Theatre

Royal Fabrics: The Politics of Apparel in Tudor England as Reflected in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy

Film & Media Studies/Shakespeare/Theatre/V16N22024

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Masum Janid¹ & Anjali Daimari²
¹Research Scholar, Department of English, Gauhati University.
²Professor, Department of English, Gauhati University

^{Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 16, Issue 2, 2024. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v16n2.11g}
^{Full-Text PDF Issue Access}

Abstract:

Costumes played a significant role at the royal courts of King Henry VIII, and courtiers maintained scrupulous cautiousness regarding their presentability and dress. Theatricality is a persistent trope in Mantel’s Neo-Tudor novels, often exercised through strategically displayed extravagant fabrics. This study interprets the clothing culture at the courts of King Henry VIII, as represented in the three Wolf Hall novels. As social classes became increasingly stratified during the Renaissance, the bourgeoisie distinguished themselves from the commoners and sustained inclusivity into the monarchical elite by enacting strategic theatricality. This paper demonstrates how the theatricality of magnificence was performed through the politics of apparel, ornamentation, and distinguished fashion. Referring to works by John Matusiak, Tracy Borman, Maria Hayward, and Elizabeth Currie, this study argues that fashion was at the core of Royal Tudor governance, and Mantel utilises this trope to camouflage or amplify the magnitude of a political persona. In the context of the Tudor Sumptuary Laws, this paper also analyses how Mantel used dress as a motif of theatricality to demonstrate class segregation during sixteenth-century England. The gendering of clothes and its political ramifications shall be another issue tackled by this paper, focusing on the sartorial choices of the characters of Anne Boleyn, Katherine, and Jane Seymour.

Keywords: Fashion, Gender, Tudors, Cromwell, Sumptuary Laws, Virginity, Wolf Hall.

Conflicts of Interest: The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
Funding: No funding was received for this research.
Article History: Received: 28 February 2024. Revised: 30 April 2024. Accepted: 03 June 2024. First published: 06 June 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 by the author/s.
License: License Aesthetix Media Services, India. Distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Published by: Aesthetix Media Services, India
Citation: Janid, M. & Daimari, A. (2024). Royal Fabrics: The Politics of Apparel in Tudor England as Reflected in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy. Rupkatha Journal 16:2. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v16n2.11g

Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Plays into Assamese Farce: A Study on Historical Perspective

Assamese Literature/North East Literature & Culture/Shakespeare/Theatre/Translation/V14N2

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Mohammad Rezaul Karim
Department of English, College of Science & Humanities, Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia. ORCID: 0000-0002-8178-8260. Email: karimrezaul318@gmail.com

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–14. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne13

First published: June 20, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Abstract

William Shakespeare has always been unanimously the most accepted model to follow for the writers of tragedy, comedy and other types of dramas. He enjoyed a great fascination in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth in India and almost all his works were translated to or adapted into different languages. As the Assamese writers did not lag behind in this respect too, they were inspired to translate and adapt Shakespeare in 1887 starting with The Comedy of Errors as Bhramaranga in Assamese. In this article, the researcher aims to examine the available Assamese translations and adaptations of Shakespearean comic plays and studied how far they contributed to the growth and development of Assamese comedy in particular and modern Assamese drama in general. With the help of the comparative method of analysis, the researcher found that Assamese comedy specially farces and the complete pre-independent Assamese dramatic literature have been impacted by the dramas of Shakespeare.

Keywords: Assamese drama, comedy, farce, Shakespeare, translation, adaptation

Introduction

Farce or Prahasana was a popular dramatic type in ancient Indian literature. It was a “one-act drama intended to excite laughter” (Wilson, 1971, p. 18). The subject was the playwright’s invention and dealt basically with the pranks and the tumults of the shallow dramatis personae of every kind. Thus, the Sanskrit Prahasana is much like the European farce, but it cannot be said that the former had any influence on our modern farce writers. We have no records of any farce being written in pre-British Assam, either in Sanskrit or in Assamese. Medieval Assamese drama was intended to please and edify, but it does not present a single instance of farce. In other words, Assamese literature does not have any tradition of writing farce. The writing of farces, like other types of drama, was undoubtedly a product of western influence, which came directly through English and also indirectly through Bengali. “During the early years of the growth of modern Bengali stage farces were more powerful and lively than serious drama: the heat and excitement that arose from the conflict between the old and the new in the society are nowhere more in evidence than in these plays” (Ghosh, 1968, p. 471). The Assamese students studying at Calcutta during the latter half of the nineteenth century, who read Bengali plays and also saw many of them performed, and who later became playwrights themselves, undoubtedly imbibed much of the art of farce writing from Bengali. Since the Assamese society of the time presented almost similar phenomena, it was not difficult for them to write farcical pieces like those in Bengali. It is also noteworthy that even in Shakespearean drama it was the lighter comedies almost verging on the farce that first attracted our earlier playwrights. All this shows that the nineteenth century and the earlier decades of the twentieth were congenial for farces and light satirical comedies rather than serious social drama – the audience wanted them, and the writers not only found the material for such plays but also models to follow.

Shakespeare enjoyed a great vogue in India in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth, and almost all his works were translated to or adapted into different Indian languages during the period. The Indian student of Shakespeare knew quite well that the people, who were experiencing a renaissance in every walk of life, would appreciate the works of Shakespeare with their emphasis on such ideals as belief in the greatness of man, patriotism, nationalism, and the Renaissance craving for a greater and fuller life. So, they undertook the great task of translating Shakespeare into their own languages, and as a result of this, the languages of India abound in translations and adaptations of Shakespeare.

The Assamese writer, too, did not lag behind in this respect, and since 1887 the year the first adaptation of The Comedy of Errors was brought out, there has been quite a good number of translations and adaptations of Shakespeare, some of which, unfortunately, have not encountered with the audience till today. The Assamese literature seems to be deficient in the main types of comic dramas. In the period we are dealing with, the type which is predominant is farce. Satyendranath Sarma stated that “the moral decay in the social life of the Assamese during the nineteenth century provided sufficient materials for writing farce and light comedy” (2015, p. 302). There are exceptions no doubt but seem to approximate in tone to farce when we examine its features closely. In this study, an attempt is being made to examine the available translations and adaptations of Shakespearean comic plays and to see how far, if at all, they have contributed to the growth and development of modern Assamese drama. The researcher has endeavoured to find out how much the Assamese dramatists have received from Shakespeare and what the responses of the Assamese dramatists to Shakespeare are.

A systematic and critical study of the subject appeared when Priyaranjan Sen brought out his work, Western Influence in Bengali Literature, where the writer has examined the Western impact on different branches of Bengali literature as well as the various channels through which this influence penetrated Bengal. Another work on the subject is Harendra Mohan Das Gupta’s Studies in Western Influence on 19^th Century Bengali Poetry (1859 – 1887), in which the author examines in detail the historical background of the new influence. Outside Bengali literature, Syyad Abdul Latif’s work, Influence of English on Urdu Literature, deserves special mention. Another important work on the subject is The History and Culture of the Indian People, Vol. X, Part II, by R.C. Majumdar deals with the subject of Western influence on Indian thought and culture as well as the Indian people’s reaction to it. Dr Satyabrata Rout in his article Indianizing Shakespeare: Adaptations and Performances studied that “the socio-cultural milieu of India fusing with the tradition of West, often creates an ‘Indianized Shakespeare’” (2016, p. 1). Parvin Sultana in her research article Indigenising Shakespeare: A Study of Maqbool and Omkara observed that the literary world of Shakespeare has gone beyond the limits of the time and space and has been predominating the Indian literary sphere for about two centuries now (2014, p. 52). In fact, this subject has attracted diverse critics and historians in recent years, and it is neither possible nor necessary to mention all the works done so far, nor to speak of such publications in the vernacular languages.

Modern Assamese literature, like Bengali or any other literature of modern India, is largely a product of Western influence. This influence has permeated all the branches of this literature, including drama, on which the influence of Shakespeare has been so profound that the new drama that came into being in 1857 with Gunabhiram Barua’s Ram Navami has hardly any direct link with pre-British Assamese drama which has a four-century old history. Pona Mahanta has undergone his research, Western Influence on Modern Assamese Drama (1985) and studied the western influences on Assamese drama, however, he has not centrally focused on William Shakespeare. Maheswar Neog and Satyendranath Sarma have touched on the subject in a general sort of way in their books, Asamiya Sahityar Ruprekha (1970) and Asamiya Natya Sahitya (1973) respectively, but as the titles indicate, these books are concerned more with the growth and development of Assamese drama than with Shakespearean influence. Karim and Mondal (2019) studied the influence of William Shakespeare over pre-independent Assamese tragedy and the style and technique of Assamese drama. A few articles have also been written on the influence of Western dramaturgy especially Shakespearean over the Assamese dramatic atmosphere by Dr Dayananda Pathak, Dr Rajbongshi, Rajbongshi and Boro, Dr Paramananda Rajbongshi, Smriti Rekha Handique, Sailen Bharali, Basanta Kumar Bhattacharjee, etc. limiting their area of the subject in one or two dramas only. Thus, the question of Shakespearean influence on modern Assamese comedy since 1887 can be a subject of very close and careful study.

As the subject of the study is comparative, usually the method of comparative analysis is observed throughout the investigation. The study is based on both the primary and secondary sources and chiefly the technical devices of pre-independent Assamese dramatists are examined. The importance of the stories and events of the Assamese dramas have been emphasized sometimes and citations to the text of the dramas are drawn up in some cases. The researcher endeavoured to furnish other references to the works of other authors to rationalize the statements and sometimes examples are provided to augment the hypothesis to establish the study more logical and reasonable.

Ratnadhar Barua, Gunjanan Barua, Ghanshyam Barua and Ramakanta Barkakati

The first Shakespearean play to be done in Assamese was The Comedy of Errors. Bhramaranga (1887). The Assamese version of the play is rather an adaptation than a translation as the story is wholly recast to an Indianized background. The four students studying at Calcutta, Ratnadhar Barua, Gunjanan Barua, Ghanshyam Barua and Ramakanta Barkakati who did this pioneering work, wrote in their preface:

There are many difficulties in translating Shakespeare into Assamese. In the first place, Shakespeare’s language and thought are so difficult that let alone a foreigner even British scholars have not been able to determine their precise meaning. Besides, it is not easy to transfer the thoughts, customs and behavior of an alien people to an adapted version, and so something of these has to be left out. While we have tried all our best to maintain the poet’s thoughts and ideas without loss, we have sometimes been constrained to change even some ideas of the great poet in order to fit them into the changed background. We have been very careful to see that the poetic quality of the piece is not destroyed, yet we do not dare to say that it is not strained since we have undertaken to translate it. (1887, p. 1)

We have seen that farces and light comedies were very popular during the initial years of the Western impact, and it was in keeping with the literary temperament of the time that the first Shakespearean play to be rendered into Assamese was The Comedy of Errors. In The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare does not seem to have any philosophy to propound, nor is he serious in tone or intention. An atmosphere of fun and gaiety pervades the whole play, which does not seem to belong to any particular place or time. What matters most here are the different situations in which confusions are created leading to the hilarious fun, and once the translator is able to create similar situations in the new background that he adopts, the rest of his work becomes easy. This is what our translators have done, or at least tried to do. They have discarded the blank verse in favour of prose in order to make it down-to-earth and appealing to their audience. The names of the dramatis personae are aptly chosen: Solinus, Duke of Ephesus, becomes Ajitsimha, king of Mayapur; Aegeon, merchant of Syracuse, becomes Dhanbar, a merchant of Kamrup, while the two pairs of twins are the two Niranjans (one is Mayapuriya, the other is Kampuriya, meaning from Mayapur and from Kampur respectively). Ephesus, the scene of the original story, becomes Mayapur in the Assamese version, which is certainly an apt name for a place where such incidents happen. (The word ‘Mayapur’ literally means ‘a city of magic’). Pinch, the school, is transformed into a village quack so that he fits well into the local situation. All the female characters except Luce have been retained, and their names are appropriately chosen: Sumanthira, Malati, Tara, Sonpahi, and all these names sound very Assamese indeed.

The use of colloquial prose in the dialogue throughout the play, except in the incantation blabbed out by the quack, Takaru Bej, lends more local colour to the story. The language is so nicely colloquilized and the sentiments localized that the translated piece reads almost like an original work. One example alone will prove this point. Pinch, thinking that Antipholus of Ephesus, is possessed by the devil, takes hold of his hand utters:

I charge thee, Satan, hous’d within this man.
To yield possession to my holy prayers,
And to thy state of darkness hie thee staright
I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven.
(The Comedy of Errors, Act IV, Scene iv)

In the Assamese version, Pinch becomes a village quack who tries to dispel the evil spirit thus:

namo chakravak utapati bhaila,
tridarsha daityara maya samharibe laila
chausasti joginir ban kati khanda khanda karila
hum hum gir gir sagarar mala
(Bhramaranga, Act IV, Scene iv)

Such a quack and a ‘mantra’ or incantation must have been very appealing to the Assamese audience in the 1890s, many of whom actually believed in evil spirits as well as in the ability of a quack to drive them off from a human being. Commenting on Bhramaranga (1887), Satyendranath Sarma says that “as the first attempt at translating Shakespeare it is undoubtedly a successful work”. Sarma further opines that “anybody unfamiliar with the Shakespeare play cannot say that it is a translation, so skillfully is the rendering done” (2015, p. 7). Satyanath Bora, who was extremely delighted to witness the performance, made a very significant comment upon it. Bora wrote in Jonaki:

I have read the book thoroughly, and I have also witnessed its performance. The book is small in size, but of unique qualities…. The writers have adapted the English thoughts to the needs of the Assamese speech; therefore, while the thoughts are intact, the book is Assamese in spirit. (1890, p. 85)

Bora evidently felt that the Assamese literature was generally deficient in the humour of the type displayed in the Shakespeare’s drama, however, exceptions can be made in the case of Kaniyar Kirtan (1861) and Kovabhaturi, written by Hem Chandra Barua; as in them the laughter is caused through manipulation of ideas, and Bhramaranga (1887) introduces a new consciousness in literary circles about the possibility of development of comic literature that is mainly expressed through the manner of speech or style. Evidently, he hinted at the appearance of a new consciousness of comic literature in Assamese in the Jonaki period. He particularly drew the attention of the writers and the audience to the role style plays in comedy. One has however to note that he makes no difference between farce or ha^–sya rasa.

