Ibsen In The Decolonised South Asian Theatre

Reviewed by: Critical Essay on British South Asian Theatre ed. by Graham Ley and Sarah Dadswell Kathy Foley Critical Essay on British South Asian Theatre. Edited by Graham Ley and Sarah Dadswell. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2012 (distributed by University of Chicago Press). Paper, $48.00. A companion volume to British South Asian Theatres, this collection adds to the growing literature on artists of South Asian descent working in English theatre since the 1970s. Essays range from historical overviews that set the stage for contemporary work to discussions of specific companies or individual performers. Most of the papers were presented at the 2008 British Asian Theatre: Past to Present Conference at the University of Exeter. The book is less useful [End Page 250] to scholars of South Asian theatre in Asia than to those researching Indian diasporic artists working in Anglophone cultures. While there is limited discussion of the use of Indian aesthetics in developing Western plays (as in a discussion by Chandrika Patel of Jatinder Verma's "Binglish" version of Marriage of Figaro placed in Mughal India and using Guajarati bhavai as a "style"), most discussion is of contemporary text-oriented modern drama by British of South Asian descent who use theatre as a forum for cultural-political examination. In the introduction the editors note that, given the visibility of British South Asian work in the theatres since the 1980s, "Its absence from the academic or critical record seems inexplicable"—the book intends to redress this lack of "an appropriate level of secondary reception . . . from an academic or critical standpoint" (p. 1). The first essay is an overview by Naseem Khan. She is author of the groundbreaking book The Arts Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain (London: Community Relations Commission, 1976), which laid the groundwork for the change in government funding policy by the 1980s and helped landmark companies like Tara Arts and Tamasha to emerge as strong producing units with significant public funding. Khan discusses the multicultural movement from the 1970s to the present, noting the generational divides within the South Asian community and the confusion over what British Asian arts are (classical or contemporary? community-based or in professional venues?). She acknowledges weaknesses of the Arts Council policies, but she also asserts successes. The support encouraged British South Asian artists to look outward, partnering with non-Asian artists and producers or bringing in noted artists from the subcontinent as collaborators. The funding, she states, created a "stepping stone from ethnic specificity to mainstream statement" and "nudged Britain into seeing itself as a multicultural society" (p. 13). Khan contrasts the firm basis from which South Indian dance launches into its postmulticultural-era existence. She praises such extravaganzas as Escapade (directed by Keith Kahn, 2003), mounted by the dance institution Akademi with 137 performers in a piece that combines club culture, film, and skateboarding. Khan sees it as part of a dance new wave, but she questions whether theatre moves from as strong a base, given the more fragile place theatre holds (compared to dance or music) within the the diasporic community (pp. 18-19). The next few essays help the reader see aspects of the chronology. Colin Chambers's in "Images on Stage: A Historical Survey of South Asians in British Theatre before 1975" (pp. 21-40) considers depiction of South Asians, noting the early use of the Indian (usually Native American) as "other" in the English Renaissance literature, the rise of East Indians [played by British] as peripheral characters onstage accompanying the rise in the importance of the British East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and nineteenth-century orientalism and the ethnological fascination of cultural exhibitions. Chambers takes time for the twentieth-century phenomenon of Tagore's dramatic work, as well as discussion of the importance of Indian student theatrical activities at British universities. This overview is a useful survey. [End Page 251] The next essays give insights into transformations in the 1980s. Susan Crofts discusses the emergence of bilingual (English-Bengali) theatre, especially the participatory Half Moon Young People's Theatre in London, which worked on "bridging the gaps between language communities in Tower Hamlets and between the theatrical...

