Rustom Bharucha Research Articles

The Second Wave: Reflections on The Pandemic Through Photography, Performance and Public Culture by Rustom Bharucha (review)

The Second Wave: Reflections on The Pandemic Through Photography, Performance and Public Culture by Rustom Bharucha (review)

Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments ed. by Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha (review)

Performing the Ramayana Tradition: Enactments, Interpretations, and Arguments ed. by Paula Richman and Rustom Bharucha (review)

Virality, Plurality, and the Future of Discourse: A Conversation with Rustom Bharucha

Virality, Plurality, and the Future of Discourse: A Conversation with Rustom Bharucha

Book review: Rustom Bharucha. 2022. The Second Wave: Reflections on the Pandemic through Photography, Performance and Public Culture

Rustom Bharucha. 2022. The Second Wave: Reflections on the Pandemic through Photography, Performance and Public Culture. Calcutta: Seagull Books. 250 pp. Notes, bibliography. ₹599 (paperback—ISBN: 9781803090757).

Ethical and Political Implications of “Performance” in a Rural Cultural Practice: Afro-Colombian Women Singers from the Town of Pogue

This article analyzes a group of Afro-Colombian female singers from Pogue, a rural area of the Colombian Pacific who have reinvented traditional mourning songs (alabaos). Their music and performance refer to the massacres and abuses committed by both the FARC leftist guerrilla group and the rightwing paramilitary in the nearby village of Bojayá. We will not study these traditional mourning songs from an ethnographic perspective, but from the interdisciplinary perspective of performance studies. As such, the aim here is to emphasize the wider political and artistic dimension of the songs vis-à-vis Colombian necropolitics. However, we will still rely on the work of social scientists as we recognize the importance of grounding our analysis on a specific reality. In addition, we find a foothold on Rustom Bharucha’s perspective on the performativity of “terror’ in the Global South, as we think this Indian cultural critic is spot-on when questioning the “war on terror” master narrative resulting from the attacks on September 11, 2001, and looking instead at other areas of the world where “terror” assumes a concrete and visceral dimension in everyday life.

Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. By Rustom Bharucha. London: Routledge, 1993. Pp. 272. £120 Hb; £34.99 Pb.

Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture. By Rustom Bharucha. London: Routledge, 1993. Pp. 272. £120 Hb; £34.99 Pb.

Milija Gluhovic and Jisha Menon, eds., Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics

Set against the backdrop of the current rise of religious fundamentalism and its increasing chokehold on nationalist politics worldwide, the ten chapters in Performing the Secular: Religion, Representation, and Politics, taken together with a substantial foreword by Rustom Bharucha, represent a timely engagement with contemporary concerns in diverse regional contexts.

Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare by Joerg Esleben, Rolf Rohmer and David G. John