Hemchandra Barua

Hemchandra Barua’s Kaniyar Kirtan (1861), which the author subtitles in English as a “Play in Assamese on the Evils of Opium-eating”, was, of course, “put on the board quite a number of times at Sibsagar and elsewhere. And this was the first modern Assamese play to be performed on a modern stage at Sibsagar” (Hazarika, 1967, p. 92). The story of the play, briefly, is as follows: Bhadreswar Barua, a revenue-collecting officer (mouzadar), had a son, Kirtikanta. One day an Assamese preceptor, Padmapani, paid a visit to Bhdreswar’s house. Padmapani, who was an opium addict, would not be satisfied unless he was treated with a bit of the drug. Kirtikanta saw him eat the opium and could not help tasting it. This turned him into a regular opium-eater, and the result was that he was soon reduced to a skeleton. In due course, his wife, Chandraprabha, too, became a victim to the evil. Kirtikanta was unable to run the office of his father when it fell to him and took to unfair means even for mere existence. At last, he was arrested and sent to jail. Meanwhile, his wife died. After a few days in prison Kirtikanta also died in utter repentance.

Kaniyar Kirtan thus, is purely a social play, dealing as it does with a very serious contemporary problem. The play was written with a view to revealing the wicked influence of opium-eating that had long been preying upon the very vitals of Assam. Technically as well as stylistically, it is decidedly an improvement upon Gunabhiram Barua’s Ram-Navami (1857). It has nothing to do with prastavana nandi (introductory verse) or Sutradhara (anchor), which are integral parts of Ankiya Nat (one-act play in Assamese). The technique as well as the style is largely modeled on Shakespearean dramaturgy with no influence at all of Sanskrit drama. No doubt, the playwright has a moral to convey, but it is not delivered through a Sutradhara but through the hero himself, who admits repentantly:

Opium is the worst of poisons.
The opium-eater hasn’t the least wisdom.
Alas! Alas! What a terrible misery!
Opium is at the root of the destruction of Assam.
(Kaniyar-Kirtan, Act VI, Scene iii)

The play is in four acts with three to four scenes in each act. The playwright shows some skill in dramatic construction. The plot is developed well, and the degradation of the hero as a result of a deep-rooted evil is tellingly shown. The play, despite its serious theme, bristles with bitter satire and biting sarcasm. But the satire and the sarcasm are only on the surface: They should not be allowed to mislead us into believing that Kaniyar Kirtan is a farcical piece.

Modern Assamese dramas, as discussed above, are divided into acts and scenes exactly like a Shakespearean drama. This is undoubtedly a result of the Shakespearean influence, for during the latter half of the nineteenth century no dramatist was read and imitated as much as was Shakespeare. Kaniyar Kirtan is divided into four acts, though not five, each having separate scenes. Pona Mahanta observes:

Like Gunabhiram Barua, Hemchandra Barua was also from an aristocratic family of Assam, educated in Calcutta, and as such, it was but natural that in technique as well as in theme they were influenced by European, particularly Shakespearean drama, although it has to be admitted that much of this influence came through Bengali. (1985, p. 65)

Padmanath Gohain Barua

Padmanath Gohain Barua has given us three farcical pieces: Gaobura (The Village Headman, 1890), Teton Tamuli (1908) and Bhut ne Bhram (Is it Ghost or Illusion, 1924). Gaobura, the earliest yet the best of the three, is rather a light comedy than a farce (Barua, 1964, p. 153). It gives a near realistic picture of the British administration of the time. The contemporary Assamese life and society in the countryside are also nearly truthfully depicted. Its story is as follows: Bhogman, a well-to-do and respectable peasant, is forcibly recruited as a porter by a team consisting of the village headman, the mandal (surveyor) and police. These petty government servants are corrupt and accustomed to taking bribes. Bhogman considers this to be an insult and to amend it, he himself decides to become a headman. He believes that this will bring him power and prestige. Through the good offices of the mouzadar (Settlement Officer), he gets the honorary job of a headman and is now entitled to prestige and some dues. However, the job being honorary and time-consuming affects his normal domestic and farm work, and he soon finds himself in straitened circumstances. His poverty becomes pronounced and he is even unable to pay his revenue dues. We then find Bhogman collecting rations for the District Magistrate (who is on a tour) forcibly from some villagers gratis, but this does not bring him credit but only maltreatment by the officer’s retinue. Misfortunes come to him in quick succession. The mouzadar orders attachment of his property for collecting arrears of revenue due in his name. In the fifth Act, attachment of property takes place under humiliating and pitiable circumstances. Then the Magistrate tries him on the charge of the forcible lifting of some hens from a Muslim house. This he had to do in spite of himself, as he was asked to collect rations for the District Magistrate gratis. It is during the trial that the Magistrate comes to know about the actual circumstances under which an honorary gaobura (village headman) has to discharge his duties. He takes to remedy the situation, but by then Bhogman is already tired of his job and relinquishes it, heaving a sigh of relief.

In this light comedy, the character of Bhogman is the main object of pity and laughter. There are, however, satirical elements that are directed against the practice of bribery, the inferiority complex of Indians before the Sahibs, greed for money among rural jurors, forcible collection of rations, the peculiar Hindi jargon used by sahibs and administrative ignorance of the part of high officials. But these are secondary elements. In Bhogman’s character, we find several situations of laughter. Firstly, Bhogman’s false sense of prestige is not becoming a porter and his equally unreal solution is accepting the job of a village headman to save his eroded prestige. This feudal sense of prestige is already anachronistic in the new milieu ushered in by British rule. Secondly, the contradiction between his behaviour and the real social situation is carried in the drama to a comic magnitude in two ways. At home, he faces an economic crisis which ruins his peace of mind and drives him to a state of acute misery. Outside, he is insulted in the most cynical manner by the sahib’s menials on the flimsy ground of insufficient supply of ration. His misery reaches an acute tragic proportion from his point of view, but strangely this only evokes mere laughter, though not unmixed with pity. This is so because his moral views are feudal; he does not realize that an honorary job in a capitalist society is useless and only a source of misery.

His eccentricity is highlighted by the fact that he remains unaware and unrepentant till the end. This leads to the development of the comic situation which we all enjoy, but not without some compassion for him in his misery. In many ways, Bhogman is an authentic comic character. He is comic without appearing to be so. But it is the humour of a different kind. There is sadness in it. Bhogman makes himself a butt of ridicule because he knows no English and also because he is ignorant of the ways of a British officer. Allardyce Nicoll observes, “Humour, we shall find, is often related to the melancholy of a peculiar kind, not o fierce melancholy, but a melancholy that arises out of pensive thoughts and broodings on the ways of mankind” (1998, p. 199). The humour of Gaobura is certainly of such nature because, despite the fact that much of it appears in words, manners and situations which are apparently ludicrous, it is as a whole tinged with thoughtful broodings over the ways of the world. This is clear in the conversations between Bhogram and his wife as well as between him and another village headman. These are full of concern about their own lot. It is only the way they talk and their mannerisms that often make us laugh.

Teton Tamuli (1909) and Bhut ne Bhram (1924) are two other dramas by Padmanath which are called comical. Among these two dramas, the latter cannot be called comical in the true sense. The author himself was aware of this when he said, “It is true that the drama may not be fit to be called comic; but if this can remove the illusory belief in ghosts among men even to a limit extent, the author would be gratified” (Gohain Barua, 1971, p. 313).

Gohain Barua further says, “the play is a series of scenes drawn with a view to removing the popular superstitions about ghosts” (1971, p. 313). Considering the advanced age of the author, Gohain Barua additionally observes, “the play, it is true, may not deserve to be called a farce, but he (the author) would consider his labour rewarded if only it helps in removing, at least partly, the superstitions concerning ghosts in which the society is steeped” (1971, p. 313). The way in which the educated members of a “reforms Committee” try to prove the unreality and non-existence of ghosts, their initial doubts and hesitations, the dialogue of the rustic folk concerning spirits, are sure to rouse laughter even in the most reserved among the audience.

Teton Tamuli, on the other hand like Bezbarua’s Litikai, is a farce based on a folk story. Teton, according to Dr P.D. Gosvami, is “a picaro or picaroon of Assamese oral literature. The story is still popular among Assamese villages” (1947, p. XXIII). Teton is a witty plebeian. Driven out of his home for his sharp witty tongue, he goes out into the wide world as a needy and hungry man. However, he is soon involved in deeds of crime such as theft, cow-killing and cheating a woman fruit-seller. Charges are brought against him in the King’s court. He argues his case well but cunningly and proves that he did not commit those offences. The defence is witty in nature. Later on, he makes himself eligible to marry the daughter of a court official by a clever device and this helps him in becoming an official of the court. The drama retains the absurd atmosphere of a folk story.

His paradoxical replies are as witty as his literal interpretation of a few sentences uttered by the tiller and the fruit-seller. This is what the tiller says: sou baghar bukuloi yova garuto mar eta mari rakhi diyagoi. Literally interpreted, this would mean that Teton should go and beat the bull that is fit to be devoured by a tiger to death. Teton actually goes and kills the bull. But this is not what the tiller meant. He spoke in a figurative manner and simply asked Teton to help him in stopping the running wily bull so that he could take him to the field. He used idiomatic expressions instead of plain speech. Baghar bukuloi yoa means ‘wily’ or ‘damned’ whereas, mari rakhi diyagoi means ‘to control and stop the bull’ (Gosvami, 1947, pp. 292-293).

In the King’s court, Teton argues cunningly that he acts as he has been instructed and got acquitted. This is a travesty of justice, but a concession to the incongruity of words. The paradoxical utterances that create verbal misunderstandings among two ridiculous characters here give rise to laughter. Exaggerated situations, ludicrous characters and humorous dialogue are the stuff of which this farcical piece is made.

All the three plays are in five acts divided into scenes. The matter in the plays is so thin and light that hardly any of them needs a five-act structure. This only shows how fast the tradition of the five-act play was held in Gohain Barua even in the third decade of the twentieth century.

Durgaprasad Majindar Barua

Mahari (The Tea Garden Clerk) by Durgaprasad Majindar Barua was written in 1893 though it came out in print in 1896, which was a “roaring success on the stage for several decades” (Neog, 1975, p. 22). The play in three acts with a few scenes to each act depicts how a young man, with the help of the European manager’s native mistress, succeeds in getting a clerical post in a tea garden and how his own ignorance together with the jealous head clerk’s conspiracy ultimately compels him to leave the job. There is much in the play to rouse laughter: the eccentric Mr Fox, the English manager of the garden; the fisherwoman, Makari, who is the manager’s mistress; and Bhabiram, the newly-appointed young clerk, provide most of the fun. In fact, the characters, the situations and the dialogue are all contrived in such a way as to create mirth. Bhabiram’s ignorance of English, Mr Fox’s smattering of Assamese, and Makari’s often unrefined and biting language are the sources of much of the fun which is so characteristic of the piece. Mahari, indeed, was so popular on the stage that the eccentric Mr Fox and his fisherwoman mistress, Makari, “become by-words for hilarious comedy, and several good actors of Assam became widely known by these roles” (Neog, 1975, p. 22). Of his other farces, Negro(?) which is not available now, ridicules the blindly Westernized people of Assam, while Kaliyug (1904), written in collaboration with Benudhar Rajkhowa, satirizes the hypocrisies of preceptors and priests (Mahanta, 1985, p. 208).

Benudhar Rajkhowa

Benudhar Rajkhowa gained vast admiration as a farceur with his Kurisatikar Sabhyata (The Civilization of the Twentieth Century, 1908). Tini Ghaini (Three Wives, 1928), Asikshita Ghaini (The Uneducated Wife), Chorar Shristi (The Creation of Thieves, 1931) and Topanir Parinam (The Consequence of Sleep, 1932). In the first, the playwright exposes the hypocrisy of the Westernized youths of Assam. They are contemptuous of the older and time-honoured faiths of their own land but are not prepared to accept whole-heartedly the Western faiths either. They profess to be atheists and non-believers in the caste system, whereas, in reality, they follow all the older customs for fear of society. Tini Ghaini and Asikshita Ghaini show how co-wives and uneducated wives can make a husband’s life miserable. In Topanir Parinam, laughter is created through a play on the word ‘topani’ meaning ‘sleep’. A young man, called Topani, seduces a young girl and is compelled to marry her. Chorar Sristi appears to be patterned after Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew. Two husbands, Dhumuha and Mauram, lead unhappy lives with their wives because of temperamental incompatibility. Dhumuha, a quarrelsome and excitable young man, is married to a simple and amiable woman; while Mauram, a peaceable youth, is married to a termagant. One night a clever and well-meaning thief comes to know of this unhappiness, and with the help of a charm that he knows gets the wives exchanged. The shrew, who was making Mauram’s life miserable with her fiery temperament, is completely tamed by the stormy Dhumuha.

These little plays of Rajkhowa may be called light comedies of situations. The mirth is created not so much through characters and dialogue as through shrewdly contrived situations. But beneath the laughter lies the playwright’s corrective motives. In all these plays he not only exposes the hypocrisies of the educated class but also pleads for a rational approach to life.

Lakshminath Bezbarua

Lakshminath Bezbarua wrote four comic dramas, Litikai (1890), Nomal (1913), Pachani (1913) and Chikarpati Nikarpati (1913). All these pieces depend on their theatrical effects on exaggerated situations, incongruous characters, malapropisms, and other deviations from the normal. Satyendranath Sarma points out that “the dramas are deficient in dramatic action and based mostly on the laughter of situations and incongruity of words” (1973, p. 300). The author amended the elements of the stories derived from the folk stories to match his requirements.

In Litikai (1890), we found that there are seven orphaned arch fools, who work in a home of Brahmin family. These fellows have strange manners of executing things and they kill their master’s mother in one of their brainless acts. This provokes the master to execute them in revenge. However, one of the fools managed to escape his end, and in return, out of revenge married the master’s sister-in-law by cheating. The seven orphaned arch fools as characters in the play, however, did not imprint any mark with their verbosity. Their plebeian personalities are highlighted in the humorous way of speech and naivete. They are unlettered, mostly indolent, credulous, superstitious, and parasitic. They talk in a strange manner and do ridiculous acts frankly and one would surely get the conviction that they live in a mock world.

