Political theatre

""RATAN THIYAM–AN INTERVIEW PUBLISHED IN THE ECONOMIC TIMES, NEW DELHI DATED 29-03-1994

SET TO STAGE A COUP AWAY FROM DELHI

In Delhi recently, the multifaceted director talked to Shamsul Islam about Indian theatre’s folk roots and the activities of his repertory company in Manipur.

RATAN THIYAM is a rarity in the world of Indian theatre. Apart from being a redoubtable practitioner of theatre, he is also a noted Manipuri dancer and vocalist, a reputed painter and musician. Moreover, all these creative dimensions give his theatre productions a distinct identity and vitality.

Thiyam joined the National School of Dram to ‘learn’ theatre in 1971, when he was already a well established name in Manipuri theatre back at home. In 1986 he took over as Director NSD, but after a troubled tenure resigned from the post in 1988, for a journey back to his Chorus Repertory in Manipur. He was in the Capital recently on the occasion of the staging of “Thambalnu”, a Hindi play based on Meitei folklore. The play was the outcome of a 40-day workshop conducted by Thiyam for 2nd year students of NSD at Chorus Repertory Complex, Imphal.

The play, which was directed, designed and given music by Thiyam, was highly appreciated. Excerpts from an interview by Shamsul Islam:

You seem to have written off Delhi. Why is it so?

Dilli bahut door hai. It is out of reach for people like me. It requires guts to be in the Capital. Even though one can never forget one’s sincere friends, I feel that I can attempt something creative by being in Manipur. In places like Delhi, the creative process comes under pressure from various quarters. You are forced to play to the gallery; you tend to behave like a courtesan. In remote places like Manipur, however, the problem is not so acute. Your urge for creativity is not crippled over there.

What is exactly the crisis of the Indian theatre?

It all hinges on the way Indian theatre is defined—as that which is modelled after European theatre and is largely staged in big urban centres like Delhi. It is passed off as our theatre. Moreover, there is a conscious attempt to demarcate folk, traditional and modern theatre. This kind of comprehension leads us nowhere.

I believe minus this so-called folk or traditional theatre, there would be no India theatre. Theatre is not a mechanical entity, it evolves through the centuries, and it must have strong roots. Indian theatre can be defined only in the context of our folk and traditional theatre which the establishment treats as inferior and backward.

A genuine Indian theatre will have hundreds of regional flavours and an amalgamation of as many traditions. That will be not just Indian theatre, it will be good theatre too.

How is your Repertory Company, Chorus, developing in Imphal?

Let me clarify that Chorus is not like any other repertory company, for, apart from theatre it is involved in many other issues like environment and water conservation. It does not even comprise professional actors as is the case in other repertories. Every actor has to learn carpentry, tailoring, light design and stage design. Actors at Chorus develop and craft their own properties which give them a strong sense of belonging. The attempt is to develop artists with a holistic attitude towards theater. We discourage specialization which ultimately harms the cause of theatre.

These days, Chorus is busy performing Imphal Karusi (Let us go to Imphal) under my direction. It is a strong indictment of the system for there is a limit to tolerance. The play opposes the socio-political, economic and religious degeneration of Manipuri Society.

Apart from this we are also involved in developing a children’s creative centre of Chorus at Imphal. In Manipur every activity is adult-oriented; there is not even a small park for children. This is dangerous, for children devoid of any outlet for their imagination are bound to play havoc with society at a later stage. It is already happening in Manipur.

One of the objectives of our creative centre will be a doll’s museum. We also plan to have puppetry and painting show. It will be a permanent set-up. I shall request my friends to gift puppets, paintings and dolls for this centre.

How do you sustain Chorus?

We do not get even a penny from the Manipur government. Even President’s Rule makes no difference. I have been awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award and Padma Vibhushan but for the Manipur government I am a nonentity. The Union Department of Culture advances a meager fund for Chorus.

Sometimes, I feel it is good this way. Acute shortage of funds and resources makes us more innovative. If we have to run a professional repertory and that too without funds we are bound to be more realistic and down to earth. It helps us to grow and avoid wastage. Whatever we need we collect from our audiences. Chorus has proved one thing. You can do serious theatre without the state’s patronage; it also gives more freedom to artists. They don’t have to bend.


Has the continuing violence in Manipur affected your work?

When the fight for power goes beyond limits, it is bound to wreak havoc. The people of Manipur are being forced to carry a cross for the sins of other. But they have realized it is all due to political bungling. Even after large-scale killings, our work has not been affected for through our cultural work we have been able to identify with the aspirations of the people. We are respected. The people think that this is the kind of work through which Manipur can be saved from vultures.