Reviewed by: Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare by Joerg Esleben, Rolf Rohmer and David G. John Vera Stegmann Fritz Bennewitz in India: Intercultural Theatre with Brecht and Shakespeare. By Joerg Esleben with Rolf Rohmer and David G. John. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp. xv + 365. Cloth $52.50. ISBN 978-1487500382. The East German theatre director Fritz Bennewitz (1926–1995) had a colorful career and left a remarkably versatile body of work that may not be widely known outside the field of GDR studies. Born in 1926 in Chemnitz, he was drafted in World War II, taken as a prisoner of war by the Americans in 1945, and had to work in a coal mine. After the war, he studied humanities in Leipzig and theater in Weimar; and from 1953–1955 he was a lecturer on Marxist-Leninist aesthetics at the Theater Academy Leipzig. In 1955 he became senior director of the Meiningen Theater, which he [End Page 182] transformed into the second most important Brecht stage in the GDR. In 1960 Bennewitz took over as director of the Deutsches Nationaltheater in Weimar. Beginning in the 1970s, Bennewitz's artistic career was increasingly shaped by international experiences. He directed plays and conducted workshops in Romania, West Germany, the US, Switzerland, Venezuela, and most frequently in India, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. Bennewitz first went to India in 1970 to produce Brecht's Threepenny Opera with students at the National School of Drama in New Delhi. This visit initiated a twenty-four-year-long engagement with Indian theatre, during which he returned regularly to India to produce plays. His long-time involvement with the International Theatre Institute and his role as the institute's vice president since 1984 facilitated these visits. In 1991 Bennewitz received the coveted Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the highest award for performing arts in India, as only the second non-Asian to be granted this honor. His last productions concentrated on Goethe's Faust, in Hindi at the Tata Theater in Mumbai and in German at the Meiningen Theater. He could not complete the latter, since he died of cancer in 1995 and was buried at the historical cemetery in Weimar. Research on Bennewitz's work has recently grown dramatically. The Fritz-Bennewitz-Freundeskreis, founded in January 1996, established the Fritz Bennewitz Archive in Leipzig, which is curated by Rolf Rohmer, one of the contributors to the volume. Canadian scholar David G. John, another contributor to this volume, published Bennewitz, Goethe, Faust: German and Intercultural Stagings in 2012; and Esleben's Fritz Bennewitz in India represents the product of team work and the most advanced state of intercultural Bennewitz scholarship to date, for which prominent Indian scholars, such as the cultural critic Rustom Bharucha, were consulted as well. The book is divided into two parts: the larger first part, about two thirds of the volume, covers Bennewitz's letters about his experiences in India, translated and adapted into English by Esleben and presented with Esleben's contextualized commentary and annotations. Interestingly, these letters are now first presented in English; a publication of the original letters in German never materialized, primarily for financial reasons. Most of these letters were addressed to his friend and confidante Waltraut Mertes. It is a one-sided correspondence; Mertes's responses have not been preserved. The shorter second part of the book contains external sources about Bennewitz: a character sketch by the Indian theater personality K.V. Subbanna; excerpts from Esleben's interviews in India with theater practitioners and scholars Amal Allana, Samik Bandyopadhyay, Akshara K.V., Prasanna, and Anuradha Kapur; a biographical essay by Rolf Rohmer; and an article by David G. John on Bennewitz and Brechtian political theater in India. A complete chronology of Bennewitz's productions in South Asia and his Indian projects in Germany, as well as a glossary of Indian and German theatrical terms, complete this rich and detailed sourcebook. Bennewitz's letters cover a fascinating array of subjects. We learn in detail about [End Page 183] Bennewitz's productions of plays by Brecht, Shakespeare, Goethe, Chekhov, and Volker Braun; we hear about the Indian performances that Bennewitz witnessed, and his...

Genet’s ‘Rituals of the Oppressed’ and the Main Stage: Benedict Andrews’s The Maids at Sydney Theatre Company

Jean Genet’s biographer Edmund White identifies the French playwright as ‘one of the great European poets of the dispossessed’.1 1. Edmund White, Genet (London: Vintage, 1993), 121. Rustom Bharucha...

Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini

Reviewed by: Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage by Sara Soncini George Potter FORMS OF CONFLICT: CONTEMPORARY WARS ON THE BRITISH STAGE. By Sara Soncini. Exeter Performance Studies series. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2015; pp. 314. How theatre responds to war—and particularly the War on Terror—has garnered much critical attention since 9/11, whether it be questioning what dramatic structure such responses take, asking if there have been appropriate or sufficient responses, or examining the artistic choices that translate historical events into political theatre. Notable among recent books on the topic are Jenny Hughes's Performance in a Time of Terror: Critical Mimesis and the Age of Uncertainty (2011), Jenny Spencer's edited collection Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (2013), and Rustom Bharucha's Terror and Performance (2014). Sara Soncini's Forms of Conflict: Contemporary Wars on the British Stage enters these discussions with an emphasis on the formal aspects of theatre and the degree to which they are able to respond to modern warfare, with a focus on the United Kingdom. Specifically, Soncini argues that there is "a connection between modes of conflict and modes of representation," and sets out to explore "theatre's capacity for providing some interpretive means to enlarge our understanding of the new patterns and mechanisms of conflict" (xiii). Soncini intriguingly explores these concerns not only within the tradition of British theatre, but also within a continental intellectual and interpretive context less often considered in English-language criticism. From framing contemporary global wars as moving beyond the ideas of Carl von Clausewitz to drawing on French and Italian theorists, philosophers, and literary critics, Soncini deploys these [End Page 433] theoretical traditions to make a convincing case that we have transitioned from a period of clearly delineated conflicts to war without clear temporal or geographic boundaries, with transnational media, and with disassociation from the violence of war. Furthermore, she claims that the "British stage has shown a remarkable readiness to take up this call [to respond to these new wars] and re-examine existing categories whereby we frame and understand violence and war" (8). Given the growth of British documentary theatre during the period under discussion (1991–2011), Soncini devotes about half of Frames of Conflict to explore new forms of representations within this genre. As she writes, "[i]t is not surprising then that 9/11, a historical event which consolidated and above all made apparent the growing theatricalization of warfare, should also have acted as a watershed in the history of documentary drama" (78). While this emphasis on documentary theatre specifically within the context of war offers Soncini an angle distinct from that of earlier studies of the genre, her focus on widely discussed work by David Hare and Richard Norton-Taylor leads her to familiar ground in arguing, for example, with regard to Norton-Taylor's Called to Account about the Chilcot inquiry, that "the one truth that audiences came out with at the end of the Tricycle performance was that there is no such thing as 'hard' evidence" (99). This focus on documentary theatre is bookended by two other concerns: a chapter exploring the depiction of war in postdramatic theatre, and a discussion of the representation of translation in contemporary drama. In the former, Soncini juxtaposes contemporary drama against previous works, such as Sarah Kane's Blasted, with its clear parallels to the Balkan Wars in the 1990s and spectacular acts of stage violence, ranging from rape, to mutilation, to cannibalism. Soncini provocatively argues that plays like Caryl Churchill's Far and Away and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? remove the iconography of war from the British stage, which also forms an interesting lead-in to the discussion of documentary drama, which tends to stage inquiries rather than war itself. Some of the most engaging interpretations of well-known plays come in the last chapter, when she discusses acts of translation onstage. Within this context, Soncini argues that Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul might be viewed as a work about failed translations, both in Kushner's own linguistic limitations and the play's use of "translation as a structuring...

Migrant Bodies, Flowing Rituals: The Performance Art of Violeta Luna

This article focuses on one of Violeta Luna's pieces on undocumented migration to the US (Body Parted/Cuerpo Partido 2008), as well as two works dealing with Mexico's current state of emergency: Requiem por una tierra perdida/Requiem for a Lost Land (2010-2014) and Virgenes y Diosas/Virgins and Goddesses (2014-2015). In order to explore what these works can tell us about our present, I rely mainly on contemporary expansions of the concept of biopolitics first advanced by Michel Foucault. Additionally, I find a foothold in cultural critics such as Ana Longoni, Rustom Bharucha, and others who have questioned the epistemologies on art and politics prevalent in Western art history. Since context is key for analyzing politically engaged art, I also refer to specific historical events in connection to Luna's pieces.

Animating the intercultural: Revisiting Peter Brook’s practice and the somatics of performance

Abstract My aim in this article is to frame Brook more clearly against historical parameters that affected the understanding and practice of theatre from the 1960s and to reassess to what extent his multiculturalism looks different from a twenty-first-century perspective. Brook’s work up to and beyond The Mahabharata occurs in the context of post-1960 developments and attitudes to science, spirituality, aesthetics and society. During the same period, there are major developments in stage languages and embodied practices. These dimensions manifest pragmatically as a specific set of adaptations of what performers do, of the nature of the relationship between performers and receivers, and of the understanding of the nature and function of theatre and performance. The article looks at Brook’s focus on the reception of his work and on what he conceived as the role of theatre in providing ‘extended’ experience; and at aspects of the practice of Brook and Barba with actors, which work around reduction and interruption and aim to put them in contact with the initial phases of production. It suggests that this work specifically targets the zone ‘beyond’ acculturation and habitus, verbal and physical. The article also revisits concerns, largely articulated by Rustom Bharucha, about the sociopolitical and economic parameters of Brook’s work in India.