The classical theatres of southern Asia are variously treated with the reverence thought due to sacrosanct and immutable forms – or as rich sources for plunder by western theatre-makers in search of intra-cultural building-blocks. The rights and wrongs of this latter approach have been much debated, not least in the pages of NTQ; less so the intrinsic desirability of leaving well alone. At the symposium on Classical Sanskrit Theatre, hosted in Dhaka by the Centre for Asian Theatre in December 1999, an unexpected consensus sought ways in which classical theatre forms might best meet contemporary needs, not only by drawing upon their unique qualities – but also by respecting the injunction in the Natyasastra that the actor must combine discipline with a readiness for improvisation. John Russell Brown here supports the conclusions of the symposium that the qualities of Asian theatre which differentiate it from western forms – of a quest for transformation rather than representation, a concern with emotional truth rather than ideological ‘meaning’ – can best be pursued by such an approach, restoring to the theatre ‘its enabling and necessary role in society’. John Russell Brown was the first professor of Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham, and subsequently Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. More recently he has taught and directed in the USA, New Zealand, and Asia, and is now Visiting Professor of Performing Arts at Middlesex University. The most recent of his numerous books is New Sites for Shakespeare: Theatre, the Audience and Asia (Routledge, 1999).

Reviewed by: British South Asian Theatres: A Documented History Kathy Foley British South Asian Theatres: A Documented History. By Graham Ley and Sarah Dadswell, editors. Exeter: University of Exeter Press (distributed by University of Chicago Press), 2012. 265 pp. + DVD. Paper $37.25. This well-edited book grew from a research project on British Asian theatre and serves as a model of how the oftentimes ephemeral and fragmentary history of companies that make up a movement can, using a combination of book and digital possibilities, be gathered into a larger nexus that reveals the patterns and differences in these diverse groups. The artistic outcomes that result from the British agitation of the 1970s with the growth of identity politics and development of a multicultural movement of the 1980s are evident. The material on the DVD is in a wonderful format with with clips of significant productions as well as diverse visual materials culled from the archive: photographs, documents, and programs. The movement documented here shows the efforts of second- or, in some cases, first-generation Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi British in carving out a theatre by and for their community (and, in some cases, the general public as well). The first chapter gives a short overview and notes the 1976 Arts Council and Community Relations Commission report, The Arts That Britain Ignores: The Arts of Ethnic Minorities in Britain by Naseem Khan, as setting the stage by recommending funding for the movement. Ongoing language issues are introduced, noting that Indian-language work may remain contained within each specific community while the use of English could bind diverse artists together and at the same time open material to the general audience with greater grant support. Throughout the book the issues of funding are part of the discussion of how these companies rose and sometimes vanished. In thirteen chapters we get a look at each group: brief overviews of Tara, Hounslow Art Cooperative, Actors Unlimited, British Asian Theatre Company, Asian Co-operative Theatre, Tamasha, Kali, Man Mela, Watermans, Peshkar Productions, Asian Theatre School, Rifco, and Rasa Theatre. In each case the authors detail the founding, clarify the artistic thrust, and give insight into the major work through description of the productions based on interviews with company members, photos, programs, posters, reviews, and video footage. (Those who keep the DVD open while reading can view clips of works being discussed while reading about that work.) Space limits the depth of description, but the reader does get a sense of the activities and changing perspectives of major figures or groups in each individual company. We sense, for example, Tara’s beginnings as a rather realistic and polemic theatre, created for social [End Page 580] action, which provided a space for south Asian voices. We see it evolve into a company exploring Indian movement idioms or classical texts in an overall agenda of creating an artistically polished professional theatre where actors and directors of Asian descent could experiment with canonical Western texts and develop their own intercultural aesthetics and ideas. Likewise on the DVD we see photocopied and sometimes barely readable sheets with political manifestoes or history lessons become polished PR materials. The theatre training that most groups carried into the work initially tended to be either amateur enthusiasm, British drama school or university drama group experiences, or workshops at theatres outside the movement but sympathetic to its aims, like Royal Court, or groups within the movement like Tara that helped train and launch a number of leaders in subsequently founded organizations. As with Asian American theatre groups, I was struck by the fact that the genres or experiences of Asian traditional performances are not normally a part of the companies’ works. Shobana Jeyasingh, as a trained bharatanatyam exponent might on Miti ke Gadi (Little Clay Cart, 1984), adds choreography drawn from South Indian dance to Jatinder Verma’s Tara production. But Asian dance, music, or theatre genres are far from the norm, and most performers lack the experience of such forms. Something which is understandable when works are largely rising from a social justice concerns, comic critique, or Brechtian interventions. The longer-term aesthetics of the subcontinent in folk or classical dance theatre sometimes...

