WORLD THEATRE DAY MESSAGE by Mallika Sarabhai
27 March 2022
I had just spent three years and close to Rs 4 crores on redoing our amphi-theatre, Natarani, a rebuilding necessitated by the city taking the land that housed the stage.
It was 2018 and we launched our season in the new theatre. That season, and the next, were riotous, energetic, fun, with theatre and dance festivals, shows from 25 countries, talks and workshops.
Then came March 23rd 2020. The nation was locked down. The rest of the season was cancelled. Money was refunded. Money was lost. Colour and sound bled to an eerie stillness. The peacocks and pea hens took over the campus, strutting across the now empty stage. For the first time in 40 years I was neither performing, nor presenting.
And on, the lockdown stretched.
My artistic director, Yadavan Chandran, and I are the only two who live on the Darpana campus. We had at our disposal, all our musical instruments, all our video equipment, all our costumes, to play with. If we could muster the energy amidst the gloom and tragedy.
And energy we certainly mustered. How could performance be reinvented for unseen audiences? How could they be enhanced by creating videos for a virtual space? We explored this and created six new dance and performance pieces.
And then something wonderful happened. The League of Theatre Women based in the US, of which I am a member, decided to organize a series of performance based webinars, in a series called Theatre From The Streets. It aimed at giving performers the opportunity to create three to five minute pieces that drew attention to a problem or issue that they felt passionately about and wanted to bring to the world’s attention. Three countries were chosen, Lebanon-Gaza, Venezuela and India. Each had four Sundays to run the webinars, with three performances being presented each Sunday, followed by moderated conversations with people who had registered. I was invited to curate the Indian month.
I started getting in touch with artists I admired. In the current climate of self censorship and the blatantly misuse of the law of sedition to silence voices that question the government and its policies, I wondered how many artists would dare speak of issues like the oxygen crises, the migrants walking home, violence, divisiveness, environmental damage, rape and more.
Just as I feared, many artists expressed their inability to participate, in a variety of polite ways. Others jumped into it.
I have been very disturbed by the curbing of our right of free speech over the last few years. Many artist and activist friends languish in jails for no reason other than following our constitutional right to freedom of expression. I wanted to create around that. Serendipitously I came across a poem by Swaraj Bir Singh, in Hindi, addressed to the judge presiding in the case of Pinjra Tod activist Natasha Narwal, who had asked for bail to visit her ailing father. On a Saturday the judge declined to give an order, saying he would give it on Monday. On Sunday Natasha’s father passed away.
Swaraj’s poem gave vent to the anguish at the failure of our judicial system, and mirrored the anger, outrage and helplessness that I felt. I created a movement vocabulary for it and read it in the original Hindi. Yadavan directed and filmed it. The process of creating it was both cathartic and anguish generating.
Theatre and the other arts are an incomparable language to draw society to its core, to mirror society so that it finds its humaneness. The challenge is to do this while still creating pieces that have an audience, artful pieces that couch their core idea with audience gripping elements.
At a moment in history where the very idea of India recedes by everyday acts of omission and commission, it is up to us to search for values and truth within ourselves, and then to find the courage and artistry to enrich an audience.
We live in times where the conscience of human beings has all but disappeared. Yet without a conscience we are no different from animals. As artists we need to plumb our own depths to rekindle our conscience, to find generosity and caring in ourselves, and then to use our work to make the world a kinder, gentler, more caring and aware place.
Mallika Sarabhai is one of India’s leading choreographers and dancers, in constant demand as a soloist and with her own dance company, Darpana, creating and performing both classical and contemporary works. She has a PhD in organisational behaviour and has been the co-director of the prestigious arts institution, Darpana Academy of Performing Arts, for nearly 30 years. Always an activist for societal education and women’s empowerment, Mallika began using her work for change. In 1989 she created the first of her hard-hitting solo theatrical works, Shakti: The Power of Women. Since then Mallika has created numerous stage productions which have raised awareness, highlighted crucial issues and advocated change, several of which productions have toured internationally as well as throughout India.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WORLD THEATRE DAY MESSAGE by Peter Sellars
As the world hangs by the hour and by the minute on a daily drip feed of news reportage, may I
invite all of us, as creators, to enter our proper scope and sphere and perspective of epic time, epic
change, epic awareness, epic reflection, and epic vision? We are living in an epic period in human
history and the deep and consequential changes we are experiencing in human beings’ relations to
themselves, to each other, and to nonhuman worlds are nearly beyond our abilities to grasp, to
articulate, to speak of, and to express.
We are not living in the 24-hour news cycle, we are living at the edge of time. Newspapers and
media are completely unequipped and unable to deal with what we are experiencing.
Where is the language, what are the moves, and what are the images that might allow us to
comprehend the deep shifts and ruptures that we are experiencing? And how can we convey the
content of our lives right now not as reportage but experience?
Theater is the artform of experience.
In a world overwhelmed by vast press campaigns, simulated experiences, ghastly prognostications,
how can we reach beyond the endless repeating of numbers to experience the sanctity and infinity
of a single life, a single ecosystem, a friendship, or the quality of light in a strange sky? Two years of
COVID-19 have dimmed people’s senses, narrowed people’s lives, broken connections, and put us
at a strange ground zero of human habitation.
What seeds need to be planted and replanted in these years, and what are the overgrown, invasive
species that need to be fully and finally removed? So many people are on edge. So much violence is
flaring, irrationally or unexpectedly. So many established systems have been revealed as structures
of ongoing cruelty.
Where are our ceremonies of remembrance? What do we need to remember? What are the rituals
that allow us at last to reimagine and begin to rehearse steps that we have never taken before?
The theater of epic vision, purpose, recovery, repair, and care needs new rituals. We don’t need to
be entertained. We need to gather. We need to share space, and we need to cultivate shared space.
We need protected spaces of deep listening and equality.
Theater is the creation on earth of the space of equality between humans, gods, plants, animals,
raindrops, tears, and regeneration. The space of equality and deep listening is illuminated by hidden
beauty, kept alive in a deep interaction of danger, equanimity, wisdom, action, and patience.
In The Flower Ornament Sutra, Buddha lists ten kinds of great patience in human life. One of the most
powerful is called Patience in Perceiving All as Mirages. Theater has always presented the life of this
world as resembling a mirage, enabling us to see through human illusion, delusion, blindness, and
denial with liberating clarity and force.
We are so certain of what we are looking at and the way we are looking at it that we are unable to
see and feel alternative realities, new possibilities, different approaches, invisible relationships, and
timeless connections.
This is a time for deep refreshment of our minds, of our senses, of our imaginations, of our
histories, and of our futures. This work cannot be done by isolated people working alone. This is
work that we need to do together. Theater is the invitation to do this work together.
Thank you deeply for your work.
Peter Sellars, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA) is an opera, theatre and festival director who has gained international renown for his ground-breaking and transformative interpretations of classics, advocacy of 20th century and contemporary music, and collaborative projects with an extraordinary range of creative and performing artists. His work illuminates the power of art as a means of moral expression and social action.
He has staged operas at the Dutch National Opera, English National Opera, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opéra National de Paris and the Salzburg Festival, among others.