[Ratan Thiyam interviewed by Shamsul Islam in New Delhi. It appeared in The Economic Times, New Delhi dated March 29, 1994. This interview carried a photograph of Ratan Thiyam which is not reproduced here.]""

La tragedia rappresenta uno dei più vasti ambiti di interesse e di indagine dal punto di vista letterario, teatrale e filosofico. Questo volume ricerca, nello specifico, un possibile “sentimento tragico della Storia”, ispirandosi a Miguel de Unamuno. Si guarda a Karl Marx, quindi alla Storia come “tragedia” nell’interpretazione di Arnold Toynbee e di Oswald Spengler, alla dialettica tra tragedia e Storia di Lucien Goldmann – e György Lukács –, sino alla “tragedia del popolo” di Orlando Figes.

Lässt sich die politische Problemlage unserer Zeit literarisch erfassen? Was ist die Rolle von Literatur im globalen Kapitalismus? Lässt sich ein dauerhafter Arbeitszusammenhang von Autorinnen und Autoren organisieren? Diesen Fragen widmete sich im April 2015 eine Schriftstellertagung unter dem Titel „Richtige Literatur im Falschen?“, die im Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus stattfand. In Zentrum stand die Frage nach dem Verhältnis zwischen Literatur, Engagement und kapitalistischer Gesellschaft. Der Band „Richtige Literatur im Falschen?“ zeichnet die Tagung dokumentarisch nach und präsentiert darüber hinaus aktuelle Statements der Beteiligten. Mit Beiträgen von Ann Cotten, Annett Gröschner, Joachim Helfer, Jan Loheit, Thomas Meinecke, Norbert Niemann, Helmut Peitsch, Monika Rinck, Kathrin Röggla, David Salomon, Stefan Schmitzer, Erasmus Schöfer, Ingo Schulze, Ingar Solty, Enno Stahl, Thomas Wagner, Michael Wildenhain und Raul Zelik.

Born in Surakarta, W.S. Rendra (7 November 1935–6 August 2009) was an Indonesian theatre director, actor, playwright and poet. A complex personality in a difficult period, Rendra represents one of the most important, and loved, figures in contemporary Indonesian theatre and literature. He remains barely known outside Indonesia. Crucial to consider is Rendra’s public criticism of Soekarno and Communism, and later of Suharto’s dictatorship. He was arrested several times during the early 1960s. In 1978 he was imprisoned for several months and then banned from performing until 1985. These events reflect both this delicate political period in Indonesia as well as Rendra’s involvement in the cultural and political scenes.
From the early 1960s, Rendra began adapting Western plays for the Indonesian context. He was experimenting with a mixture of theatrical traditions and intercultural techniques. His Yogyakarta-based drama club Lingkar Studi Drama Mahasiswa was a crossroad of experiences, a workshop involving other individuals who also became later prominent figures of the Indonesian culture, as Arifin C Noer and Putu Wijaya. Together with his social commitment, public speaking, and perform- ing, Rendra was already being noticed as rebellious by the authorities. The political tensions in the country and Rendra’s arrest on several occasions during the early 1960s influenced his decision to depart for the US in 1964. He joined an international humanities seminar for anti-communist youth at Harvard University, then studied social sciences and humanities at New York University “where he began to think of art related to ‘structural analysis’ and communal activism” (Winet 2010, p. 152). He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (AADA), which represents the first and only formal training he ever received in theatre and performing.
The American period between 1964 and 1967, and in particular his experience at AADA, were crucial to Rendra’s human and artistic development. Little previous research has investigated this dimension of Rendra’s development. Moreover, at that time,American theatre was interconnected with European theatre, and the interest in cross-cultural and multi-ethnical ensembles was growing exponentially. Given his interest in the avant-garde in his early career, while in the US Rendra had the opportunity to touch those trends.
Considering the above, this essay explores certain dimensions of Rendra’s back- ground to highlight specific facets of his work, compare it to others better known, and thereby contribute to a better international appreciation of his work. I choose here to focus on the actor, training and the human processes that precede the creation of a character. In this attempt to understand certain features of Rendra’s work, I collect, consider and interpolate relevant information.
I begin by exploring important aspects regarding the AADA, and highlight key influences Rendra could have received. I do so through pertinent bibliographical sources and via direct email correspondence with the Academy and reputed US acting coach Harry Mastrogeorge. I contextualize some information directly collected through discussions and interviews with key people via email, phone calls, or in person. Particularly important are Rendra’s eldest son, Teddy and senior actors of the Bengkel Teater, especially I Gede Tapa Sudana. Interviewed at several stages during the research process, we discussed theatre, meditation and other aspects of Rendra’s work. The language used for interviews was English, along with some Indonesian phrases. Quotations most relevant to this investigation are provided with minimal “editing” to preserve each voice.
I suggest correspondences between the American and Indonesian debates around Stanislavsky. I confront some aspects of Rendra’s theatre with facets of Stanislavsky. I then discuss the possible presence of, or similarity with, some of Stanislavsky’s principles in Rendra’s works. I compare Rendra with other prominent personalities of twentieth-century theatre. Historical documents and press are reported where appropriate. Finally, I glimpse at the significance of Rendra’s work today in Indonesia.

