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Dossier: History, Memory, Event: A Working Archive1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2012

NOBUKO ANAN ,
BISHNUPRIYA DUTT ,
JANELLE REINELT  and
SHRINKHLA SAHAI
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Abstract

This dossier documents a research collaboration between members of the School of Art and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, India, and members of the School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, United Kingdom, between 2008 and 2010. This collaboration was dedicated to a cross-cultural inquiry into methods and topics of performance research that might serve to produce a robust international dialogue capable of approaching performance through multinational lines of inquiry. Participants chose a common topic (History, Memory, Event, and the Politics of Performance 1970–1990), and composed an archive of materials drawn from six nations which was analysed and interrogated by the group. The dossier offers examples from the archive and an account of the way the group processed these artefacts.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , July 2012 , pp. 163 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2012

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References

Notes

2 Our two universities had entered into a formal collaborative relationship with each other as ‘preferred partners’ in 2008.

3 These dates are, from one point of view, quite arbitrary, but from another the list of events generated from those years demonstrates some of the issues of interest to all: the Vietnam War and its aftermath; the Bhopal disaster and the emergence of the environment as a world concern; the rise of the religious right in India, the USA and the UK; and the hegemony of the political right in India (Indira Gandhi), the USA (Ronald Reagan) and the UK (Margaret Thatcher). In addition, the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent ‘end of socialism’ was of critical importance to both partners.

4 At Warwick, the Masters in International Performance Research (MAIPR) trains students to think and work in three modalities: scholarship, curation and creative practice. This Erasmus Mundus course, offered by a consortium of Warwick and the Universities of Amsterdam, Belgrade and Helsinki, structures the curriculum to offer coursework in all three modalities. The JNU/Warwick partnership adopted this concept as useful to its work as featured here.

5 The image can be viewed on line at www.flickr.com/photos/tara-arts

6 The collaborations depended on short independent pieces by two groups improvised separately with only a short finale bringing the two in dialogue. For both Shankar and Subramaniam it also meant a shift from the intricacies of Indian classical to lighter hybrid musical compositions. These performers were creating a new nation's mnemonical cultural identity through music in a form complicit with the branding taking place in the theatrical and dance elements of the large international festivals.

7 Sudeshna Banerjee, ‘Between Violence and Democracy: Bengali Theatre 1965–1975’. This unpublished manuscript combines two conference papers, ‘Violence as Theatre: Bengali Theatre in the Sixties and Seventies Kolkata’ (presented at the Theatre and Violence seminar organized by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, at Udupi, December 2008) and ‘Between Violence and Democracy: Bengali Theatre 1965–75’ (presented at the National Seminar on Cultural Representations as Historical Processes organized by the Department of History, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, March 2010).

8 Quoted in Banerjee, ‘Between Violence and Democracy’, p. 15.

9 Ambedkar, the great lndian jurist and reformer of these communities in the twentieth century, gave them the name Dalit (‘the trampled down’), with which he replaced different traditional caste names to unify the traditionally ‘untouchable’ communities.

10 The Indian government uses this collective term for castes that are economically and socially disadvantaged. The actual term is ‘Other Backward Classes (OBC)’, but we have retained the specification of ‘castes’.

11 The process was documented by Anand Patwardhan in his historic film In the Name of God (Ram Ke Naam), 1992.

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