Who’s Pulling the Strings? The Politics of Puppetry in the Théâtre du Soleil’s Tambours sur la digue

Since Rustom Bharucha’s Theatre and the World1 1. Rustom Bharucha, Theatre and the World: Performance and the Politics of Culture (London: Routledge, 1993 [1990]). drew sharp attention to the probl...

Terror and Performance by Rustom Bharucha

Terror and Performance by Rustom Bharucha

Teatro Travieso and Creación Colectiva: Challenging the “Devising” Paradigm through Intercultural Performance in Lima, Peru

Teatro Travieso and Creación Colectiva: Challenging the “Devising” Paradigm through Intercultural Performance in Lima, Peru Jimmy A. Noriega (bio) Introduction In summer 2012, I undertook one of my most exciting (and riskiest) theatre projects to date: I traveled with six students from the United States to study and create theatre for five weeks in Lima, Peru. This essay draws on that experience and describes the processes, motivations, challenges, and forms used to create Encuentro: Peru!! (Encounter: Peru!! ), the one-hour production based on our collective investigation. It also engages with the notion of intercultural performance and the limits of working from primarily Anglo models of devised theatre. From my own perspective, precisely because we were working in Latin America, it was necessary to avoid the words devised or devising, as these descriptors carry with them a history and set of values forged from a colonial gaze that often sees the Global South as a receptor for European and US artistic innovation rather than as a joint creator/innovator in theatrical practice and theory. Instead, I turned to the Latin American process of creación colectiva (collective creation) as a method and aesthetic for creating cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary theatre work. This experience was more than just an international exchange. As Claudia Tatinge Nascimento notes, “the intercultural stage has served both as a mirror and as a laboratory where questions and new strategies for cultural border crossing are brought to the public’s attention. But before these possibilities are exposed to the spectators, two important phases in the creation of intercultural performance take place: training and rehearsals” (7). This essay recounts those phases as they took place in our process of creación colectiva and opens up avenues for rethinking how actor training and artistic collaboration can occur through an intercultural encounter. Within the field there is a long history of engagement with intercultural performance and theory. Both Bertolt Brecht and Jerzy Grotowski experimented with cross-cultural themes in their performance practices and philosophies. More specific to Latin America, Antonin Artaud visited Mexico in 1936 and became obsessed with the indigenous populations and the peyote ceremonies of the Tarahumara, which he wrote about in his book The Peyote Dance. It was the success of Peter Brook’s 1985 Mahabharata, however, that arguably propelled larger interest in intercultural theatre and opened up international networks and funding opportunities for more cross-cultural collaborations. Other well-known examples of interculturalism in theatre include the work of Ariane Mnouchkine and Theatre du Soleil, Eugenio Barba and Odin Teatret, and the work of Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki and US director Anne Bogart. Of course, none of these examples are without their criticisms. As Rustom Bharucha warns: “In the best of all possible worlds, interculturalism could be viewed as a ‘two-way street,’ based on a mutual reciprocity of needs. But in actuality, where it is the West that extends its domination to cultural matters, this ‘two-way street’ could more accurately be described as a ‘dead-end’” (2). Numerous scholars and artists have written about the dynamics involved in intercultural [End Page 207] theatre, offering praise and critique of the practice.1 Despite the challenges and opposition to these types of works, at least for the time being, it seems like intercultural theatre is here to stay. So how did I position myself, a Latino from the US–Mexico border, within this history and what motivated me to take on such a daunting task? I usually spend my summers in Latin America conducting research and working with artists. At the time, I was preparing for my fifth visit to Peru. As I made plans, one of my Peruvian collaborators asked: “Why don’t you direct a play for us this time instead of just coming to watch them?” She offered help finding me a stage and assisting with advertising, but said that I was responsible for everything else (including finding the actors). I knew immediately that I wanted to develop an original work, but the collaborative and open process of creating a new piece requires a dedicated group of performers willing to immerse themselves completely into the project. This would be essential for a...