The seven arch fools sometimes observe the straightforward meaning of the expression and act seriously which generates laughter. The word ekatha^– signifies either a ‘measure of rice’ or ‘a measure of land’. In one occasion, all the fools are asked by the master to hoe a katha of land, however, each fool evades the allotted work and they hoe a piece of earth weighing a katha.

A similar act is done by the fools, which ensues in killing the master’s mother, Subhadra –

Satotai – ai ai, dangari kot thom? Kan cigi ahiche tenei, kouk begai, kot thom? Kouk, kouk.
Subhadra – (khongere) thoboloi thai pova nai yadi mor murar operate tha.
(Litikai, Scene III, Act IV)

[The seven fool brothers – o mother, where will we place these bunches of paddy? It is hurting our shoulders, quickly tell where will put these? Tell, tell.

Subhadra – (Angrily) If you don’t find any place to put those bundles, keep those bundles on my head.]

And to our surprise, they do so in reality and as a result, the mother of the master dies.

The master now realizes that the fools are mere burdens to him, therefore, he makes up his mind to do away with them. He succeeds to kill six of them, but the seventh one manages to escape from his master’s grudge. Interestingly, the living fool abruptly acts like a very clever fellow and successfully manipulates to espouse the master’s sister-in-law by way of cheating. The end, as Satyendranath Sarma points out, is somewhat improbable and there the fifth Act appears to be rather out of tune with the spirit of the whole drama. Sarma further says, “There is plenty of horseplay in the drama and it emanates from the improbable incongruities and most trivial incidents. It is a short play with a weak plot and indifferent characterization” (1973, p. 301). It is a pure farce.

In Nomal (1913), the mirth is created through a series of situations in which a rickety old man is constantly humiliated and mortified because of his foolishness and malapropisms. The brief story of the play is as follows: Naharphutuka approaches to spiritual master in Athiyabari sattra to request him to give a suitable name for his newborn baby. The guru of the Athiyabari sattra, then, is introduced to us. He leads a life of pompous manner by earning money in a dishonest way. He gave a name for Nahraphutuka’s son, ‘Nomal’. As he has some problems with pronunciation, he uttered the name as ‘Nemel’ (which means ‘do not sail’). As he fears forgetting the name, he starts repeating the name ‘Nemel’ on his way home. A trader who is about to start his voyage on a boat hears Naharphutuka uttering ‘Nemel’ and on hearing this the merchant becomes angry and beats him. Naharphutuka then ruefully says, ‘nohowabor hol ou’ (happened something unusual). And he utters these words as he proceeds on. A rich Ahom is passing that road in a palanquin in a ceremonial and glamourous way, misunderstanding the utterings to be really meant an inauspicious remark on his noble rank. On being angry, the merchant beats him again. Then, Naharphutuka cries out in torment and says, ‘one is more oppressive than the other’. This very uttering again offends two diseased travellers. One is suffering from elephantiasis and the other is suffering from goitre. Then, they act with him very roughly too. Being traumatized and disheartened, Naharphutuka, arrives home and he realizes that he has forgotten the name. However, he remembers the name ‘Nemel’ when his wife is almost opening his bag. (The term ‘Nemel’ also means ‘do not open). The consortium of words with the action of the unfolding of bag helped him remember the name. It is, therefore, oral and incidental misconception that creates this farcical story to progress on. The element of satire present in the play is incidental and there is much entertainment in the word ‘Nomal’. A sort of punning impact is articulated while Naharphutuka utters it in the rural fashion. The incidents of beating Naharphutuka are brief and merely ridiculous. These ridiculous fancies are hilarious and comical.

Bezbarua gives a slightly better account of himself in Pachani (1913). It is comparatively a graceful farce and there are juxtapositions of contrasting ideas and intertwist of fun and satire. The play is segregated into five scenes. As the play opens up, we see that Dharmai Pachani, a childless man, who is religiously devoted, has developed a habit of having guests every night. That night, he returns home without any guests after a vain search for them. Then we see that he is busy making a ‘dheki-thora’ (grinding stick of a ‘dekhi’ or a pounding machine), and at this moment two guests have turned up. Then, he, being overjoyed having the guests, goes shopping. His wife, on the other hand, does not like this attitude of her husband and she used to drive out the guests. She holds the grinding stick of the pounding machine and tells them that she is going to beat them up with the stick. On hearing this, the guests flee and at this very moment, Pachani arrives from shopping. He feels disappointed with the departure of the guests. His clever wife informs him that the guests are greedy and that on being refused to hand over to them the ‘dheki-thora’ (grinding stick), they took offence and left. Then, Pachani gets the grinding stick in his hand and follows the guests with the intention to give it to them. When the guests see that Pachani is following them with the dreaded piece of wood in his hand; they speed and run out of that place. The husband returns back unhappy with a small pet animal (a domestic cat) as a guest and as a substitute. It is full of zest and laughter, especially the scene in which Pachani follows the panicked guests with the piece of wood in hand.

In Chikarpati-Nikarpati (1913) also, there is full of fun. It arouses laughter through the two thieves’ display of methods used by them in larceny as well as of corruption in the court. Pona Mahanta observes, “these plays are nothing but purely farcical pieces which undoubtedly appealed to the rustic audience of the time” (1985, p. 205). Chikarpati-Nikarpati starts with a scene where a trial is going on. In the trial, Chikarpati is adjudicated for a charge of theft of a brass pot. It comes to an end in his liberation from the charges. The adjudications are convened in the modern court, however, as Chikarpati’s state is governed by a king, the adjudication scenes are old-fashioned and traditional. To see the capability of the acclaimed thief, the king employs him to steal a ring from him when he is sleeping in the bedroom. And in this mission, Chikarpati successfully steals the ring from the king. Then, the king employs him to get him a man for his daughter’s bridegroom. And in this also, he becomes successful. Later, when the bridegroom becomes the king, he announces the thief to be his minister.

B.K. Bhattacharyya (1982) opines that –

The drama is not only loose in structure, but full of improbable incongruities. A thief who steals a brass-pot is introduced as the great thief. Then the king uses his services for procuring for his daughter a bridegroom, who again promises him to make him his minister. All these are very amusing, as the identical appearances of the two thieves, Chikarpati and Nikarpati create a comic situation based on chance. (pp. 193-194)

The atmosphere of the play is, however, farcical. The trial scenes and the scene of the conversation between the pleaders of opposite parties in the Chikarpati case are a reflection of manners of Bezbarua’s time and the former is full of plebian laughter. But the scene of a heart-to-heart talk between the pair of lovers, Rongdoi and Chikarpati is improbable, extremely light and farcical. According to Birinchi Kumar Barua (1964):

The exaggerated situation, irony of thought and words, malapropisms and humorous dialogues – these are the characteristics of these farces. There is hardly any development of plot. The humour is low because it is invariably one of situations. Exaggeration is the very breath of these farces and hence they are often unreal. (p. 150)

Of the many other farces published before the thirties, mention may be made of Chandradhar Barua’s Bhagya-Pariksha (Fate Decided, 1916). Based on the tale of Khaza Hosen in the Arabian Nights, this little play in a lighter vein dramatizes the relative merits of fate and affluence. Padmadhar Chaliha in his Nimantran (Invitation, 1915) creates laughter by exploiting the lack of common sense on the part of four ‘foolish wise men’. Mitradev Mahanta, a leading actor and playwright, has published quite a good number of farcical pieces of which Biya Biparyaya (The Marriage Debacle, 1924) and Kukurikanar Athmangala (The Reception of the Night-blind son-in-law, 1927) were at one time ‘warmly received at every theatre in Assam’. In the former piece, mirth is created through incongruous situations and behaviour. He also ridicules through dramatic exaggeration such evils of contemporary society as child marriage, dowry and superstition. The source of laughter in the latter play is mainly the incongruous behaviour of the son-in-law, who, in his vain attempts to conceal his night-blindness, only exposes himself and makes himself ridiculous. Mahanta has published a few more farces such as Eta Curat (One Cigarette), Tengar Bhengar (The Clever Rogoue), Checha Jyar (Cold Fever), Achin Kathar Thora (The Bluff Giver) and others. All these pieces are meant for mirth which the playwright creates through exaggerated situations, spicy dialogue and ludicrous characters.

Farcical pieces and low comedies continued to be written even after the thirties of the twentieth century, but gradually their place came to be taken by serious social plays. Of those who wrote such plays after 1930, mention may be made of Lakshminadhar Sarma, Surendranath Saikia, Kumudchandra Barua, Karunadhar Barua, Binandacchandra Barua, Prabin Phukan, Premnarayan Datta and a few others. In most cases, the light dramatic pieces written by these writers were like sugar-coated pills because, although their apparent aim was to arouse laughter, they also aimed at exploring the follies and hypocrisies of a society still in transition. But after the Second World War, the farce as a dramatic type almost ceased to be a living force, its place being taken by plays on serious social as well as psychological themes. The effects of the War, the disillusionment that immediately followed the attainment of Independence, the rapid spread of scientific and technological knowledge, and the popularity of such thinkers as Marx and Freud – all came to have their impact on literature including drama. Pona Mahanta (1985) stated:

The audience no longer looked for boisterous comedy created through exaggeration of all kinds; instead, they wanted to see flesh and blood human being in real human situations. The playwright was ready to give them this, and as a result drama became almost entirely social and inward in place of farcical and mythological (p. 210).

Conclusion

Although the new drama in Assamese began with plays of a social-realistic type, the latter years of the nineteenth century and the initial ones of the twentieth were largely a period of farces, as well as translations and adaptations. Shakespeare was naturally the first and the greatest favourite to be translated, adapted and imitated. But while several of the Shakespearean adaptations seem to have been successful as stage plays, their influence on the Assamese drama is not obvious. The writers of the plays draw their subject matter from indigenous sources. But, the themes apart, all these plays were modelled on Western dramatic methods, particularly those of Shakespeare. And with the plays of Bezbarua and Gohain Barua, Shakespeare, whose influence had been felt as early as 1857, became the dominant influence on pre-independent Assamese comedy and all types of Assamese dramas. Of all the fields of literature, dramatic piece of art is unquestionably responsive to societal transformation. The pre-independent Assamese dramatic literature is in debt for its progress to its exposure to the West. It is also greatly responsible for the phenomenal transformation of our society, which in every facet, has gone through in the course of the period. Thus, it can be concluded that this influence has been continuously operating in various ways and it is found that the entire pre-independent Assamese dramatic literature has been affected by the plays of Shakespeare. Though the content of the plays is native, the style and technique are purely modelled on the dramas of William Shakespeare.

Declaration of Conflict of Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest.

Funding

No funding has been received for the publication of this article. It is published free of any charge.

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Intermedial Postmodernism in Art: Concepts and Cultural Practices

Aesthetic Studies/Cultural Studies/Theatre/V14N2

673 views

Irina Aleksandrovna Urmina¹, Kristina Konstantinovna Onuchina², Natalia Dmitrievna Irza³, Irina Anatolievna Korsakova⁴ & Ivan Alexandrovich Chernikov⁵

¹Russian State Social University, Moscow, Russia
²Russian State Social University, Moscow, Russia
³Russian State Social University, Moscow, Russia
⁴Moscow State Institute of Music named after A.G. Schnittke, Moscow, Russia
⁵Military Training and Research Center of the Air Force “The Air Force Academy named after Professor N. E. Zhukovsky and Yu. A. Gagarin” (Voronezh) of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, Russia.

Corresponding author: Irina Aleksandrovna Urmina. Email: n.yushenko@list.ru

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.02

First published: June 18, 2022 | Area: Aesthetic Studies | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Volume 14, Number2, 2022)
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Intermedial Postmodernism in Art: Concepts and Cultural Practices

Abstract

The study analyzes the existing and developing ideas of and approaches to the study of the multilevel concept of intermediality and its different aspects, forms, and phenomena considering the existing approaches and definitions. The study aims to reveal the capabilities of intermediality as a potential of innovative artistic creation. Research is conducted using sociocultural research methods including a comparative study of the recently proposed typical intermediality models, analysis of descriptive texts about the factually present models of art synthesis, as well as the context pointing to the presence of lack of correspondence between a particular fragment of text (the content of activity) and the real conditions in which activity is carried out. In the framework of an interdisciplinary comparative study, the emergent field of intermediality and its relationship to cultural practices in different spheres, including education, are defined at the qualitative level. The subject field of the study of intermediality as a key concept of modern culture is evaluated and its specific features in art, including music, are identified. The problems of the formation of synthetic media arts as a reflection of the postmodern perception of the world under the new conditions of digital technology, which transforms any creative cultural text into another type of information, usually of a quoted and multiple nature, are presented for discussion. It is proposed to pay special attention to the formation of “intermedial competence” – the ability to understand and interpret the process of the generation of new meaningful content, which occurs within the semantic modalities and communicative registers. The latter is only possible within the framework of the competence-based approach enshrined in the foundations of the universal system of European, including Russian, two-level higher education.

Keywords: Art, intermediality, theatre, communication.

Introduction

Sociocultural reality in the conditions of the greatly accelerated spread of visual culture determines the specific problems in the formation of a person’s world image. Visual forms, which dominated mass culture throughout the 20th century, have now become basic in the context of the active expansion of the media space created by means of new mass communication media. As a result of the qualitative changes in the ways of influencing mass audiences, a new generation was brought up on the ubiquitous use of modern visual technology, which drastically differs from the traditional social and cultural forms of communication that have existed for centuries but only partially allow to maintain the connection with the experience of previous generations today. Modern mass culture has become almost exclusively visual and categorically offers ready-made images, depriving people of the ability to imagine and independently form individual perceptions of their surroundings. Even W. Benjamin, a German philosopher, cultural theorist, aesthetician, literary critic, essayist, and translator, emphasized the growing nature of the entertainment function of mass culture: “The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality: the greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation” [Benjamin 1996: 61]. The philosopher also indicates that the wide availability of works of art leads to the loss of the uniqueness of artwork, and a cult character is replaced by a consumer and commodity character.

