Absent Performances: Distant Fieldwork on Social Movement Theater of Algeria and India

Abstract

This chapter addresses the social movement theater produced by Abdelkader Alloula, the playwright and actor regarded as having revitalized the Algerian theater through the adaptation of local and popular forms. In a context where there is little record of the open-air theater practices that Alloula developed in the 1960s and 1970s and then carried onto Algeria’s main stages, this chapter asks how forms of comparative fieldwork, or “distant fieldwork,” might be used to imagine the social dynamics of Alloula’s innovative technique. Drawing on fieldwork focused on the open-air political theater production of the North Indian group the Jana Natya Manch (People’s Theatre Group), I read Alloula’s play El-Adjouad (The Generous Ones) to uncover traces of its history as political, open-air performance.