1919 steht für einen politischen Neuanfang und gleichzeitig für ein krisenhaftes, immer wieder scheiterndes Ringen um Demokratie und eine liberale Gesellschaft. Vor diesem
Horizont entsteht ein politisches Theater, das sich einmischt und sich als Reflexionsraum von Machverhältnissen versteht.
Macht| Spiele beschreibt anhand markanter Stationen die Geschichte dieses politischen Theaters von 1919 bis in die Gegenwart. Dabei werden so unterschiedliche Formen beleuchtet wie die Shakespeare’schen Königsdramen, etwa am Beispiel der Inszenierungen von Leopold Jessner, Jürgen Fehling, Saladin Schmitt, Peter Palitzsch oder Peter Zadek, Schillers »Räuber« (in ikonischen Inszenierungen von Erwin Piscator und Hansgünter Heyme) oder die Orestie-Inszenierung von Peter Stein.
Mit Arbeiten von Karin Beier, William Kentridge, Brigitte Maria Mayer, Luk Perceval, Maya Krishna Rao und Robert Wilson zieht sich die Perspektive bis in die Gegenwart.

This study aims at exploring the significance of Post-Neoliberalism in Anders Lustgarten’s If You Don't Let Us Dream We Won't Let You Sleep (2013). Acknowledging that any literary production cannot be examined without considering a bigger and more complex social structure, the study attempts to find out about the dialectical relationship between Lustgarten’s play and the society in which the characters live. Post-Neoliberalism is a relational perspective on governance that emerged after the 2008 global financial crisis. Post-Neoliberalism is also a concept given to a period on which a global climate crisis affected the whole world and vital resources were crudely consumed. Most importantly, the Post-Neoliberal era has been built on serious political disappointments fuelled by neoliberal policies. In the play set in a dystopian UK, the business representatives decide that the financially burdensome culture of addiction must be eliminated. For this purpose, the state invents “Unity Bonds”, a tool that will generate returns if the number of people committing crimes to the investor or taking drug treatment drops to a certain level. Thus, the state wants to shift the cost of social repair to the private sector.  The play takes place in a dystopian universe in which ‘the market determines everything approach’, the basic principle of neoliberalism, dominates every area of society, and the basic rights of citizens such as health, education and housing are commodified. Using close reading method, this study deals with the analysis of the interactive arrangements between the play and its socio-political context. The impetus behind this study is to investigate the ways in which Anders Lustgarten critiques the Post-Neoliberal era which destroys the foundational values of the western society and the social consensus lying in its base by deepening the economic and social injustices.
Key Words: Anders Lustgarten, Post-Neoliberalism, Free Market Capitalism, Neoliberalism, Post-Globalisation, Contemporary British Theatre