The expanding presence of art in public life is undoubtedly due to the development of technical means, the duplication (copying) of works of art, mass production of works of fiction, reproductions of paintings, sculpture, and architecture. The qualitative technical and technological shifts in the digital sphere and the advancement of information and communication technology allow for the reproduction of virtually all forms and types of artistic products in the video and audio format on a mass scale. This list now also includes the phenomenon of virtual reality, which became a logical continuation of the methodological evolution of visual communication through media. The communicative potential of electronic and digital technologies has presented the entire society with new prospects for their use in social and cultural interaction. Thirty years ago, the German poet, writer, playwright, essayist, and translator H. M. Enzensberger wrote:

“The new media are oriented towards action, not contemplation; towards the present, not tradition <…> That does not mean to say that they have no history or that they contribute to the loss of historical consciousness. On the contrary, they make it possible for the first time to record historical material so that it can be reproduced at will. By making this material available for present-day purposes, they make it obvious to anyone using it that the writing of history is always manipulation” [Hans Magnus Enzensberger 1986: 104-105].

The American film critic and theorist B. Nichols writes the following about the works of culture in the age of cybernetic systems: “Instead of reproducing, and altering, our relation to an original work, cybernetic communication simulates, and alters, our relation to our environment and mind” [Bill Nichols 1996: 128]. The very process of simulation and the phenomenon of a hypertrophied model of reality was revealed by French sociologist, cultural scientist, and postmodern philosopher J. Baudrillard in the concept of simulacra, which has become a representative model of modern culture:

“It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real <…> A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences” [Jean Baudrillard 2002: 181].

The phenomenon of art synthesis made its appearance in the earliest periods of art development. In the first half of the 20th century, there emerged an urgent need to create synthetic works that could have a complex effect on the viewer and listener by transferring the properties of one art form to another. For example, the Russian artist and fine art theorist V.V. Kandinsky created several stage compositions including “Green Sound”, “Purple Curtain”, “Black and White”, and “Yellow Sound”, the composition of which was intended to harmoniously combine music, color, plasticity, and word. Kandinsky believed that the combination of the means of various arts “can only be successful if it is not external, but principled. This means that one art must learn from the other how to use its means; it must learn in order to then apply its own means according to the same principle” [Kandinsky 2016: 17]. Russian composer and pianist, teacher, and representative of symbolism in music A.N. Scriabin was the first to use color in the performance of music, introducing a new concept of light music. In the musical poem “Prometheus”, he “sought parallelism – I wanted to strengthen the impression from sound with light”, but this also ceased to satisfy him: “now I am no longer satisfied with this. Now I need light counterpoints… Light goes its own melody, and sound its own…” [Sabaneev 2014: 239].

With the development of the information space, by virtue of the improvement of mass media, the established relationships between the visual and the verbal in public life were distorted in favor of the visual (the so-called visual turn). Art, in general, became part of the daily life and was attributed utilitarian meaning. At the same time, the borders of art were being blurred in structuralism, poststructuralism, postmodernism viewing the world as text and the works of art as “artifacts”, and in the development of constructivism in art. All this gave rise to multidisciplinary research not only on the interaction between particular types of art but also with other sciences and, later on, on the concept of intermediality primarily in the media-technological sense. Research practically split into two branches: technological and semiotic. The former is associated with the concept of “medium” or “media” consistently used as a material concept of “means of communication” or “technical means of publication,” and “communication channel”. The latter refers to the content aspect when media acts like a sign system or a sign code, and the interaction between the sign systems (languages) of different types of art generates the integrity of artistic and aesthetic perception.

In a broad sense, “intermediality” is now understood as a special type of relations emerging between media. The concept itself, however, generally has multiple meanings (in various scientific disciplines, there are no less than ten definitions [Khaminova, Zilberman: 2014: 39]), therefore, both the nature and the mechanism of the interaction of media also vary. For instance, in art, intermediality is the perception and experience of a different type of art, their juxtaposition, providing for a fundamentally creative movement and unpredictability of future states. Contacting media not only merge in a common space, but also influence, modify, and even transform one another (theater as a combination of plastics, action, music, images, etc.). It should be borne in mind that media is, first, a means of communication (a way of transferring information), second, a means of mass information, and third, a certain sign or code system. Then, in the interaction process, that is, in the process of intermediality, there emerges a polyartistic environment, in the space of which cultural codes are born, aesthetically developed, and translated through various cultural codes (for example, in various types of art). Here we would like to emphasize that the concept of intermediality started to appear in the terminological apparatus of such sciences as philosophy, philology, and art history only in the last decade of the 20th century coming to be the intersection of the concepts of “intertextuality” and “interaction of the arts” (interart). Such a split of the term into two separate sections calls for a double comparison with each concept. Intertextuality in literature and art refers to a special principle of citing previous works in a new philosophical and artistic context. The interaction of arts becomes their synthesis, which forms an independent interference environment that contains many different cultural texts.

Thus, by means of the new computer (digital) systems for transferring mass information via telecommunication networks (the Internet media), mass media or the means of mass information carry out the multichannel transmission of all types of information contained in the cultural texts of different types of art. In the postmodern era, the entire world can be viewed as cultural texts, conceptions, motifs, and cliches, which are distinguished into the uniform (homogeneous) and non-uniform (or intermedial, synthetic, heterogeneous) types. From this point of view, creation is a conscious or unconscious reference to its predecessors, hence modern art is reference art.

It is important to mind the fact that the technically electronic media of the last century (which appeared at the same time as print media), i.e. sound recording, radio, cinema, and television, used analog systems. As stated by D. Hesmondhalgh:

“…in analog broadcasting, the main components of communication and cultural expression – words, images, music, other sounds, etc. – were transferred to a continuous medium (radio waves), which in one way or another reproduced the form or appearance of the original performance, image, etc. <…> The radical innovation associated with the development of digital electronic methods of data storage and transmission is that the basic components of cultural expression – words, images, music, etc. – are converted into binary code (sequential series of zeros and ones) which can be read and stored by computers” [Hesmondhalgh 2018: 327-328].

It is believed that intermediality takes a special place in art by virtue of the interpenetration (synthesis) of its different directions reflecting the author’s emotional perception of events expressed in cultural texts. Semantically, however, people only perceive the part of a cultural text (as a reflection of the current worldview) that is stereotyped, recognizable, and does not require interpretation or multi-dimensional decoding of meanings. Therefore, the formation of modern individuals’ “intermedial competence” – the active ability to understand and interpret the process of the generation of new meaningful content, which occurs within the semantic modalities and communicative registers, to use various symbolic systems, scientific and general discursive practices for this purpose – becomes relevant. Effective development of such skills and abilities within the framework of the existing competency-based approach in the institutional system of higher education is a logical continuation of the development of a modern person in the digital age.

Methods

At present, there is a strong conviction of the need for interdisciplinary research in virtually all fields of science, including the humanities. “Accordingly, it has become appropriate to combine different theoretical models to solve certain social science problems. A condition for this combination is the compatibility of the models and not the strict correspondence to the commonly accepted provisions of the general theories that spawned them” [Orlova 2008: 290]. The methodology of intermediality is also based on interdisciplinarity [Tishunina 2001: 149]. The common ground for all classifications of this concept is the ways and forms of media exchange. Since the intermedial process, from a sociocultural perspective, is the communicative exchange of information generated by a person or a group of people and transmitted through different cultural codes, there arises the need for identifying the basic foundations for the study of such a multilevel concept comprising a wide range of humanitarian disciplines (communication theory, sociology of culture, cultural and intercultural studies, philosophy, theory of literature and music, art history, film, theater, etc.). Of primary importance, in this case, is the study of the aforementioned process in the conditions of a dynamic intersection, interpenetration, and interference of these disciplines generating new forms of artistic innovations, which rapidly spread in the virtual space and are with little comprehension used as the carriers of innovative education practices. What can become the primary method for the study of such a phenomenon is comparative analysis, which includes quite a wide array of particular techniques of analysis. However, the intermediality subjected to research today inherited the problematics of the long-known concept of “interaction of the arts”, and at a time when the concept of “cultural text” had become one of the leading ones in the humanities. Nonetheless, the broadened concept of text does not cover the peculiarities of the interaction of the “voices”, “languages”, “codes”, “textual units” of various arts. The more problematic becomes their interdisciplinary qualitative analysis – particular methodological principles of research in literature, the fine arts, music, theater, cinema, etc. have been developing for centuries. Such theoretically substantiated monomediality divides these special areas, which in practice have very successfully merged into new synthetic forms. It remains to select a common methodology for studying these innovations. The heterogeneity of types of individual arts united in new semantic manifestations should be levelled in the general methodological foundations of studying the process of interaction of these arts.

What unites them is the obvious anthropocentricity reflecting in the historical time the centuries-old social and cultural practices of human communities as the reflection of the world image, the reproduction of the present reality in artistic images. It is methodologically possible to determine the basic foundations for the analysis of these practices. Such methodological foundations emerge with the combination of the sociological and cultural-anthropological ways of cognition within the problem field, where it is necessary and possible. The problem field of intermediality research can be defined as the semantic intersection of mutually complementary and compatible sociological and cultural-anthropological concepts. It is also clear that such interdisciplinary research can utilize classic scientific methods:

– the functional method, which allows determining the significance of a specific and stable sociocultural interaction of individual social units for individuals and society;

– the structural method, which allows identifying stable bonds between symbolic objects;

– the semantic method allowing to study and evaluate the symbolic representedness of the content of sociocultural life in iconic and symbolic form;

– the dynamic method, allowing to determine the causes, forms, and driving forces of the occurring sociocultural changes and processes;

– the systemic method, which allows studying such cultural units as traits, patterns, and themes, as well as the possibility of logical links and transitions between them, at the level of theoretical conceptions.

It has to be noted that “at present, there are all conceptual grounds for the integration of sociological and cultural-anthropological knowledge into a common theoretical and methodological model of research that can be called sociocultural. First and foremost, both sciences are logically compatible. They have a common fundamental basis: both the social and cultural dimensions of human coexistence are considered as derivatives of people’s organized interaction and communication” [Orlova 2008: 300]. Particular attention should be paid to the analysis of the dynamic aspects of people’s life together, which are reflected in the processes of their communication and interaction, including in the sphere of art. Time will tell how this will be taken into account in research on intermediality.

Interpretations of the concept of intermediality in art

It can be argued that the digitalization of any creative cultural text transforms it into a different type of information, one of reference and plural nature. What then happens to such a text transformed into a cultural product in the qualitative sense? Let us more closely examine the process of transformation of cultural texts in the intermedial space of art starting from basic definitions.

The concept of intermediality is generally defined in our sign and multimodal culture as the interaction and mediation realized in texts. In essence, all contemporary social, cultural, and educational practices are carried out exactly in the field of intermediality. Without diving too deep into the analysis of historical and theoretical preconditions for the emergence of the phenomenon of intermediality, we will only note that as early as in the 19th century, it was showing itself in the interaction of different types of art, either within one type or crossing its borders and generating various synthetic forms. At present, such synthesis has become an active and commonly occurring phenomenon of artistic culture making use of the latest digital technology. Irina Rajewsky points to the fact that the concept of intermediality has been an umbrella term for different approaches from the very start and each time, intermediality is associated with different attributes and distinguishing characteristics. The specific objectives in different spheres (for instance, in medieval studies, literary studies, sociology, film studies, art studies, etc.) of intermedial research are constantly changing [Rajewsky 2018: 43-63]. As a result, there rises the need for deep additional study of both the methodology and lexical techniques of intermediality.

In art, intermediality presents the perception of another form of art as if from a distance, a kind of figurative empathy involving not only possible communications but also future joint interactions. It is in this exact case that different forms of media exchange come to be. For example, “transformative intermediality – the representation of one medium by another, the transition of an artifact into a different sign system, which it becomes part of, the relationship of manifestations of the same plot in different types of art; ontological intermediality as the ontological dimension of culture based on the inherent commonality of various media that does not rule out their differences (for example, the musicality of poetry, the cinematography of prose); conventional intermediality – the medial diversity of forms of artworks, a special type of interrelations inside text and interactions of cultural codes of different arts; normative intermediality – the same plot is developed in various media and each new era assesses the art of the previous ages differently – new thoughts and feelings arise, requiring new methods (mediums); referential intermediality – the text of one medium referencing the text of another” [Sinelnikova 2017: 808].

Without a doubt, intermediality has been showing itself in art in different forms since the 19th century, since the author of a work presents their unique image of the world with the means of communication available to them [30].

As noted above, not only works of various arts but also the very space of culture can be considered text. The concept of semiosphere or the semiotic space proposed by the Russian literary scholar, culturologist, and semiotician Iu.M. Lotman [9] best describes the conditions necessary for carrying out communication in this space. It is, however, also important to consider the fact that any cultural text or statement in the sphere of art exists within different semiotic (sign) systems, which are the works of literature, art, and culture as a whole. This problem has been analyzed by Iu.M Lotman and many other researchers in works on the semiotics of the space of culture [9; 21]. Essentially, they all rely on the idea of the world as text proposed by structuralists, including the French philosopher, literary scholar, aesthetician, and semiotician R. Barthes [Barthes 2016]. At the same time, the text can also be considered within the framework of discursive practice [10, 11, 21, 30].

Intermediality in music

The English essayist and art historian P. Walter pointed out that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it” [Milian 2019: 1].

