Pakistani Muslim Theatre at Home and Abroad: A Critical Manifesto for a Feminist Homecoming

Abstract

Through my involvement as both actor/performer and scholar/ academic with Pakistani alternative theatre groups since the late 1980s, and with Compagnie Faim de Siècle, a fringe theatre collective based in New York City and Paris, since the late 1990s, I have arrived at a set of questions and possible answers, however incomplete, which have led me to conceptualise a Manifesto for Pakistani/Multinational/Muslim Feminist Performance. Such a manifesto locates itself in the interstitial space between the ‘home’ locale of Pakistan and Pakistani theatre workers, and the translocation of this ‘home’ ‘abroad’, typified by Compagnie Faim de Siècle. The Compagnie’s artistic director, Ibrahim Quraishi, and I, a founding member and performer, are both of Pakistani origin.1 What counts as ‘feminist’ performance in terms of politics and aesthetics in local and transnational contexts is different and complex enough to confound our understanding of women’s relationship to Islam, and yet both locales create feminist possibilities for a manifesto for social change.KeywordsMuslim WomanPakistani WomanPakistani OriginFeminist InterventionDance FormThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.