A N obituary often mourns and bids adieu. This one will not. Type Dario Fo's name on any search engine and you will see image after image of this happy looking man with round eyes, on stage and off, laughing, hugging, dancing. It is only in politically minded celebration during and despite dark times that you can remember Dario Fo, for his legacy of humour is an incredibly durable and endearing template for our times. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997, as he notes in his acceptance speech, many friends of his said that the Swedish Academy should be applauded 'for having had the courage to award the Nobel Prize to a jester!' Dario Fo was no writer who toiled away through the nights to the tap of the typewriter in glum literary solitude. He had no solemnity becoming of a literary figure whatsoever. In fact, in the same speech, in describing those men of letters who were stumped at his winning the prize, he says, "It's enough to take stock of the uproar it has caused: sublime poets and writers who normally occupy the loftiest of spheres, and who rarely take interest in those who live and toil on humbler planes, are suddenly bowled over by some kind of whirlwind." Fo was that whirlwind of the stage, a wind that lit political fires, by telling the stories of the humble and the toiling. He was the most complete being of the theatre, who wrote plays and directed them, who acted in them and made music for them. And this he did with his friend, love, partner-in-laughter, wife, Franca Rame, with whom he toured with their bagful of stories in performance, and who he said deserved the prize along with him. The Swedish Academy rightly said that in giving the award to Fo, they had honoured someone "who emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden." Born in 1926 in Sangiano, Italy, little Dario sat beside his grandfather who sold farm produce out of a cart, and told the most fantastic stories. His father Felice was a socialist and committed anti-fascist, and his job as station master took the family across the country, where Dario listened to more fantastic stories from fishermen and glassblowers, even as his mother wrote reminiscences of post war experiences in Italy. He rightly deserted the army, went to study architecture in Milan, and gave up the soullessness of architecture to throw himself into the little theatre movement that in the post war years was growing and throbbing with social critique. Fo's wild satirical humour discomfited the establishment right when he first opened his mouth to a public, in the early 1950s, when he did 18 comic monologues in a series called Poor Dwarf (Poer Nano), in which he stood biblical, historical, and Shakespearean tales on their heads, and angry radio authorities cancelled the show. Having devoured works by Brecht, Gramsci, and Marx as a young man, Fo was not to be reined in by these interruptions. Along with Rame, he continued depicting the lives of the working classes, the endless injustices faced by them, always in satirical hilarity, resulting in the couple being effectively banned from Italian television for over a decade. He went on to take on another sacred cow of European history-the thug Chris Columbus, whom Fo demystified in the play Isabella, Three Sailing Ships and a Conman, in which he debunked the text book version of Columbus as the great explorer. This led to threats and attacks by the fascists. Unabated, the couple then took on the US establishment-having earlier also staged a play on racism in the US-in Throw the Lady Out, in which the 'lady' was interpreted by one critic as American capitalism. The US government continued denying him and Rame visas, not just for the play, but for their support for families of left-wing militants in Italy. In 1969, he began staging Mistero Buffo (Comical Mystery Play), which took on various stories of the passion of Christ and retold them through the eyes of the common person, brought satire, erudition, and laughter to cast a big beady eye on politics of the time. Of course, telling tall tales about Jesus and other biblical characters had the Vatican hot around the clerical collar. But the audiences loved his one man show and the act toured the world for the next thirty years. Fo is known also for the unforgettable Accidental Death of an Anarchist, produced by Rame and Fo's independent theatre group in 1970, which took on disturbing concerns of his time: the death of the anarchist and railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli, who was picked up following a bomb explosion in a Milanese square caused by a far right group. In the cover up, the police made his death from a fall from the fourth floor of the police station look like an accident. The sharp commentary on police corruption, persecution of those whose politics resonated with Pinelli's, were universal experiences that endured in many translations, adaptations, and performances across the world, including in Hindi and Kashmiri. Taking on the political establishment and the far right had its dark shadow. In 1973, Rame was picked up at gunpoint by five fascists supported by the police, and raped, brutalised, and left in a park. Yet, the couple continued touring the country with their political satire, going on to tell the story of Salvador Allende and the struggle of the people of Chile, and in a few years that of the economic crisis closer home in Cant Pay? Won't Pay!, in which a housewife, played by Rame loots supermarkets because she has no money to pay. Played always to packed houses, the play, again, was translated and adapted and the whole world adopted it and laughed with it. After all, the working class woman all over the world still can't pay for groceries, can she? Indefatigably, despite attempts to muzzle him and arrest him, and create all kinds of obstacles when he and his theatre company occupied an abandoned building in a working class district in Milan, Fo continued to thematise the elections, the class nature of the drug problem in Italy, a TV show called Let's Talk about Women, in which they thematised burning issues around women's rights at the time. In the middle of all that, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize, and kept laughing at the prospect of seeing the look on the Italian establishment's face should the prospect come true. In the 1980s, while Fo's plays were being widely performed across the United States, the US government mulishly continued denying the couple visas, mystifyingly declaring the reason that they were associated with terrorist groups, this being their association with the radical left in Italy. The couple simply filed a lawsuit against the US State Department! And when Fo and Rame returned to Italian television, they again were the storm of jibing laughter with their critique of the banking establishment, rape culture, and state censorship. Always the internationalist, having spoken out against the Vietnam War, Fo now took on the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Gulf War, AIDS, genetic experiments, and closer home kept making fun of the church and of Silvio Berlusconi. In The Two-Headed Anomaly, first performed in 2003, Fo presents the comic madness of a scenario where Vladimir Putin is shot dead and his brain transplanted into Berlusconi's head-a comment on Berlusconi's businesses and control of the media. And of course, Fo took all the threats that followed in his jaunty stride. Always the hero of the left, through his association with the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Fo later championed the cause of the Five Star Movement, led by Beppe Grillo. In 2013, Franca Rame, his artistic collaborator, critic, muse, and comrade for nearly six decades, died. Years earlier, in his Nobel lecture, he had summed up their shared political values and their lives together thus: "Together we've staged and recited thousands of performances, in theatres, occupied factories, at university sit-ins, even in deconsecrated churches, in prisons and city parks, in sunshine and pouring rain, always together. We've had to endure abuse, assaults by the police, insults from the right-thinking, and violence. And it is Franca who has had to suffer the most atrocious aggression. She has had to pay more dearly than any one of us, with her neck and limb in the balance, for the solidarity with the humble and the beaten that has been our premise". He decided that the best tribute to her was to continue his creative endeavours, which were not fun and games, but were a radical, zestful, and perhaps optimistic reworking of Italian aesthetic traditions. Fo continued to paint, write, and speak, even writing a novel on the controversial Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, recasting her as a modern woman, and the machinations of her infamous family as bearing parallels in modern life and politics. And in all this, he continued to make fun of a decrepit and corrupt political establishment. It is only fitting that Umberto Eco, who in his own dazzling writing fantasised about the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics that is said to have talked of the theory of comedy and laughter, delighted in Fo receiving the Nobel Prize. To quote the inimitable jester again, who recalled Molière and Ruzzante Beolco as inspirations: "both actors-playwrights, both mocked by the leading men of letters of their times. Above all, they were despised for bringing onto the stage the everyday life, joys and desperation of the common people; the hypocrisy and the arrogance of the high and mighty; and the incessant injustice. And their major, unforgivable fault was this: in telling these things, they made people laugh. Laughter does not please the mighty".