What can be considered a manifestation of intermediality is ekphrasis as a doubled statement in a cultural text in different semiotic codes. For example, the interaction of literary fiction and music has been a topical subject of communication and creative interaction of composers, writers, musicologists, historians, and literary theorists for centuries. The aesthetic connections between literature and other arts have been discussed since Antiquity, particularly concerning the link between literary works and musical pieces. This discussion concerns the phenomenological musicality of prose associated with the two-fold structure of an artistic text as a correspondence between the material and form, the plot and the composition. According to the Soviet psychologist L.S. Vygotsky, “the very essence of the impact of art on us” resides not in the depiction of events but in the “processing of the perception that comes to us from the events”. An important role in this processing is played by the “plot composition,” “the organization of the writer’s speech itself, their language, the structure, rhythm, and melody of the story” [Vygotsky 2016: 202-203]. What comes as a result of ekphrasis is a strong emotional impact on the listener (an emotional explosion). “The moment of explosion is at the same time the point of a sharp increase in the informativeness of the whole system” [Vygotsky 2016: 135]. This occurs by virtue of the interpenetration through the genre and type borders – in the literal sense, a textual literary work expands its semiotic boundaries at the expense of other art forms. This results in intermediality. Since the problem of ekphrasis is closely linked to the issue of the interaction between literature and other art forms, M.I. Nikola [Nikola 2009: 25-26] alongside fine art, sculpture, and architecture identifies such types of ekphrasis as literary and musical, A.N. Taganov lists the literary, musical, and theatrical types [Taganov 2005: 140-149], and D.V. Tokarev mentions musical, fine art and musical, and cinematography ekphrasis [12: 93-95].

The semiotic principle of the division of arts, which made a particularly strong appearance in the 19th century, draws a distinction between the pictorial and non-pictorial (or expressive) types of art. “Pictorial arts (fine art, sculpture, graphics, photography, literature, theatre, and cinema) use the ‘language of real-life impressions, recreating before the eye or imagination objects and phenomena of the real world as one perceives them in one’s practical experience’. The non-pictorial arts (music, dance, architecture, applied arts, design) diverge from ‘the form of a sensual image that emerges in the experience of a person’s daily life’” [Bochkareva et al. 2012: 5-6]. Different models of transition and interaction form between them inescapably. What we are primarily concerned with is the contemporary aspect of intermediality in music. In this sense, “a vivid example of ekphrasis is the musical “The Phantom of the Opera” based on the novel of the same name by Gaston Leroux, a legendary and world-famous masterpiece by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, which has not left the stage of the world’s theaters for almost 30 years” [Bigvava 2018: 34].

It is worth disclosing the concept of intertextuality, which was introduced by Iulia Kristeva based on “the discovery first made by M.M. Bakhtin in the theory of literature: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, any text is a product of absorption and transformation of some other text” [Kristeva 2000: 429]. Kristeva operates with the terms “alien word”, “dialogue”, “multivoiced”, “polyphony”, etc., which Bakhtin used in relation to the texts of fiction. R. Barthes [Barthes 2013], specifying the definition of intertext, once again emphasized that in any text (intertext), other texts are inevitably present as fragments of cultural codes, formulas, rhythmic structures, fragments of social idioms, etc., absorbed and mixed in this text from the preceding linguistic culture [Bochkareva et al. 2012: 7].

Various methods for the analysis of literary works (mythological, biographical, comparative-historical, cultural-historical, psychological, formal, structural, sociological, culturological, narratological, semiological, etc.) have been developing in the sphere of literary art as the totality of any and all texts for decades, whereas the problems of analyzing the non-verbal (non-word) artworks remain unresolved to this day. Of most relevance appears to be the method of intermedial analysis, although it cannot be applied to all literary works since, at the very least, it requires defining the categories, levels, and common techniques of analysis universal for the works of different types of art.

Numerous definitions and approaches to the study of the concept of intermediality generate a wide array of intersecting and sometimes contradicting versions of seemingly the same thing. This is especially apparent from the works on the systematization of intermediality research by Lars Elleström [27, 31] who believes that all media are multimodal and intermedial in the sense that they contain a multitude of basic attributes and can only be considered in the general field of other types of mass information means.

Based on the formal method developed in structuralism, narratology, semiotics, communication theory, and interpretation, there are semiotic methods [1, 9, 21], which can be considered intermedial in a broader sense, meaning by that the analysis of relations and forms of interaction of the textual languages of different arts. This was indicated by the Italian scientist, philosopher, specialist in semiotics and medieval aesthetics, cultural theorist, and writer Umberto Eco in his book “Interpretation and Over-interpretation” [26]. The same idea is argued by Patrick Milian, who proposes four intermediate configurations of intermediality as the basis for interpreting the relations between different types of art [Milian 2019]. Milian himself relies on the work of Peter Dayan [Dayan 2011], who states that these relations rest on the fundamental incommensurability between the individual arts: the visual arts can never affect and communicate as music does, music does not come close to poetry, and poetry – to the visual arts. Nevertheless, there is the concept of transposition, which allows the author to represent another kind of art, its, so to speak, environmental peculiarity, which has recognizable signs of measurability and scientific repeatability. Thus, it becomes possible to maintain the existence of truth in art as a whole, to use the iconic features of one type of art in combination with the expressive features of another.

At present day, due to the lack of universal criteria and a terminological system for the study of the concept of intermediality, the search for a universal method for analyzing any work of art remains a topical issue.

“The main problem is that in different arts, the same terms refer to substantially different phenomena: the composition of a painting or a musical piece is not the same as the composition of a literary text. Different types of art arrange artistic time and space differently and use varying means of creating an artistic image. An example of this is the artistic image and the means of creating it in music, fine art, and literary works” [Chukantsova 2009: 140].

Since the artistic image is defined as a way of mastering and transforming reality [16, p.42], it is possible to identify the means used by music, fine art, and literature to the same degree. One of the primary tools in these arts is composition [18; 20; 21], which presents a system consisting of elements or components that are in specially organized relations with each other and can be distinguished by some formal attribute. Compositionally, these elements are the parts of an artwork that can be considered essential for its structure and content and are subdivided into external and internal [16, p. 216–223]. The external components or elements of a literary work can be individual chapters, stanzas, or phrases, stylistically isolated moments, as well as an introduction, conclusion, and epilogue. The internal components include the plot, theme, and individual characters of a literary work in their textual associations. The components or elements of the composition of musical and literary pieces can match or differ in terms of structure. For example, both types of works (cultural texts) are formally divided into parts, yet in music, this division is based on intonation as the foundation of musical thinking and communication. On the other hand, intonation is the unity of sound (the sound shell of a word) and meaning, same as words. The word, however, comprises a limited number of phonemes, whereas musical intonation uses the entire range of sound with different tempos, rhythmic patterns, volume levels, etc. The parts of a work are often marked by theme, motif, and leitmotif. Theme refers to the main idea of an artistic work lying at its basis and developing throughout its course. The motif is the semantic unit of any artistic text, including musical ones. The motif can be represented by a recurring word, phrase, situation, object, idea, image, or character. A leitmotif is a theme or motif that is associatively linked to a certain situation, character, or idea in a musical piece. In music, the leitmotif is a prominent, vivid, melodic phrase used to characterize a certain character, phenomenon, idea, or experience and repeated many times in the course of the plot development, i.e. it takes on the function of the motif of the artistic text. The main distinguishing feature of leitmotif in literary works is continuous reappearance in different qualities: as a word, gesture, action, image, idea, and so on.

It can be argued that multimediality emerging from the interaction of different arts describes the integration of semiotic operations and meaning modalities in a common phenomenal space. At present, such symbiosis has generated a vast space of intermedial artworks, new synthetic media-arts, in which importance is attributed not to the cultural texts themselves but rather their relations that form new meanings.

Discussion. Intermediality in the context of total digitalization

Intermediality “as the interference of the arts, particularly the verbalization of nonverbal art forms within fictional genres, is under serious pressure from the modern technological landscape, the main challenge of which should be considered the digitization of any content (music, video, photos, audio files, etc.)” [Zagidullina 2017: P. 60]. The era of panmediatization has brought about the transformation of both participants in communication in the sphere of art (the creator and the consumer), the channels of communication between them (as a condition for the existence of an artwork itself), and the nature of works of art. Same as many other technological innovations, digitalization generates immediate and delayed effects. The immediate effects can be considered to be the aforementioned transformations of any creative cultural text into another through interference with cultural texts from other art forms and the convergence of polycode structures in the space of an artwork, or even into another art form through changes in the very ways of forming the postmodern image of the world as a set of cultural texts. Finally, interactivity at the moment of communication or interaction between the creator of an artwork and its recipient (today, the consumer of a cultural product). Modern polycoding differs from the already existing accompaniment of text with video, audio, or photographic inclusions (the so-called longreads) because it relies on hybridization based on the possibilities of a protocol as a way to digitally replicate any work of art. Here we refer to the technologies allowing to convey color through sound and emotions through color, to the opportunity of describing a person’s state through musical composition. As an example, the British musician and artist Neil Harbisson who suffers from a disease that only allows him to distinguish the shades of grey, and who has expanded his ability to perceive color and became the world’s first officially recognized cyborg – with an antenna implanted in his skull and dental implants that can allow Harbisson to send messages over the Internet by clicking out Morse code with his teeth. This may be an isolated case, but the mass acceptance of synthetic art is not that far away. Moreover, as soon as digital technology becomes simple enough, art will immediately respond by creating new syncretic forms. As for the delayed effects of digitization, we should pay attention to the rapidly spreading hybrid forms of cultural texts in virtual space (newslore, medialore, journallore, netlore, etc.), new polycode genres (pins, instas, photoshop battles, memes, longreads, etc.), and new forms of language.

Considering the contemporary sphere of musical art, there is the rise of song culture as a polycode literary and musical genre, in which the meaning of a hybrid cultural text is formed through the synthesis of the meaning of the word itself and the image generated by the melody. It is melody and not the word that becomes primary in this synthesis of two arts – the meaning of words in a foreign language can be unclear, or the song itself can be deliberately arranged so that the lyrics are difficult to hear. The technical opportunities are extraordinary – smartphones and headphones allow any person to dive into the world of art “on the go”. Thus, the seeming easiness of perception creates the illusion of the simplicity of creating an artistic work, which results in a greater number of authors writing music and song lyrics and their demonstration on the Internet. Mass cultural practices have already generated the profane culture of the 20th century. Now, we propose to discuss what is to come in the near future.

A. Petho indicates the following: “‘intermediality’ has proved to be one of the most productive terms in the field of humanities, generating an impressive number of publications and theoretical debates. This popularity of intermedial researches was prompted by the incredibly accelerated multiplication of media themselves that called for an adequate theoretical framework mapping the proliferation of media relations. The other factor that propelled ‘intermediality’ to a wider attention was most likely the fact that it emerged on an interdisciplinary basis that made it possible for scholars from a great number of fields (theories of literature, art history, music, communication and cultural studies, philosophy, cinema studies, etc.) to participate in the discourse around questions of intermediality” [Petho 2010: 40]. This statement cannot be argued with since it is relations and not the meaning content of each of the interacting arts that have become the most topical subject of discussion today. The part of a cultural text (in the broad sense) that ends up perceived today is that which is stereotyped and recognizable and does not require interpretation or multidimensional decoding of meanings.

What comes to the fore then is a kind of “intermedial competence” as the ability to understand and interpret the process of generating new meaningful content, which takes place within the semantic modalities and communicative registers, the ability to use different symbolic systems, different disciplines, and general and scientific discursive practices for this purpose. For this ability to be developed, it is not enough to merely use the information and communication opportunities of the digital environment of the virtual space, it also calls for the exchange of knowledge of the entire sphere of culture. The conceptual content of culture, the management of knowledge, and the practical use of the enormous amount of information generated on the World Wide Web are immanent to education, science, creativity, innovation, education, upbringing, and everything that shapes both citizenship and identity of individuals. The rapidly advancing digital technology and intermedial discursive practices have started to play a special role in the development of modern educational and cultural policy and practice. The interactive nature of Internet communication networks, which attracts users looking for obtaining a cultural identity, also reveals the dark side of this activity – the more the users engage in information search, the less they seek social solidarity. The increase of mobility resides in the greater individualization it creates, since people can communicate and interact at distance regardless of their physical location, and individualization entails social passivity. The global nature of this problem is apparent today and manifests in all spheres of human life, including education.

On the Internet, especially in the creative field, a sense of belonging to the creation of something new, or even mutual exchange and cooperation, is formed. However, in reality, this rarely happens due to differences in the basic professional competencies of individuals, even if they have talent. Even in the professional sphere (for example, music), excessive use of network technologies can tear an individual away from active real life with its obligatory resulting interactions and information exchange. Network individualism is clearly manifested in the virtual space, where instead of the expected globalization, people have many changing sets of glocalized connections due to many changing cultural preferences. At the same time, through the Internet, people get access to the public sphere and the opportunity to express their personal opinions, which may not at all correspond to public information and professionally formed media. Thus, bloggers have appeared who consider themselves specialists in any field of everyday activity, and in the field of music – practically professionals. As a result, an imaginary community space is formed, in which the space of information flows replaces real life in the geographical space of places. Against this background, there is an obvious decrease in a person’s sense of social and personal responsibility to others, but real society may not forgive this (an example is cancel culture).

It is the sphere of education as a stable social institution that can use the growing volume of virtual network communications using forms of intermediality to represent reality as a dynamic process in which a person (as a formed personality) is defined in a variety of times and cultural spaces – genres, languages, groups, etc. The dynamics of culture then appear realized in discursive pedagogical practices and creative projects. The globalized virtual context with all its interactive forms is combined with glocalized training programs that consider the cultural and historical heritage, forming general cultural competence. It is already impossible to imagine it without understanding intermediality as a necessary component of the creative process of generating something new. This is especially evident in the field of culture and, in particular, art, when the teacher acts not only as a teacher-methodologist but also as a teacher-technologist, who forms an actively creative person who will continue to need an independent constant search for new knowledge and professional skills. This requires the teacher themself to be fully immersed in the changing context of the socio-cultural environment, as well as to master intermedial technologies in relation to the current life situation in society. In the field of art, various artistic trends, synthetically uniting in multidisciplinarity, have been creating new visual forms for more than a century (Russian modernism is an example). Disciplinary boundaries are being pushed but whether intermediality will become the basis of all humanities outside the realm of art is not yet clear. Discursive practices allow an art teacher, together with students, to form new professional competencies. At the same time, students also manifest the social position of citizens of a particular country. This is the function of the education system in any state – the formation of a general cultural and professional worldview of competent and responsible citizens. Hypothetical global cultural unity is hardly achievable today; rather, intermediality contributes to the expansion of knowledge in the field of culture as a dynamic content basis of social life (considering modern technological and technical achievements). Manifested in the media-technological, cultural-aesthetic, and socio-cultural-communicative trinity, intermediality is in the process of forming a new semiotic system as a result of the interaction of arts. This dynamic also corresponds to the educational process of forming general cultural and professional competencies in the field of art.