Unknown Others: South Asian Theatre and Its Audiences in Britain Today

Geoffrey V. Davis “Uncomfortable Truths about Contemporary Britain”: Black and South Asian Theatre in the U.K. 25

In 1996 Graham Ley compiled for NTQ a record of the first twenty years of Tara Arts, the London-based British Asian theatre company. In this essay, he tests the theoretical concept of a third space for diaspora culture against the experience of two leading British Asian theatre companies, and considers the contrasting role of an Asian arts centre. From 2004 to 2009 Graham Ley led an AHRC-funded research project on ‘British Asian Theatre: Documentation and Critical History’, and has co-edited with Sarah Dadswell two books soon to be published by the University of Exeter Press: British South Asian Theatres: a Documented History and Critical Essays on British South Asian Theatre. He has earlier published in NTQ on Australian theatre and enlightenment and contemporary performance theory, and is presently Professor of Drama and Theory at the University of Exeter.

Reviewed by: Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre: Essays on the Theatres of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka ed. by Ashis Sengupta Arnab Banerji MAPPING SOUTH ASIA THROUGH CONTEMPORARY THEATRE: ESSAYS ON THE THEATRES OF INDIA, PAKISTAN, BANGLADESH, NEPAL AND SRI LANKA. Edited by Ashis Sengupta. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 272 pp. Hardcover, $90.00. The political complexities of South Asia has considerable impacts on performance practice. Performers responded to the varied social, cultural, and political shifts in the region through their artwork. Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre is possibly the first volume of its kind that critically interrogates varied performance practices from several countries of this region. The collection, edited by Ashis Sengupta, puts performance at the heart of the South Asian critical discourse and is a valuable addition to the study of the region. Sengupta's imagining of South Asia leaves out Afghanistan, Bhutan, and Maldives, in his own words, for "space constraints" (p. 1). The editor contextualizes the collection by looking at extant material that examined South Asian theatre as a whole and clarifies this book steered clear of the biases that characterize most of that work. He explains that the performance put under the microscope within the covers of this book are "germane to a comprehensive, critical understanding of the sociohistorical and politicocultural narratives of contemporary/postcolonial South Asian nation-states" (p. 2). Sengupta explains that the rugged, interconnected, and confused territory of South Asian performance and its overlap with South Asian society makes it an even more pertinent project. [End Page 496] In her Foreword, Aparna Dharwadker draws special attention to the cartographic resonance in Sengupta's title. Dharwadker plays with the word to identify two central tenets of this edited volume. Mapping, Dharwadker reminds us, is a way of defining terrain within a critical study of a cultural form like theatre. In the specific contest of the volume, Dharwadker says, mapping also celebrates the ability of criticism to work with "permeable and resilient boundaries" (p. xii). The essays in this volume successfully and critically engage with the cultural give-and-take between the nations represented within and define South Asia as a critical site of contemporary performance. The essays in the book are as varied as the geographic area that this ambitious project covers. The arrangement of the essays follow the order in which each country appears in the title. Apart from the essay on India, all other essays choose to provide thorough yet succinct histories of the performance practices in their respective countries. Shayoni Mitra's essay "Dispatches from the Margins: Theatre in India since the 1990s" brings to light "fringe incidents" that affected Indian theatrical representations of identity (p. 66). Mitra's essay works against hegemonic loci of power that shaped Indian performance practice after the independence in 1947. Her essay deftly discusses the dissipation of the centers of power (which informed the beginning of institutional art practice in the newly independent India) and the possibilities the destabilizing of the center hold for future Indian theatre. Her essay sets the tone for the frequent echoes of emergent and marginal South Asian voices. Asma Mundrawala's essay "Theatre Chronicles: Framing Theatre Narratives in Pakistan's Sociopolitical Context" looks at the specific examples of the groups Tehrik-e-Niswan (The Women's Movement) in Karachi and Ajoka (Of Today) in Lahore. Mundrawala writes that no discussion of Pakistani theatre "is complete without acknowledging the profound role" of these two groups (p. 104). Her essay locates these two groups in the sociopolitical context that defined the theatre of the antecedents of these two groups. Mundrawala looks at the martial law imposed by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haque in 1977 as serving as the impetus and exercising the strict controls that defined their work. She expands her discussion further to examine the changes in theatre affected by the relaxing of martial law in the aftermath of Ziaul-Haque's death in 1988. In this section of her essay, Mundrawala studies the transition of theatre in Pakistan from political to social commentary. Providing a broad sweep of contemporary Pakistani [End Page 497] theatre, Mundrawala examines "amateur and professional theatre groups practicing a range...