The article focuses on the representation of violence in Rebecca Prichard’s Yard Gal.
Building on Slavoj Žižek’s theory, the paper suggests that the play is a complex exploration of the problem as it not only depicts instances of what Žižek calls subjective
violence, but also probes into systemic violence that may have led to the eruption of
the former. *e article argues that the characters are socially excluded and that it is
precisely this fact that drives them to commit felonies. *e paper also addresses the
question of whether Prichard’s play is an in-yer-face drama, suggesting that it eludes
such categorization as it is also a piece of social realism.

Dieser Aufsatz liest das während des Ersten Weltkriegs begonnene Lustspiel-Fragment Timon der Redner als einen Versuch HofmannsthaIs, ausgehend von der Geld-thematik und Figurentypik bei Shakespeare zu einer kritischen Inszenierung des mo-dernen Massenstaates und dessen Sozialdynamiken zu gelangen. Hierbei stützte er sich auf sozialpsychologische Studien Sigmund Freuds und Gustave Le Bons sowie auf Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie. Als Wirkungsabsicht hinter dieser Ironisie-rung des allegorisierten Masse-Führermodells zeichnet sich die Re-Etablierung von legitimen Autoritätsstrukturen im Faszinosum der Dichtung ab, welche das Politi-sche authentisch gestaltet. This survey interprets Hofmannsthal's fragmented adaptation of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens as a comedy on the masses of modernity. Combining contemporary theories of the crowd (Freud, Le Bon, Weber) with the staging of the political and economic sphere in Shakespeare's works, HofmannsthaI tried to elaborate critical poetics of the modern state and its most urgent dangers. His ironical dramatization of brute anarchy versus corrupted aristocracy tended to re-establish a consciousness of true authority-which should be found in literature. »Hofmannsthai sehnt sich nach dem extensiven, vielseitigen und polyphonen Leben Shakespeares, des alten englischen Dramas.« (Georg Lukacs, 1911). »Nie in meinem ganzen Leben hat das productive Element diesen Raum ein-genommen, von unten her mit solcher Kraft sich nach oben gedrängt, meine bürgerliche Lebensführung so erschwert und gewissermaßen ironisiert wie in diesen Jahren seit 1916. Das was nach oben will, sind Massen, die ich natürlich seit weit längerer Zeit in mir trage.« (HofmannsthaI an Hermann Bahr, 15.VI. 1918).1 Timon der Redner gehört zu den vergleichsweise wenig beachteten Arbeiten Hugo von Hofmannsthals. 2 Aus den überlieferten Materialien des schon 1975 1

One of the greatest revolutionary performer, lyricist, musician and political activist, Rama Rao is no more. He died May 5, 2019 after a brief illness in a Hyderabad hospital. Many of us did not believe this news to be true but it was a fact. He was a close friend of mine, co-performer for last 4 decades. We performed together in many parts of India. His death was a great loss not only to the revolutionary cultural movement of AP/Telengana but whole of the country. Pradeep, a renowned trade unionist from Hyderabad has penned this homage to him which describes in totality the contribution and heritage of Rama Rao.

