickly. You still have to be careful not to disturb the audience. It is a challenge but there are so many new angles to discover.”