Reviewed by: Feminist Theatre and Performance, and: The Masks of Judith Thompson, and: George F. Walker, and: Theatre in British Columbia Nancy Copeland Susan Bennett , editor. Feminist Theatre and Performance. Playwrights Canada. xvii, 161. $25.00 Ric Knowles , editor. The Masks of Judith Thompson. Playwrights Canada. xi. 149. $25.00 Harry Lane , editor. George F. Walker. Playwrights Canada. xv, 205. $25.00 Ginny Ratsoy , editor. Theatre in British Columbia. Playwrights Canada. xxii, 228. $25.00 Taken together, these four anthologies from Playwrights Canada Press represent a range of approaches to configuring drama scholarship. Three of the four are volumes in the ongoing series Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English, while the fourth, The Masks of Judith Thompson, is a companion to an earlier Critical Perspectives volume dedicated to Thompson's work. George F. Walker, edited by Harry Lane, like the other Critical Perspectives volumes, is intended to complement collections of plays issued by various Canadian publishers, in this case the anthologies of Walker's work published by Talonbooks, in order, according to the series' general editor, Ric Knowles, to 'facilitate the teaching of Canadian drama and theatre.' Lane's anthology combines scholarship on Walker's work extending from 1978 to 2006 with three interviews with the playwright at different stages of his career. In keeping with the series' approach, most of the material is reprinted, although two of the pieces are published for the first time, including a commissioned article on This Is Wonderland, by Amanda McCoy. The collection begins with some of the earliest critical assessments of Walker's work: Ken Gass's introduction to Walker's Three Plays of 1978 and Chris Johnson's influential 'George F. Walker: B-Movies beyond the Absurd,' first published in 1980. The subsequent articles provide comprehensive coverage of the stages of Walker's career, including a substantial body of criticism of the work prior to the East End Plays, up to his most recent work, Heaven and This Is Wonderland. The articles demonstrate the extensive body of serious critical commentary on Walker, including the work of such prominent critics as Robert Wallace, Ric Knowles, Reid Gilbert, Jerry Wasserman, Denis W. Johnston, and Craig Stewart Walker, and document the gradual articulation of Walker's post-modernism and, more recently, his post-colonialism. These essays also represent a range of theoretical approaches, including Knowles's influential analysis of Walker's 'dramaturgy of the perverse' from The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning, Gilbert's Lacanian post-colonial analysis of two of the Suburban [End Page 422] Motel plays, and Ed Nyman's queer reading of Theatre of the Film Noir. Surprisingly absent, however, is any reference to the casting, which was such an important feature of Walker's early work, notably the contributions of Walker 'regulars' David Bolt and Peter Blais. Only D.A Hadfield contributes performance criticism to this collection, and her focus is on characters in The Power Plays who do not appear in the cast lists. This absence is, presumably, a shortcoming of the available criticism, rather than of the selection process. Lane's collection simultaneously provides a rich and stimulating overview of Walker's work and in-depth analyses of individual plays. Ginny Ratsoy's Theatre in British Columbia, intended as a companion to Playing the Pacific Province: An Anthology of British Columbia Plays, 1967–2000, which she edited with James Hoffman, is at the opposite pole from George F. Walker's focus on an individual playwright. Ratsoy has interpreted her subject broadly, producing an anthology that encompasses many different sub-topics. The articles are arranged chronologically, from 1983 to 2006, but in her introduction Ratsoy identifies alternative groupings: 'broad views,' 'theatre companies,' specific play-wrights and plays, and 'specific communities perform themselves.' Malcolm Page and Denis Johnston give overviews of theatre in the province; Renate Usmiani writes about Tamahnous Theatre and Savage God in the 1960s and 1970s and Bruce Kirkley about Caravan Farm Theatre; Uma Parameswaran writes about South Asian theatre and Sibohan R.K. Barker about Black playwrights; David Diamond gives a 'historical overview' of Headlines Theatre; Margo Kane and R.A. Shiomi write about their experiences as theatre practitioners from 'specific communities'; James...