Cet article étudie la place et le statut des Songs dans La Décision (1930) de Brecht et Eisler. Grâce à une étude dramaturgique et une analyse musicale, le Gestus est appréhendé dans ses différentes expressions

Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, coll. « Annales littéraires », p. 19-35.

The nature of surveillance is changing. It is becoming gamified. This article charts a shift in thinking about surveillance culture, from the panopticon models advanced by Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault to current analyses of the increasingly participatory and gamified models of surveillance in the age of big data. That shift is played out literally in Theatre Conspiracy’s immersive play Foreign Radical, in which participants are led through a game environment in which they reveal aspects of their online behaviour and judge each other in a way that replicates the kinds of social sorting that take place in both social media and in surveillance. The game leads them to deliberate on the case of an Iranian-Canadian man named Hesam, who stands accused of terrorism. As the case against Hesam comes to rest increasingly on his Middle Eastern and Islamic identity, the show reveals the role that racism and Islamophobia come to play in the interpretation of surveillance data. Although surveillance operates on a seemingly empirical basis, the stories it tells about people nevertheless remain fictions, assembled from statistical probability and speculation. In this way, surveillance adds to the sense that we live in a post-truth society.

Musical Theatre has been seen by many as a 'fluffy' piece of entertainment. This paper examines how Les Miserables, Billy Elliott and Oliver can be examined to explore how the musical has projected political, social and historical themes of the time of writing.

Cette édition propose une nouvelle traduction de la pièce ainsi que de scènes restées inédites en français. Les notes et la postface essaient d'éclairer l'extraordinaire travail d'"historien du temps présent", mais aussi de philologue de la langue nazie, accompli par Brecht.

This article is an adapted version of a text originally published in Turkish in the historical materialist journal PRAKSIS in 2016, and translated into English by the author. It focuses on performative protest acts and the role of the performing artist in Turkey in the context of the Gezi Park uprisings of 2013. The article examines how some of Gezi's performative protest actions evidence a larger cultural transformation, of which we can see a continuation in new theatre playtexts.

The paper draws on the speaker’s 25-year history of busking in UK city centres, and notes the increasing importance of playful loitering in the urban space. It notes the changing attitudes of the general public to costumed performance in the city in recent years and considers the role of leisure technology, CCTV and the roving nature of street-policing in influencing public response to live urban performance. It suggests that singing– particularly acapella singing – brings a necessary breath to the streets and is essential to maintain. The paper further argues that costumed performance in the current climate effects a disruptive and transgressive intervention that troubles the British public with an uneasy nostalgia. It considers whether buskers increasingly provoke 'unheimlich' conditions with song, and asks how performers can adapt to changing social and legal conditions that render the simple act of public singing ghostly, subversive and queer. The paper reflects on the history of street-singing in the UK, suggesting that it has always enjoyed an ambivalent relationship to commerce, and brought mixed responses from the public and from city authorities. It considers the recent imposition of £1,000 fines by Camden Council, London on buskers performing without a license. It asks what cultural or economic values street-singers represent and whether these values are increasingly in tune or at odds with the British public’s perception of normalcy, performance and the function of city spaces. Noting Michael de Certeau’s ideas on space, the paper asks whether buskers effect a necessary delinquency to the ‘practiced place’ of the street, and how the singing, busking, performative body can resist marginalisation and ‘inscribe itself into the interstices of the codes’ of the urban space it both ‘undoes and displaces’.

En Antígona podemos ver como el papel de la mujer a través de confrontarse ante la decisión de respetar las leyes divinas o seguir las leyes humanas toma gran fuerza, puesto que la mujer en el siglo V a. C. no tenía gran importancia como integrante de la sociedad, dado que no participaba en la toma de decisiones, ni tenía un lugar destacado jerárquicamente, como el hecho de no pertenecer a la ciudadanía. Es por ello que la decisión de Antígona de respetar la ley divina ante la de los hombres sin importar las consecuencias que este hecho le acarreara toma gran importancia al ser un contraste destacado en cuanto a la sociedad en la que se desarrolla la historia.

There is some hesitation in theatre scholarship to confront and engage with the resurgence of political theatre in the 21st century, despite the vast numbers of political plays that have been performed in a variety of genres on the British stage in the last decade. This article considers the rejuvenation of political theatre in the 21st century and focuses in particular on Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (2000), Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (2006) and Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009). I argue that these plays rehabilitate explicit political comment for the stage as well as discover fresh theatrical languages to represent what are often familiar political narratives. The discussion borrows from the writings of Jacques Rancière to help identify strategies Churchill’s plays use to find innovative ways of producing new forms of political subjectivity in audiences.