Conclusion

Youth as a special socio-demographic group occupies a special place in the reproduction of labor relations, i.e. in the market of the social division of labor. The atmosphere of the simultaneous presence of numerous opportunities and their inaccessibility is further aggravated by the fact that the only social model supported by ideological imperatives in any state (inviolability of private property, the prestige of people of science and education, tolerance, national dignity, etc.) has led the younger generation to strive for greater freedom of action and movement, to become aware of the value of their own private life as greater compared to corporate values in labor, and to seek creative self-realization. The model of success that had been viewed as the only possibility for decades no longer brings satisfaction to individuals. This means that the a priori desired “happiness”, a cultural concept closely related to the concept of “success” in this case, is not achieved. It should be noted here that the basis for modern youth’s self-identification became the orientation on understanding and not cognition and gaining knowledge.

Today, education has become, in the first place, a crucial socializing factor. Self-determination in life is viewed as a person’s active assertion of their position in relation to the social system of values (moral, social, communicative, aesthetic, professional, etc.), which allows them to manifest themselves in various life situations. This is directly associated with the competency-based approach enshrined in the foundations of the universal system of European, including Russian, two-level higher education. The formation, or, more precisely, the design of general cultural and professional competencies has become a demanded result of the educational process in higher education. It is possible that the development of intermedial competence has to become another component of this vital process.

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Under the Canopy of Sal Trees: A New Vocabulary of Performance in Sukracharya Rabha’s Minimal Theatre

North East Literature & Culture/Performance Studies/Theatre/V14N2

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Namrata Pathak
North-Eastern Hill University, Tura Campus, Meghalaya, India. ORCID id: 0000-0002-1193-6221. Email:

Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 2, April-June, 2022, Pages 1–12. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n2.ne09

First published: June 09, 2022 | Area: Northeast India | License: CC BY-NC 4.0

(This article is published under Themed Issue on Literature of Northeast India)
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Under the Canopy of Sal Trees: A New Vocabulary of Performance in Sukracharya Rabha’s Minimal Theatre

Abstract

This paper would be structuring and documenting Rabha’s theories of performance which are heavily laced with ecological concerns, and also his penchant for body-centric performances that explore the contact point between man and nature, the given and made, public zones and biospheres. The paper aims to capture the nuances of his unique ensemble called “green theatre,” something that is akin to a search for roots, a drive to cultivate an “intrinsic rural mechanism”, in the words of H. Kanhailal, a renowned theatre exponent and Rabha’s mentor. There is an urge to capture the ebb and flow of country life, humankind’s vital affinity with nature. Rabha fuses lifeworlds, bio-forms, and landscapes. He gives birth to new grammar and vocabulary of “physical theatre” by weaving the synergy of life into the fabric of performance.

Keywords: Sukracharya Rabha, Theatre of the Sal, Badugduppa Kalakendra, Green Theatre, Body, Space, Ecology

Introduction

The act of situating the oeuvre of Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018) on the map of contemporary theatre practices requires a thorough inspection of the relationship between theatre and nature. Rabha’s attempt at liberating the operations of theatre from the impact of media and its technological strangleholds leads to an interesting re-contouring of dramatic patterns and semiotic principles in regard to the performance text notwithstanding the challenges his unique theatre-aesthetics pose in terms of stage décor, the logic of display and audience-reception. In a world of post-truth, when drama and theatre “rely on the institutions of mass art and the media of mass communication, and examine the rituals of a society in which reality is crucially constructed via its media representation”, Rabha’s conscious dig at the possibilities of digital and electronic reproduction charts out an alternative grammar and vocabulary of theatre: his penchant for ecological balance further enables him to form a close association with nature, a move away from a world ruled by technology (Potter and Gann 2016, 135). Rabha’s theatrical language conjures up local and indigenous elements in favour of a site-specific performance. His plays are staged in the lap of nature and there is a total admonishment of the need for artificial light, sound, stage and technological aids in the mentioned province. Notwithstanding the entanglements and overlaps inherent in the process of representation itself, Rabha’s insistence on drawing a line of demarcation between theatre and media finds an echo in Pavis too. In this regard Pavice maintains:

The task would be an arduous one, however, and we will note only that theatre and media tend to move in opposite directions. Theatre tends towards simplification, minimalism and the fundamental reduction of the direct exchange between actor and audience. The media, on the other hand, tend to become more complicated and sophisticated through technological advances and are, by definition, reproducible and multipliable ad infinitum. Being part of technological, but also cultural and ideological practices, of a process of information and disinformation, the media can easily expand their audience to become accessible to a potentially infinite number of spectators (Pavis 1998, 207).

Sukracharya Rabha, the man behind the innovative Theatre of the Sal festival in Rampur, Goalpara, (Assam) is always seen interrogating the reliance of theatre on mass media and the latter’s nature of repeating and diversifying the ‘ready-made’, ‘immediate’ and ‘served-up’ ingredients of performance (Pavis 1998, 207). In the rural set-up where he performs, Rabha intends to do away with the influence of technology on audience tastes and expectations, not to mention his derision for ‘the artificial’. In his performances there is an urge to capture the ebb and flow of country life, humankind’s vital affinity with nature. Rabha fuses lifeworlds, bio-forms, and landscapes. He gives birth to a new kind of theatre by weaving the synergy of life into the fabric of performance. In his words, “This can be achieved only by aligning the make-believe world of theatre with the world of nature, by borrowing from the latter its music, rhythm, light, silence, darkness…its elements” (In a personal interview with the author). In the grove of Sal trees where Rabha performs, “theatre is a subsidiary of nature; it is a process of reflection that conjoins the external world with the inner sanctum of the soul, but with varying degrees of freedom and imagination” (In a personal interview with the author). His is a move away from mainstream Assamese theatre, which is more of a consumerist spectacle, an urban hodge-podge, “an unwanted noise, a piercing shriek, a cacophony” (In a personal interview with the author). In Rabha’s words:

Amidst the craziness of saleable entertainment, organic traditional media are hardly making sense to the people nowadays. Popular media are now affected by the idea of commerce. This notion of consumerism applies to all…the way processes of de-rooting are emerging in the new world through marketing strategies and consumerism, it is almost impossible for us to look back at the notion of ‘belongingness’ (Baruah 2019, 50).

Towards a Minimalist Theatre

Sukracharjya Rabha’s Badungduppa Kalakendra founded in 1998 in Rampur, Goalpara, creates a performance space out of a lush green Sal grove, leaves, tree trunks, stems, branches and roots. In Badungduppa Kalakendra we are ushered into a world of theatre that is pared down to the core. His is a space of minimal propensities, and it is a kind of theatre that “seeks to reduce its effects, representations and actions to minimum” by dispensing away with exaggerated and excessive modes of presentation, verbal overplay, spectacular visual effects and extraneous layers in the plot (Pavis 1998, 215). Roland Barthes traces the origins of theatrical matter to “atoms of meaning” that can be reduced to “the smallest sign transmitted in time” (Barthes 1964, 258, as cited in Pavis 1998, 214). On one hand we have the distinctiveness of sign and its implications in the constitution of overall meaning, and on the other hand there is a relativity of absorption and segmentation that wholly depends on the changing meanings as per the eclectic reception of the audience. However, Rabha’s conceptualization of minimalist theatre is neither akin to Beckett’s adherence to what is “ontologically unsayable” nor Vinaver’s chamber theatre whose signature styles are “montage, the spaces in between, silence, the unspoken” (Pavis 1998, 215). Rather Rabha’s strategy is to turn the autonomy of ‘the artificial’ (light, sound, and stage) upside down. The stillness of the performance space is occasionally and rarely penetrated by music, that too when there is an extreme necessity, “otherwise a loaded silence pervades the air” (“A Tribute to a Progenitor of New Ideas”, Pathak 2018).

He dispenses away with the proscenium arch by vouching for a rural, idyllic setting— a modest clearing in the middle of a grove. According to Rabha, there is no need for artificial light. He prefers “the intrinsic, regulatory time of nature with the sun as the only source of light” — accordingly “the performance is attuned to a specific time of a day, be it a warm, scorching afternoon or a not so well-lit evening” (“A Tribute to a Progenitor of New Ideas”, Pathak 2018):

There is an occasional play of light and shadow with the canopy of the Sal trees acting as a natural sieve that filters light. The sky acts as the roof on the head. The twitter of a bird, the rustle of the wind-caressed Sal leaves, a clap here and a footfall there—all add to the rhythmic sound that we get to hear, occasionally spiced up by songs with the accompaniment of musical instruments (“A Tribute to a Progenitor of New Ideas”, Pathak 2018).

Rabha’s site-specific performance creates a kind of “displacement through a wedding of artwork to a particular environment” (Crimp 1993, 16-17, as cited in Collins and Nisbet 2012, 103). As an effect, Rabha not only articulates “an exchange between the work of art and the place in which its meanings are defined” but also underlines “its positioning in relation to the political, aesthetic, geographical, and institutional” (Collins and Nisbet 2012, 102).

There is a close affiliation to Japanese theatre, especially in Rabha’s precision and clarity, his employment of pauses, stillness, and silence in his performance. Moreover, the influence of Barong in Balinese is hard to miss in Rabha’s creation of trance-like moments in which a man is momentarily sucked by the instantaneity of the occurrence. Moreover, the fusion of opera with dramatic arts, popularized by Richard Wagner, the preference of shifting tonal centres, chromaticism and Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) found a way to Rabha’s theatre too.

Community Building and the Theatre of the Sal

Sukracharya Rabha’s theatre resists politico-cultural indoctrination by circumventing the stereotypical and accepted. Deeply entrenched in the community-life of his people, his theatre carries at its heart indigenous philosophy, aesthetics and traditions. Usham Rojio, his close aide who happened to witness the genesis of many of his plays, talks about Rabha’s affiliation to the concept of rasong, which means ‘the being of existence’. By attaching rasong to the precepts of ‘live theatre’ Rabha foregrounds a deep understanding of the ‘lived-world’ or the experiential realm in which he is steeped. In the words of Rojio:

What is important concerning the rich concept of rasong is the safeguarding of the community participation and Nature-Human symbiosis. The insistence on performance as a way of creation and being as opposed to the long-held notion of performance as entertainment has brought forth a movement to seek and articulate the phenomenon of performance in its multiple manifestations and imaginings. The concept of rasong was more of bringing closer the celebration of life to nature. We share the idea that this concept has a close affinity with the concept of noiba in our Meitei tradition… (“Together We Heal: Remembering Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018)”, Rojio 2020).

Rojio further dwells on an interesting intersection of two cultures, Manipuri and Assamese, and this he does by harping on the Meitei equivalence of noiba. The word noiba translates to ‘movement’, and its philosophical meaning is “embedded in the cultural practices and day to day lived-world” of the Meitei (“Together We Heal: Remembering Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018)”, Rojio 2020). According to Usham Rojio:

It is believed that just as noiba (movement) of the foetus within the mother’s womb gives her the joyous anticipation of a new life; the Meitei believe that they are immersed in a womb-like Universe, so god and goddess are pleased when they perform dance. Therefore, body movement is life and thus we celebrate life through dancing in Lai Haraoba (“Together We Heal: Remembering Sukracharya Rabha (1977-2018)”, Rojio 2020).

Community participation and a peaceful coexistence with the objects of nature, therefore, form the pulsating life force in both Kanhailal and Rabha’s performances. However, alluding to Rabha’s initiation of and commitment to a huge cultural movement in Rampur, H S Shiva Prakash mentions that,“…he (Rabha) has realized over the years that theatre institutions have to be self-supporting to grow in a desired direction. He had hit upon the idea of setting up small-scale industries in the village. This would ensure jobs for the local people, sustenance for the artists and funding for activities” (Baruah 2019, 91). Rabha maps the aesthetics of rural life in his performances. He also incorporates local ingredients into his theatrical mold by taking resort to folk forms of the Rabha community.

Rampur, near Agia, is a small village, economically backward and far away from nearby urban centres in Goalpara. Even though Rabhas and Bodos chiefly populate this place, the social fabric is multihued because of the ongoing cultural assimilation and harmonious co-existence of micro-communities. In the words of Aparna Sharma, Rabha’s theatre has a deep connection with the Rabha community as his theatrical explorations hinge on a balanced representation of the community’s textile, architecture, music and cultural heritage. Moreover, the ownership of resources like the Sal groves obliquely teaches the practitioners the essence of performance that is efficacious and ritualistic, and that revolves round the everyday tasks and activities of the Rabha community which is chiefly agrarian in nature:

Specific movements were first studied. For instance, how the body moves while working in a rice field flooded with water; or, how does the body traverse distance while climbing a Sal tree; or, indeed, how we rise from a lying position, say when we wake up at dawn…there is an emphasis on the breath that changes in every step with the movement (of the body). Finally, the studied movement was considered for its narrative potential and then applied to theatrical performances (Baruah 2019, 384).

Rabha’s theatre is a consciousness-raising project based on the ethics of harmony, social responsibility and an allegiance to certain forms of community expressions. Moreover, his yearly theatre festival, Under the Sal Tree, attracts audience from all over the world. In Rabha’s words, the practitioners pick up bits and parts from everyday life, from the synchronized vocabulary of rural life and in the process cleanse and purify these forms and constructions to implant them in a new terrain or locale. This transference is an intrinsic part of his theatrical process as “Badungduppa’s attempt is to inherit, interpret and evolve through immediate contexts, mother nature and village life” (Baruah 2019, 152). Such a unique synthesis paves way for an alternative model that maintains a distance from “the ultra-commercial and cheap entertainment gimmicks” (Baruah 2019, 153). Rabha is also against publicity of any sort. In his words, “We have never been anywhere to sell tickets; we have never announced anything loudly. Nor we pasted any banner, poster elsewhere” (Baruah 2019, 153-4). Nevertheless, every year thousands of people from both India and abroad, ranging from scholars, practitioners, theatre exponents to common people, throng Rampur to partake of the spectacle under the Sal trees.