For most aspiring thespians in Canada, Toronto is the place to be. Montreal may be home to the National Theatre School, but Toronto is where artists flock for work. Boasting more than 10 000 live shows in the past year, Canada’s most populous city is the third largest theatre centre in the English-speaking world, after New York and London.

Access to sources of information has allowed states to use media as a tool of propaganda warfare. It can be observed that within the South Asian theatre, India and Pakistan are involved in propaganda warfare, spreading disinformation campaigns with the aim to disrepute the other's international image. To understand the techniques of propaganda warfare, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's propaganda model provides a befitting conceptual cushion to study propaganda warfare techniques using news media to propagate disinformation. This paper tends to focus on how New Delhi exercises control over news media to portray Pakistan as a failed state, a safe haven for terrorist organizations, installing anti-army information, building war hysteria in South Asia, and targeting Pakistan's stance on Kashmir and Balochistan. The paper argues that Indian news media has become a tool in the hands of the Indian political elite in generating false propaganda against Pakistan.

ABSTRACTThis article provides a summary of major issues that confronted the recipients of an AHRC grant whose aim was to compile a documented history of British South Asian theatre, explaining on the way the decision to publish the outcome of research in two distinct volumes, one primarily historical and the other composed of critical essays.

The Nautanki Theatre Company (Nautanki) has been actively performing drama in Sydney since 2012, and it has been organising the South Asian Theatre Festival since 2016. We study their discourses, cultural politics, and practices; conduct an ethnographic observation of performances; and interview performers, organisers, and survey audiences of the 2019 theatre festival in-depth. We contend that by hosting performances and events, Nautanki creates a space for amicable, intercultural dwellings in which collective identity is forged through cross-cultural dialogue, deliberation, embodied aesthetics, and bottom-up intercultural ethics that shift state-promoted top-down multicultural ideas and policies. Nautanki also instils a sense of longing for cultural novelty, authenticity, and participation, and creates a hybrid cultural ‘South Asian’ community identity, in Sydney.

Staging Black Feminisms: Identity, Politics, Performance. By Lynette Goddard. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. 229. £45 Hb. - Staging New Britain: Aspects of Black and South Asian British Theatre Practice. Edited by Geoffrey V. Davis and Anne Fuchs. Brussels: PIE Peter Lang, 2006. Pp. 350 + 22 illus. £18.10 Pb. - Alternatives within the Mainstream: British Black and Asian Theatres. Edited by Dimple Godiwala. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 415 + 53 illus. £39.99 Hb. - Volume 33 Issue 3

The article is concerned with the four-year Arts and Humanities Research Council project ‘British Asian Theatre', which is being conducted at the University of Exeter, UK. As the project draws to a close, its research fellow, Sarah Dadswell, problematises the issues encountered by the researchers when seeking to piece together a documented history of the formation and development of a discernible British South Asian theatre. Whilst she argues that an historical framework provides a useful context to understand the development and heterogeneity of the British Asian performance culture, she questions the potential ethnic ghettoisation from the mainstream that such a study may imply.

(1980). Total Theatre, Indigenous South Asian Theatre, and Prasad: Some Reflections. South Asian Review: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 46-50.