The Jatra of Bengal, India is embedded in religious celebrations and communal and cultural quests. Jatra is known for its distinctive presentational styles comprising song-dance sequences, larger than life physicalization, enthralling dialogues, and the anthropomorphizing of the “conscience,” commonly known as the bibek. This article focuses
on an interview with Shekh Madhusudan, the 87-year old Jatra artist who reminiscences about his relationship with this form of theatre. This interview exposes how religion and his journey as a bibek in relation to the dramatic and theatrical theories of postcolonialism and hybridity inform the nature of contemporary Jatra in West Bengal.

Daniel Wetzel/Rimini Protokoll in a conversation with Florian Malzacher about differences and similarities between art and politics in Rimini Protokoll's practice referring to a variety of other artists' work. A fundamental question that runs through the conversation is whether theatre could be more than merely a space of representation and critique.

As an influential playwright of Verbatim theatre which emerged in England in 1960s as a form of politic theatre, the roots of which date back to Ancient Greek period, Philip Ralph concentrates on Cheryl James, one of the four soldiers died doubtfully at the barracks in Surrey between 1995- 2002 and her parents seeking answers upon their daughter’s death in his
play, Deep Cut. Playwright who analyzed all the documents within three years studied social and political aspects of the tragedy, especially the parts that did not take place in the media. In this study, the researcher explores the specialities of the Verbatim theatre and considers Philip Ralph’s play, Deep Cut in political aspects.

Marquée par le surgissement d’une parole jusqu’alors inouïe et inaudible, la révolution symbolique à laquelle De Certeau associe 1968 a conduit le théâtre à redéfinir ses missions et ses exigences. Comme en témoigne la déclaration de Villeurbanne, le souci de transmettre un patrimoine culturel déjà constitué auprès d’un auditoire élargi est considéré comme insuffisant et tendrait même à perpétuer l’expropriation des moyens d’expression dont est victime une partie de la population. La démocratisation du répertoire doit donc laisser place à des créations inédites où puisse enfin se reconnaître ce qu’on appelle alors le "non-public". C’est dans ce cadre qu’il convient d’inscrire les recherches menées dans les années 1970 par le théâtre dit "du quotidien". En se proposant comme objectif de "mettre en jeu la parole de ceux qui ne l’ont pas", les pièces de Michel Deutsch, Claudine Fiévet, Michèle Foucher et Jean-Paul Wenzel entendent remettre le théâtre en phase avec une réalité populaire trop longtemps interdite de représentation.

Un tel projet ne va pas toutefois pas sans tensions tant le geste qui consiste à s’ériger en "porte-parole" s’avère politiquement et esthétiquement problématique. Il faut souligner ici que ce théâtre issu de mai 68 en opère implicitement la critique en portant sur la scène ceux qui sont restés aux marges de l’événement et qui sont précisément privés des moyens linguistiques d’assurer leur libération. La parole s’impose alors comme un enjeu manifeste de pouvoir, de sorte que les dialogues laconiques et maladroits des personnages proposent un questionnement inquiet sur les conditions d’impossibilité d’une véritable transformation collective. Mais la place accordée à ces phénomènes de relégation linguistique n’échappe pas au soupçon du surplomb et du misérabilisme. Aussi est-il intéressant de s’attarder sur des spectacles qui ont précisément tenté d’éviter ces écueils en s’appuyant sur des entretiens : Dorénavant 1 de Wenzel et La Table de Foucher, tous deux créés en 1977 et fondés respectivement sur une année d’implantation dans la ville nouvelle de Bobigny et sur de nombreuses discussions avec des femmes.