Terror and Performance by Rustom Bharucha (review)

Reviewed by: Terror and Performance by Rustom Bharucha Prateek TERROR AND PERFORMANCE. By Rustom Bharucha. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2014. 250 pp. London: Routledge. Paper, $39.95; cloth, $125.00. The literature on terror has grown substantially since 9/11. Most of these books either reinterpret the concept of terror in the light of American war on terror or critically examine terror in the wake of discursive readings of critics such as Edward Said. Surprisingly, both readings underline the Muslim and Judeo-Christian divide. By rethinking terror in the wake of Hobbes’s idea of war of “every man against every man,” Rustom Bharucha’s book Terror and Performance offers a much awaited perspective beyond the Muslim and Judeo-Christian world to the existing scholarship on terror in the field of theatre and performance studies. Besides being a provocation for the emerging scholarship on terror and performance, the book offers a reengagement with real people who were lost in a rigid dichotomy between subject and object. Above all, in writing terror using the parlance of performance studies, the book, intelligibly, puts humans at the center and challenges state-centric approaches on terror in which humans are often presented as war machines. The book’s content defies partisan feeling that has been running high against the Muslim world after September 11, 2001, by questioning lopsided views of anti-terror political think tanks. In the process of revealing the “undiscovered” contours of terror in continents ranging from Asia to Africa, Bharucha constantly engages with and expands the discourse of his theoretical predecessors such as Tzvetan Todorov, Paul Virilio, Talal Asad, and Mahmood Mamdani. We are informed that the initial provocation of the book is located in an uncanny accident in the Manila bar, which was the actual site of the Genet [End Page 681] play directed by Bharucha. Three days after the last production of the play, the bar was consumed in a blaze and became a burning site for Bharucha to question the nexus of terror and performance. Although Bharucha has registered this connection before in an essay titled “Genet in Manila: Reclaiming the Chaos of Our Times” (2003), the book provides a larger canvas to “think through it [terror]” (p. 2). In this process of considering, Bharucha destabilizes all hegemonic definitions of terror and frees it from its most circulated definition as premeditated and politically motivated violence. The introduction makes it clear that the book does not address terror at a purely dramaturgical level of theatrical representation but that “it prioritizes those instances of terror which are unscripted, unplanned, undetermined” (p. 20). Following this argument, Bharucha reads performance not as a “rehearsed, time-and-space-bound event framed within the cultural norms of civic institutions like state theatres,” but as an event “linked to social interactions, behaviours, strategies, deceptions, manipulations and negotiations of terror in the public sphere” (p. 21). This reading of performance by Bharucha expands the spectrum of performance studies and makes it go beyond its conventional focus. Although the book is primarily a performance studies text, chapter 1 briefly engages with the critical methods of theatre studies. Using the vocabulary of theatre studies, Bharucha analyzes the writings of Genet and Artaud, and reads them in the context of brutality and torture. The chapter explores the politics of Genet by reading Genet’s writings against the backdrop of his love for the Palestinian struggle and his defense of the Baader-Meinhof terrorists. Explicating the writings of Artaud, Bharucha rewrites the dynamics of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, by rereading him as “a victim of medical terror whose life was destroyed by the regulatory mechanisms of clinical psychiatry” (p. 53). Over the course of 250 pages, the book, divided into four chapters, explores terror in all its implications: personal, public, real, imaginary, voluntary, and involuntary. One of the best examples of this engagement is seen in chapter 1, in which Bharucha rewrites debates connected to 9/11 in the light of his own production of Genet’s The Maids in Manila. The chapter beautifully highlights the confluence of real/voluntary and imaginary/involuntary as the production of The Maids overlapped with the actual protests against the corrupt regime of...