It would not be wrong to say that Rabha envisages theatre as a community exercise, a collective enterprise that takes in its fold the whole village or the entire area. He involves “the whole community— the Rabha community that he belongs to, by giving them back what was their—the theatre” (Baruah 2019, 180). As a performance maker Rabha is adept in creating passageways that help in negotiating, appropriating and admixing multifarious cultural forms. He also slashes the taut line of demarcation between mainstream theatre and regional practices by drawing upon the raw materials and resources of a community’s collective memory. Interestingly, he moulds and chisels these ingredients and segments, oral lores and narratives, through a special act of “concentrating” on “the (bodily), mythical and ritual” axes (Baruah 2019, 182). Rabha explores:

their delicate relationship with nature and finally this relationship underlies how a text is developed. It is this particular attention to break down the text into infinitesimal bits and to blend it with the type of existences mentioned above, and the act of giving it back to the audience with the energy of the soil, and leave the audience susceptible to a performance (to borrow Clifford Geertz’s expression) that is “deep” and “thick”…(Baruah 2019, 182)

Therefore, the performance text is made up of basic units borrowed from the rich repertoire of community life and also, from the narrative of the everyday which, then, undergoes “tangible manifestations of the intangible experience” in the performance space (Baruah 2019, 182-83).

The Performance Space in Badungduppa

On a small mound of earth Rabha created his stage. It is created on the ground level and the use of wood or iron is discouraged. As intended, the audience and the performers stand on the same level as there is no elevation of the proscenium to draw a line of division between the two. The purpose behind this technique is a conscious debunking of the idea of theatre as a mechanism to create illusion and fantasy. Right from the beginning, Rabha makes an effort not to weigh the audience down with tricks to sustain illusion, an unnecessary endeavour as per his theatre tactics. Rabha narrates how the surreal environment of the Sal grove adds a special charm and ambience to his performance. Of course, the sieved light filtering through the canopy of Sal trees and the southern winds whistling and rustling the Sal leaves create natural light and sound. There is, “A sudden dappled light. A sudden flight of an unseen bird. A faint echo of the jili in the distance” that add to, supplant and blend with Rabha’s performances (Baruah 2019, 188). Due to this strange concoction of natural elements there is an infusion of a layered semantics in his performances. Rabha reminiscences:

A narrow path passes through the jungle. There was a small open area on the side. We cleared that area, prepared benches and space for the stage. The idea of a gallery made of bamboo was implemented to preserve the ecological balance and it is in tandem with the idea of theatre close to nature. The gallery benches were thus prepared from bamboo and betel nut trees… The cyclorama was prepared with hay. The wings too (Baruah 2019, 188-89).

Sangeeta Barooh Pisharoty in her article, “Under the Sal Tree, A Unique Theatre Festival that Unites the Villages of Assam” (2017), discusses the ingenious stage arrangement, décor and style of Rabha’s theatre:

Every December, young volunteers gather to erect a mud stage under the Sal trees. The backdrop is delicately arched with a fence of straws. Bamboo planks are placed around the stage in an ascending order to seat the gathering, like in any open air auditorium.

Besides being located inside a forest, what makes the venue unique is that the performers don’t make use of mics or artificial lights – features commonly associated with proscenium theatre.

The actors typically modulate their voices so their dialogues reach the audience. The Sal grove also acts as a natural receptacle for trapping the sound. The background music is played live and the stage is set up in a way use the sun rays filtering through the trees as the natural spotlight (“Under the Sal Tree, A Unique Theatre Festival that Unites the Villages of Assam”, Pisharoty 2017).

Under the Tutelage of Heinsam Kanhailal

In Rabha’s theories of performance which are heavily laced with ecological concerns, there is a penchant for body-centric performance that explores the contact point between man and nature, the given and made, public zones and biospheres. His unique ensemble called “green theatre” is akin to a search for roots. It can be termed as a drive to cultivate an “intrinsic rural mechanism”, in the words of H. Kanhailal, a renowned theatre exponent and Rabha’s mentor. Kanhailal’s Kalakshetra Manipur is situated at the outer-most limits of Imphal, precisely at the foothills of the valley of Manipur. It seems “to have quietly celebrated, over the many years since its inception, this position of silence and liminality as a source of strength, creativity and resilience” (“The Lost Wor(l)dsof Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). In “Ritual Theatre: Theatre of Transition” (2004), Kanhailal elaborates on his art of performance as such:

Believing in the autonomy of theatre, we swallowed the text and absorbed it into our body instead of speaking out the lines through lip movement, facial and finger gestures. We shattered the whole network of illusion on the stage. We were no longer burdened with the heavy light, costume and make-up. We cleaned the stage as an empty space where we began to unfold the autonomy of theatre…(Krasner 2008, 550)

Kanhailal has been a strong influence on Rabha. The latter’s definition of theatre as an “inward churning of emotions and feelings”, “…a glance at one’s own soul and body” has intersections with his mentor’s theories of performance (In a personal interview with the author). The methodical minimalism culminating in novel experiments by Kanhailal, especially in the late 1970s and early 1980s are noteworthy. Like his mentor who trained the villagers and the market women of the famous Nupi Keithel of Imphal, Rabha too worked with the rustic lot, the villagers of Rampur. Both shunned the Western proscenium and the “spatial politics of the city” for community spaces which are more specifically, sites of interactions for the spectators and actors (“The Lost Wor(l)dsof Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). In this regard, Kanhailal’s Nupi Lan is noteworthy which, in the words of Rustom Bharucha, is “an open-air production involving approximately 70 working women from the Women’s Bazaar in Imphal” (Bharucha 1992, 66). Also:

The production created, through improvisations with the ‘market women’, simultaneously juxtaposed images of women in the festival of Lai Haraoba (perhaps especially the maibis) and the imas of the market, followed by a theatrical representation of the historical Nupi Lans. Distinctions between spectator and actor were strangely blurred during performance of this theatre event in the open public space of the city (“The Lost Wor(l)dsof Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016).

The aesthetics behind Nupi Lan grew out of his disenchantment with the draconian AFSPA, an Act that is much criticized for catalyzing bloody sagas of communitarian suffering. Without any obvious slant towards any ideology, his performance subtly touches upon the hidden, regulatory political force running at the underbelly of Manipur and the regimes of control of the military on the public spaces. The politico-linguistic domination of the India that Manipur battles every day, and also, a lopsided and partial Meitei nationalism that is raising its head slowly in the state creep into the fabric of Kanhailal’s performance, thereby impregnating it with issues of identity and citizenship. The complexities of resistance movements and the authoritarian position of the Indian state as a “military-legal killing machine” are not to be ignored:

After Nupi Lan, Kanhailal continued his career with similar projects that sought to break down the schism between political theatre and the people it claimed to represent. He worked in a village called Umatheili or the Valley of Durga to produce a play called Sanjennaha (Cowherd) from a community of rural non-actors, followed by a production that emerged from extensive work with the young men and women of the Paitei tribe of Churachandrapur (“The Lost Wor(l)dsof Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016).

The overlaps between Kanhialal’s and Rabha’s theatre are hinted at by Richard Gough when he maintained that the “enchantment” and “bewilderment” that we discern in their art stem from a common place, the magical woods: in Rabha’s case, it is the “Macbeth jungle” (the term was first coined by Rabha’s ally and a famous theatre exponent HS Shiva Prakash) in which “identities are lost and changed”, where there is a “possibility to affect change” (Baruah 2019, 72-74). Richard Gough, artistic director, Centre for Performance Research, Wales, used five words to describe the theatre of Sukracharya Rabha:

Disorientation, Bewilderment, Interruption, Turbulence and Contagion or Infection. These might all seem rather negative concepts but I want to think through the positive implication and provocations that lie behind these words…Three images, so you all see I’m following a sort of classical structure of three acts and five acts but that actually make it eight which is not a good number in some cultures, too symmetrical, too balanced and so to follow the Japanese aesthetics I must add one, another one which will operate as a sort of sub-terranean theme and that is transformation, not just as a theoretical separation but practical realisation with an apparatus to affect change which I am feeling, seeing here (Baruah 2019, 73).

Gough has first-hand experience of watching 20 minutes of Rabha’s performance at Goalpara. In a letter to Kanhailal, he mentions Rabha’s act of mobilizing the village women to participate in the theatre movement— he calls it “the power of women combined with a political edge” (Baruah 2019, 75). :

I like the sense that what is happening here is that we have all been infected, that we have all been contaminated and that we take this disease, so much like Auto’s vision of theatre, that now we take this disease, this viral infection with us to other parts of India and as for me, I will take it back to the UK. But through that it begins to spread and I think that is what I am seeing, I think what I am seeing is the political- with a small ‘p’- a project that is happening here. Your (Kanhailal’s) work needs to be distributed and diffused and needs to find other emanations, other forms of it. I very much enjoyed the production of Sukra. It was very different from your work but he is clearly taking the inspiration (from you) (Baruah 2019, 75).

The power of the collective in Rabha’s theatre lies in the presence of women’s bodies on stage— both Rabha and Kanhailal draw upon women’s embodied resistance, and thus, negotiates the binaries between inner/outer and private/public to propagate progressive notions of femininity. By moving away from the urban metropolis, Rabha reevaluates the “nation-state’s systemic legacy of failure to address issues surrounding women’s “visibility” in civil and political spaces” (Purkayastha 2015, 519). How does a woman utilize theatre space is a matter of concern for both Rabha and Kanhailal. Does this space give a woman a possibility to reassess her representation in history? The village women of Rampur whom Rabha ropes in for his performance can see the emergence of a new logic of retaliation; the structural limitations of patriarchal thoughts are exposed and tampered with. Theatre in this way can be an answer to what the Indian nation-state fails to recognize: women’s labor or granting her “equal access to civil liberty” (Purkayastha 2015, 519).

The Body that Elongates, Constricts, Moves and Stays Still

When the borderlines between the body and its technological mediations are inflected, how do we frame the immediacy of agency in a site-specific performance? If Rabha’s creation of an alternative corporeality hinges on the location and reliance of human conditions on a special spatio-temporal configuration, how do we look at “ontological exhaustion” which is aesthetically linked to “the modern or postmodern age of simulations” (McMullan 2001, 167)? Taking account of the proclivities of self-willed bodies that slip away from the director’s hands, and also the bodies-in-performance that are ever “dissolving, redefining or establishing identity”, Paula Cooey draws our attention to “the ambiguity of the body as both site for and artefact of human imagination” (1994: 42, 110). Cooey connects “the phenomenological concept of the lived experience of the body (the body as site) with the body as an agent of its own symbolic creation”, contending that we should keep an eye on how a body is normalized, mediated and reproduced in a historical moment (1994:42). Therefore it is impossible to do way with the “corporeal labour of performance, in terms of the physical discipline which has produced this sign / spectacle” and the body’s sustained engagement with the ever changing norms of perception, truth, and beauty (McMullan 2000, 111). On stage, a body is more than a material, aesthetic and political sign.

Rabha’s framing of the embodied experience of a community, chiefly his discourse that extends beyond the material limits of a body, can also be read as a commentary on the connections between theatre space and the bodily ‘other’. The systemic assaults on those who are denied entry into mainstream spaces and the larger praxis of life, in Gautam Bhadra’s words, point out the “curious complicity” inherent in perceptual modes of representation and historiography. This does not deride the body’s vehement resistance to the “signifying economy inscribed upon it” and regimes of political order and ideology by its act of forging webs of instantaneous connections with audience and theatre-environments.

In the plays of Badungduppa, “the body is a prop. A utensil. Something that is elastic, and can be moulded and filled” (Baruah 2019, 236). The regular long walk of the theatre artists in the early morning to the heart of the groves, hills and rivers is necessary to understand the language of nature, to know its soul. Such expeditions coupled with numerous breathing exercises and meditation, “open the doors of our corporeal frames” to the bounty of nature and help mirror it, which eventually leads to a transcendence “beyond our own selves” (Baruah 2019, 236). Rabha is interested in a state that is reached when “the corporeal frame, of flesh and blood, formed out of cosmological happenings cease to exist and we become a part of nature” (Baruah 2019, 236). Every day after the morning walk, Rabha’s artists and workers practise “yoga, maati-aakhora, Manipuri martial arts, Kalaripayattu of Kerela”, and various European forms to make the body flexible (Baruah 2019, 237). In Badungduppa, more than the expressive potential of words, an extra emphasis is given on the responses and reactions of the body, its gestures, distinctive movements and the embodiment of “each rasa, each emotion, each stimulus” (Baruah 2019, 237). Rabha describes this process as such:

Most significantly, the objective is to make the body capable and strong enough to elicit any kind of reaction or impulse in a way that leaves an impression on the audience. So that we are able to bury in the depths of our minds waves of thoughts, that when mulled upon, are emitted at once as vibrations transferred, transfused, and transmitted to the audience. The more immediate this process, the greater intensity and pervasiveness of the play. The reverse would mean a weak statement of the play conveyed or weak acting performances (Baruah 2019, 237).

Along with the semiotics of the body, body-art and body-painting, certain formulae and symbols are devised for the special purpose of replacing dialogues and at times, these are either used as add-ons or alternatives to dialogues. More than an abundance of words, a meaningful silence pervades which is loaded with layers of signification at a different level. Linguistic assemblages and verbal excess are sacrificed for distinctive bodily gestures and movements— the power of the non-verbal is foregrounded. By resisting the spectacular and gaudy, Rabha’s theories of the body aim at unmasking and denuding the body by stripping off the extraneous, artificial layers. In this regard H S Shiva Prakash makes an apt comparison between Rabha’s practices and his mentor Kanhailal’s style, “The theatre expression that Badungduppa developed was no doubt inspired by Kanhailal’s ‘Theatre of the Earth’, which is an orchestration of the movements of the body, breath, mind and rhythms of nature” (Baruah 2019, 89). However, we can rope in both Sabitri and Kanhailal in this regard who as theatre exponents share and disseminate a common belief that “bodies, when stripped bare of urban affectations (inhibitions that restricted the expression of vulnerability, for example) and sharpened by processes of psychophysical training, could release narratives of collective pain in a way that was unmitigatedly political” (“The Lost Wor(l)ds of Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). Both of them speak about the role of the body in the cultivation of empathy, it being a resonator that catches “the reverberations of pain” which is not their own (“The Lost Wor(l)ds of Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). Partly, Sabitri’s adept imitation of the sounds and movements of animals stem from a need to “withdraw from the soul-killing noises of the city” and to know “how to become animal, in order that she may not shrink from encountering the horror of the human body in a state of absolute violation” (“The Lost Wor(l)ds of Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). Both Sabitri and Kanhailal quip, “How to embody, and not simply express, another’s pain?” (“The Lost Wor(l)ds of Heisnam Kanhailal”, Banerjee 2016). This question takes on a totally different colour in the wake of insurgency and counter-insurgency movements in Manipur when communitarian violence has torn the social fabric of the state. The Indian government’s employment of repressive tools to silence the entire valley is another example of apathy towards the state. However, the expressive potential of the body is highlighted by Kanhailal in an interview with Naveen Kishore and Biren Das Sharma for the Seagull Theatre Quarterly in January, 1996. He states, “The child, I looked at the new born child crying. I noticed that the whole body of the child cries. But actors only use a certain resonator. Actors do this because we are socially and culturally conditioned. […] what we need is the creation of a new body culture…” (Katyal 1997, 46).