Performances and performance cultures are often seen in our discipline as indicative of the political unconscious in the way they shape dramatizations of collective myths and identities. Yet they are also so much entangled with the present political agendas, the arts (and education) decrees and legislation, the support by local communities and audiences, and the general social and political climates in which they operate, respond to and aim to influence. In Turkey, for over a decade, politics and theatre are increasingly at odds with each other in a general climate that seeks to restrict freedom of speech and expression as well as the public representation and visibility of (political) identities that go beyond the homogeneity of an 'ethnically' Turkish nationhood and a (Sunni) Muslim denomination or cultural background. Moreover, right before the previous general elections and even more so after the failed coup attempt, the role of the state as a primary actor in identity politics has taken a nationalistic turn. Despite its ethnically diverse history and social reality, the homogeneous Turkish nation as predicated by the state leaves formally and publicly no space for cultural pluralism. Theatre and aesthetic protest take up an important social role in contesting mainstream notions of citizenship and in creating a space for plurality. In this keynote, I propose to do four things: 1. I will first focus on the current political climate in Turkey and look at its implications for the artist's response-ability (Lehmann 2006). 2. I will move on to reintroduce Turkey's protest culture after the Gezi uprisings and discuss how performativity in protest actions has the potential to be called a 'structure of feeling' (Williams 1977) with a wider history in political performance history. 3. I will unpack similarities and differences with protests and theatre cultures in the 1950s and 1980s. However, it must be said that my rereading of Turkey's history of aesthetic protest and the role of the artist within it will only reveal a very disparate story. 4. I will return to today's Turkey and pose some critical questions regarding the term ‘Gezi spirit’. I will conclude with the question whether or not the Gezi spirit is (or should be kept) alive and what it left us – as academics – to make sense of what is happening around us today.

Paper for Political Performances working group, IFTR, Hyderabad, 2015.

See 52:23 mins for another version of this paper with slides, at Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, as part of Fast Forward Festival.
http://www.sgt.gr/eng/SPG1032/?vid=1_d9djepf0&pg=4&flt=152

Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‘In Praise of Profanation’ proposes “profanation as the political task of the coming generation”. This paper uses Agamben’s text as a frame through which to think about Uninvited Guests’ Make Better Please, and thinks through this performance about Agamben’s proposal. Rather than being site-specific, Make Better Please was specific to the date on which it was performed, with each day’s unique script emerging from conversations with audience members, prompted by reading the day’s newspapers. The audience-generated content fed into a structure that borrowed from other forms and media; Quaker meetings, shamanic rites, rock gigs and radio broadcasts. Both performers and participating audience profaned the practices and means of print and broadcast media, from which the public tend to be separated, they put to new uses political debate and news reporting: democratic processes, press and media apparatuses that tend to be out of the public’s hands.

Unlike polemical, socialist theatre of the past, Uninvited Guests’ agenda was not to persuade or unite the public around an issue, or to assemble them for or against a cause. In conclusion I will turn to Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, who critique the possibility of “the democratization of democracy” and profane the concept of consensus, which they suggest has become sacred within leftist politics. In Make Better Please, multiple voices retain their precarious identity and singularity; are not subsumed into a collective, unified or fully inclusive “we”. I will argue that there is a relationship with Mouffe and Laclau’s conception of a pluralist democracy, constituted by sustained relations of antagonism as well as processes of identification.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3nksLZUyWU
Or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC3I2Zqueg8

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

Though both South Asian and South African literary and cultural studies boast deep critical traditions,
rarely have critics specifically focused on dramatic literature and the performative acts of Indian South Africans. Theatre – as an aesthetic genre as well as a social institution – has been remarkably under theorised within Indian Ocean communities, even though its power in Indian South African communities and within South African history and culture has been amply documented and analysed In theatre studies of South Asia, scholars have pushed new frontiers about the studies of colonial modern theatre as well as post-independence Indian theatres, inspired by a performance-studies turn, but the push to link theatre and performance studies with Indian Ocean, and migrant, contexts has yet to fully manifest within scholarly circles. Through an examination of Ronnie Govender’s
play 1949, this article argues that theatre as a medium offers the opportunity to create specific versions of history and community identity not visible in prose literature or the novel. These versions of history and community identity are analysed with reference to the broader history of South Africa as well as
the manners in which Govender’s history both incorporates particular aspects of earlier definitions of Indian identity in South Africa and innovates to create images of Indo-African shared spaces.

This paper concerns Let me tell you a story about Israel, a theatrical play tasked with influencing existing perceptions of the Palestine/Israel conflict amongst international audiences. Drawing on the work of philosopher Baruch Spinoza, I explore the complex issue of how to address the need to change people's political perceptions by using theatre as a form of activist persuasion. The play attempts to create an image of the conflict mostly absent in the commentaries of international observers who are unaware of the full implications of the conflict's settler colonial character. Typically, they understand it in terms of two sides competing over land, frontiers and recognition. The sense of balance that this perception conveys preempts coming to grips with the colonial history of Palestine beginning with the advent of Zionism from late 19th century. Such a view also obscures the nature of current forms of Israeli domination and fails to take into account a major historical factor: that the settler colonial dynamic in Palestine rests on the ways social life in Israel is organised and reproduced. Hence, the play aims to make perceptible the relation between the social mechanisms of subjectivity formation in the Israeli society on the one hand, and the everyday performance of settler colonial power on the other. Making this relation observable is a necessary step towards rethinking where change could possibly come from.