Terror and Performance. By Rustom Bharucha. New York: Routledge, 2014; 236 pp. $125.00 cloth, $44.95 paper, e-book available

September 01 2015 Terror and Performance. By Rustom Bharucha. New York: Routledge, 2014; 236 pp. $125.00 cloth, $44.95 paper, e-book available Branislav Jakovljević Branislav Jakovljević Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Branislav Jakovljević Online ISSN: 1531-4715 Print ISSN: 1054-2043 ©2015 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2015 TDR/The Drama Review (2015) 59 (3 (227)): 169–172. https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_r_00480 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Branislav Jakovljević; Terror and Performance. By Rustom Bharucha. New York: Routledge, 2014; 236 pp. $125.00 cloth, $44.95 paper, e-book available. TDR/The Drama Review 2015; 59: 3 (227), 169–172. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_r_00480 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsTDR/The Drama Review Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. ©2015 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Translation as intervention: Sambhu Mitra's Putul Khela (A doll's house)

For post-colonial writers and theorists, translation is a highly political activity. As Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi say, “translation is a highly manipulative activity” and it “involves all kinds of stages in ... [the] process of [“intercultural”] transfer across linguistic and cultural boundaries” (1999, 2). They hold that the “the common translatorial temptation [is] to erase much that is culturally specific, to sanitize much that is comparatively odorous” (ibid). Rustom Bharucha terms translation as “intervention”. This article considers the Bengali translation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in 1958 by one of India’s theatre legends, Sambhu Mitra (1915-1997). The paper reads Mitra’s translation as “intervention”, studying it at the linguistic level. It contends that Mitra pronounces his voice by intervening in the translation through making careful choices which include, among other issues, his choice of the title as well as his handling of Ibsen’s swear-words and special words.

Effects of Chinese opera on the reproductions of Ibsen's plays

As part of a globalized phenomenon, the reproductions of Ibsen’s plays on the Chinese theatrical stage increasingly focus upon the exploration and expansion of new cultural forms, as Patrice Pavis defines interculturalism as “grasping the dialectical of exchanges of civilities between cultures”. However, how do we evaluate the effectiveness of the many “intercultural” productions that surround us today?I attempt to answer this question by comparing two Chinese reproductions of Ibsen’s plays that employ elements of Chinese opera on varying scales. The first one is a total transformation of Hedda Gabler into a Hangzhou yue opera form, Xin Bi Tian Gao (Aspirations Higher than the Sky, 心比天高) in 2006. As part of the yue opera tradition, Hedda Gabler was staged in an all-female cast. The second one is a fragmented insertion of a Peking opera excerpt into the staging of A Doll’s House by the National Experimental Theatre of China in 1998. One of the highlights of the play is a Norwegian actress, who plays Nora, singing and dancing a short Peking opera excerpt, thus replacing the tarantella dance in the original play. Contextualising the multiple perspectives towards interculturalism by Patrice Pavis, Richard Schechner and Rustom Bharucha, I aim to explore how the appropriation of Chinese opera in such performances might strengthen or weaken the reciprocal flows between the source and target cultures in Pavis’s “hourglass model”, and whether the initial attempt of revitalising both Chinese and Western art forms has backfired and misproduced Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect directed at the contemporary audience.

Um Diálogo às Margens do Ganges: Gordon Craig e Ananda Coomaraswamy

RESUMO O artigo analisa o diálogo entre Edward Gordon Craig e Ananda Coomaraswamy, historiador de arte indiana, como ponto inaugural do universo investigativo conhecido como teatro intercultural e as consequências desse diálogo no pensamento do diretor inglês, desafiando sua criação do Über-marionette. A partir desse diálogo, o texto apresenta a postura precavida de Gordon Craig sobre as trocas entre tradições culturais. Problematiza-se as idiossincrasias inerentes a estes intercâmbios, que povoaram as pesquisas ao longo do século XX e início do XXI. Exemplifica-se o aspecto cíclico do debate, resgatando o embate entre Rustom Bharucha, crítico severo das tentativas de interculturalismo ocidental, e Richard Schechner, um dos mentores do teatro intercultural.