Creating New Permutations and Combinations

Evelien Pullens, theatre director and puppeteer from Netherlands, after an intensive workshop in Badungduppa, co-created a play with Rabha named Bijuli in which she explored the possibilities of physical theatre, music and puppetry. She laced the play with images from Western theatre, but the mould given by Rabha to Bijuli was noteworthy, “Sukra showed me how you can express emotions and messages by the body. Body language went hand in hand with the puppets and objects, partly made of natural materials. We used rice bags, leaves, seeds, jute, bamboo and traditional cotton” (Baruah, 2019, 97). Also, her Soul Tree theatre-research-workshop which she did for Netherlands Theatre Embassy is based on a special communication and communion with the trees, like singing from a distance and singing near the trees, calling out commands while climbing trees, “hiding and acting in the middle of the dense green vegetation” (Baruah 2019, 209). The participants explored natural environments like “fields…rocks, hills”, fish ponds too and honed “theatre skills such as timing, group-balance, and action-reaction” (Baruah 2019, 209-210). The outcome is quite interesting:

In the second half of the workshop we started to extend our research to natural objects in theatre. We mainly focused on leaves, sticks, seeds, vegetables and mud. We concentrated on the world of insects. We started to make them out of natural materials without the use of any glue, pins or other artificial help. So we moved into puppetry as we let the insects come to life (Baruah 2019, 209-210).

Some of the unique experimentations by Badungduppa are carried out in the heart of the forest, amidst the lush Sal trees. It is noteworthy that the grove extends an interesting acoustics to the soundscape of the performance and provides scopes for “disparate aural tones, textures and affects” (Baruah 2019, 385). An optimal place for forging “intimacies with other beings” and life-forms, his theatre has a deep ecological understanding of the physical environment and shared materiality (Arons 2012, 567). The democratizing impulse stems from the belief that to a great extent both the human and the non human are “enmeshed in a dense network of relations” with no “firm, bright boundaries between inside and outside, male and female, life and nonlife, or between and within species” (Arons 2012, 567, 569). Rabha’s act of imagining and imaging permeable world/s of nature in theatrical spaces is noteworthy as this leads to an “open-ended concatenation of interrelations that blur and confound boundaries at practically any level: between species, between the living and the nonliving, between organism and environment” (Morton 2010, 275-76).

References:

Arons, Wendy. (2012). Queer Ecology/Contemporary Plays (QUEER RESEARCH IN PERFORMANCE). Theatre Journal, Vol. 64, No. 4, pp. 565-582.

Banerjee, Trina Nileena. (2016, October 7). “The Lost Wor(l)ds of Heisnam Kanhailal”. Raiot, Retrieved from https://raiot.in/the-lost-of-worlds-of-heisnam-kanhailal/#_ftn1

Baruah, Nilutpal. (2019). Sal Soul Sukracharya. Goalpara: Badungduppa Publications.

Bharucha, Rustom. (1992). The Theatre of Kanhailal: Pebet and Memoirs of Africa. Calcutta: Seagull Books.

Chaudhuri, Asha Kuthari. (2018, June 14). “Rhythms of the Sal Trees: Sukracharya Rabha”. The Thumb Print- A Magazine from the East. Retrieved from http://www.thethumbprintmag.com/rhythms-of-the-sal-trees-sukracharjya-rabha/

Collins, Jane and Nisbet, Andrew (Eds.). (2012). Theatre and Performance Design, A Reader in Scenography. London: Routledge.

Cooey, Paula. (1994). Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP.

Katyal, Anjum (Ed.). (1997). Seagull Theatre Quarterly: Theatre in Manipur Today. Calcutta: The Seagull Foundation for the Arts.

Kanhailal, Heisnam. (2008). “Ritual Theatre: Theatre of Transition (2004)”, in Krasner, David (Ed.). Theatre in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology (pp. 550). Oxford: Blackwell.

McMullan, Anna. (Fall 2000/Spring 2001). Performance, Technology and the Body in Beckett’s Late Theatre. Journal of Beckett Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 and 2, pp. 165- 172.

Morton, Timothy. (March 2010). Guest Column: Queer Ecology. PMLA, Vol. 125, No. 2. pp. 273- 282.

Neveldine, Robert Burns. (1998). Bodies at Risk: Unsafe Limits in Romanticism and Postmodernism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Pathak, Namrata. (2016, June 2). Personal interview with Sukracharya Rabha.

Pathak, Namrata. (2018, June 15). “A Tribute to a Progenitor of New Ideas”. The Thumb Print- A Magazine from the East. Retrieved from http://www.thethumbprintmag.com/a-tribute-to-a-progenitor-of-new-ideas-sukracharjya-rabha/

Pavis, Patrice. (2008). Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts and Analysis. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.

Pisharoty, Sangeeta Barooah. (2017, January 10).“Under the Sal Tree, A Unique Theatre Festival that Unites the Villages of Assam”. The Wire. Retrieved from https://thewire.in/culture/sal-tree-unique-theatre-festival-unites-villages-assam

Potter, Keith and Gann, Kayle (Eds.). (2016). The Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music. London: Routledge.

Purkayastha, Prarthana. (2015). Women in Revolutionary Theatre: IPTA, Labor, and Performance. Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 518-535.

Rojio, Usham. (2020, June 8). “Together We Heal: Remembering Sukracharya Rabha (1977- 2008)”. Raiot, Retrieved from https://raiot.in/together-we-heal-remembering-sukracharjya-rabha-1977-2018/

Murray R., Eleanor James and Sarah Ann Standing. (2014). Eco Theatre. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 35-44 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Performing Arts Journal, Inc.

Namrata Pathak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at North-Eastern Hill University (NEHU) Tura campus, Meghalaya. An MPhil and PhD from English and Foreign Languages University (formerly, CIEFL), Hyderabad, she is an academic, poet, and a critic. Her latest books are Indira Goswami: Margins and Beyond (2022, Routledge) and an upcoming Reader on Arun Sarma (Sahitya Akademi, 2022). Her debut collection of poems, That’s How Mirai Eats a Pomegranate was brought out in 2018 by Red River. Her poems are included in the Sangam House Monsoon Issue (July, 2019) and anthologies forthcoming from Aleph and other publishing houses.

The Weird ‘Others’: An ‘Alternative’ Understanding of the Witches of Macbeth from Feminist Perspective

Gender Studies/Theatre/Volume 13 Number 1 2021

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Reema Chakrabarti¹, PhD & Shah Al Mamun Sarkar², PhD

¹Assistant Professor of English, Techno Main Salt Lake, Kolkata-700091, India, chakrabarti.reema2012@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2136-7349

²Assistant Professor of English, ICFAI University Tripura, Kamalghat, West Tripura-799210, India, shahalmamunsarkar@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9019-6577

Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.39

The Weird ‘Others’: An ‘Alternative’ Understanding of the Witches of Macbeth from Feminist Perspective

Abstract

This paper attempts to re-interpret the witches of Macbeth from a Feminist perspective. Both critics as well as the ordinary readers mostly receive them in a negative light. Doing so, they overlook the fact that women like these witches are relegated to the margins and share a history of being discriminated and vulnerable to attacks. Within the text, they are humiliated as the ‘weird others’ and compared to ‘bubbles’ on earth. To this date, people have the tendency to marginalize and discriminate women who posit their individuality in their socially reclusive lifestyle. While analyzing their character from a Feminist perspective, the paper will explore their trauma and identify their mischief as a source of rebellion. By making such an alternative reading of the text, the work aims to create a ‘shock-effect’ among people who continue to discriminate such marginalized women.

Keywords: Women, Witches, Macbeth, Feminism, Identity.

Shakespearean and Brechtian Drama and Theatre: An Audience Response Perspective

Theatre/Volume 13 Number 1 2021

319 views

Vishal Joshi¹ and Shakuntala Kunwar²

¹Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, HNB Garhwal University (A Central University), Srinagar-246174, Uttarakhand (India), Email: joshi.vishal84@gmail.com, ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1922-2677

²Professor, Department of English, HNB Garhwal University (A Central University), Srinagar-246174, Uttarakhand (India), Email: shakuntalarauthan@gmail.com

Volume 13, Number 1, 2021 I Full Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.25

Shakespearean and Brechtian Drama and Theatre: An Audience Response Perspective

Abstract

Shakespearean Dramatic theatre and Brechtian Epic theatre represent two divergent paradigms in the field of genre-drama. The plays falling under these two varying paradigms invite their readers or audience to learn to approach them by adopting a different theoretical perspective or critical stance. As per Martin Esslin “human capacities can change through time: human beings may learn to adjust themselves to new ways of perception …, and gain practice in accepting new ways of seeing both reality and art” (15). In the proposed study, the two plays chosen for comparative analyses are Hamlet by Shakespeare and Mother Courage and Her Children by Brecht: the former one centring on empathy, and the other one on alienation. Of the two paradigms discussed in the present study, in one type, admittedly, an emotional catharsis occurs and the second theoretically disclaims emotional catharsis.

Keywords: illusion, empathy, catharsis, hamartia, probability, bisociation, introjections, projection, verfremdungseffekt, alienation effect, leichtigkeit, spass, laconic language, Hegel’s dialectics.

Performative Retrieving of Tradition for Socio-Political Intervention: A Study of the Protest Theatre of Dario Fo

Theatre

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Sohaib Alam¹ & Farhan Ahmad²

¹Assistant Professor, Department of English, College of Sciences and Humanities, Prince Sattam Bin Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia. ORCID: 0000-0002-9972-9357. Email: s.alam@psau.edu.sa (Corresponding Author)

²Assistant Professor, Department of English Studies, Faculty of Indian and Foreign Languages, Akal University, Talwandi Sabo, India. ORCID: 0000-0001-5710-7800. Email: farhan_eng@auts.ac.in

Volume 12, Number 6, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n6.22

Abstract

Theatre provides Dario Fo with a unique vantage point through which he vents out his thoughts on issues of class, justice, equality and lays bare in his performances that are comic, derisive, and outspoken people’s discomfort with the prevailing order. They are an indictment of the establishment’s perceived apathy and neglect of the oppressed groups. He does not let the zany spirit of his performances to overshadow his art but redirects it in a constructive and meaningful way.

Keywords: performance, folklore, popular culture, hegemony, dissent

Negotiating Masculine Circles: Female Agency in Aphra Behn’s Work

Gender Studies/Theatre/Volume 12 Number 4 2020

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Arifa Ghani Rahman
Associate Professor, Department of English and Humanities, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. ORCID: 0000-0003-1165-2541. Email: arifa.rahman@ulab.edu.bd

Volume 12, Number 4, July-September, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n4.03

Abstract

In her works, Aphra Behn examines the possibilities of female agency in a patriarchal world. This paper begins by contextualizing Behn’s work within the male literary tradition in which she wrote to understand the place of female agency. Her play The Rover is closely examined to show this agency in heterosexual relationships and its connection to money and parental/patriarchal authority. The paper also analyzes the interrelationship between subjects and objects of desire. The use of masks in the play as instruments that accord temporary liberation or empowerment is discussed, and the paper questions whether female agency in Behn’s world is real or merely assumed. A poem is also examined to reinforce the conclusion which suggests that, despite empowerment in various forms, female agency is ultimately only temporary. However, the paper also questions whether Behn had ulterior motives in presenting female agency as unsustainable.

Keywords: Female agency, Empowerment, Objects of desire, Masks, Masculine

What is Performance Studies?

Featured/Performance Studies/Theatre/Vol 5 No 2

5K views

Richard Schechner

Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

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Because performance studies is so broad-ranging and open to new possibilities, no one can actually grasp its totality or press all its vastness and variety into a single writing book. My points of departure are my own teaching, research, artistic practice, and life experiences.

Performances are actions. As a discipline, performance studies takes actions very seriously in four ways. First, behavior is the “object of study” of performance studies. Although performance studies scholars use the “archive” extensively – what’s in books, photographs, the archaeological record, historical remains, etc. – their dedicated focus is on the “repertory,” namely, what people do in the activity of their doing it. Second, artistic practice is a big part of the performance studies project. A number of performance studies scholars are also practicing artists working in the avant-garde, in community-based performance, and elsewhere; others have mastered a variety of non-Western and Western traditional forms. The relationship between studying performance and doing performance is integral. Third, fieldwork as “participant observation” is a much-prized method adapted from anthropology and put to new uses. In anthropological fieldwork, participant observation is a way of learning about cultures other than that of the field-worker. In anthropology, for the most part, the “home culture” is Western, the “other” non-Western. But in performance studies, the “other” may be a part of one’s own culture (non-Western or Western), or even an aspect of one’s own behavior. That positions the performance studies fieldworker at a Brechtian distance, allowing for criticism, irony, and personal commentary as well as sympathetic participation. In this active way, one performs fieldwork. Taking a critical distance from the objects of study and self invites revision, the recognition that social circumstances– including knowledge itself – are not fixed, but subject to the “rehearsal process” of testing and revising. Fourth, it follows that performance studies is actively involved in social practices and advocacies. Many who practice performance studies do not aspire to ideological neutrality. In fact, a basic theoretical claim is that no approach or position is “neutral”. There is no such thing as unbiased. The challenge is to become as aware as possible of one’s own stances in relation to the positions of others – and then take steps to maintain or change positions. Keep Reading

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