Download or read book Utpal Dutt and Political Theatre in Postcolonial India written by Mallarika Sinha Roy and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-11 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the most significant playwrights and theatre-makers of postcolonial India, Utpal Dutt (1929–1993), was an early exponent of rethinking colonial history through political theatre. Dutt envisaged political theatre as part of the larger Marxist project, and his incorporation of new developments in Marxist thinking, including the contributions of Antonio Gramsci, makes it possible to conceptualise his protagonists as insurgent subalterns. A decolonial approach to staging history remained a significant element in Dutt's artistic project. This Element examines Dutt's passionate engagement with Marxism and explores how this sense of urgency was actioned through the writing and producing of plays about the peasant revolts and armed anti-colonial movements which took place during the period of British rule. Drawing on contemporary debates in political theatre regarding the autonomy of the spectator and the performance of history, the author locates Dutt's political theatre in a historical frame.
Download or read book Utpal Dutt and Political Theatre in Postcolonial India written by Mallarika Sinha Roy and published by . This book was released on 2024-04-15 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the most significant playwrights and theatre-makers of postcolonial India, Utpal Dutt (1929-1993), was an early exponent of rethinking colonial history through political theatre. Dutt envisaged political theatre as part of the larger Marxist project, and his incorporation of new developments in Marxist thinking, including the contributions of Antonio Gramsci, makes it possible to conceptualise his protagonists as insurgent subalterns. A decolonial approach to staging history remained a significant element in Dutt's artistic project. This Element examines Dutt's passionate engagement with Marxism and explores how this sense of urgency was actioned through the writing and producing of plays about the peasant revolts and armed anti-colonial movements which took place during the period of British rule. Drawing on contemporary debates in political theatre regarding the autonomy of the spectator and the performance of history, the author locates Dutt's political theatre in a historical frame.
Download or read book Acts of Authority Acts of Resistance written by Nandi Bhatia and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2010-02-01 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its importance to literary and cultural texts of resistance, theater has been largely overlooked as a field of analysis in colonial and postcolonial studies. Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance seeks to address that absence, as it uniquely views drama and performance as central to the practice of nationalism and anti-colonial resistance. Nandi Bhatia argues that Indian theater was a significant force in the struggle against oppressive colonial and postcolonial structures, as it sought to undo various schemes of political and cultural power through its engagement with subjects derived from mythology, history, and available colonial models such as Shakespeare. Bhatia's attention to local histories within a postcolonial framework places performance in a global and transcultural context. Drawing connections between art and politics, between performance and everyday experience, Bhatia shows how performance often intervened in political debates and even changed the course of politics. One of the first Western studies of Indian theater to link the aesthetics and the politics of that theater, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance combines in-depth archival research with close readings of dramatic texts performed at critical moments in history. Each chapter amplifies its themes against the backdrop of specific social conditions as it examines particular dramatic productions, from The Indigo Mirror to adaptations of Shakespeare plays by Indian theater companies, illustrating the role of theater in bringing nationalist, anticolonial, and gendered struggles into the public sphere. Nandi Bhatia is Associate Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.
Download or read book The Rights of Man written by Utpal Dutt and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utpal Dutt (1929 93), playwright, director and actor, an inspiration and role model for the activist theatre person. Whether through the proscenium theatre, street performance, the traditional strolling theatre-in-the-round, or cinema, Dutt tried to take revolutionary theatre to the widest mass of people, with political messages for every turning point in a highly sensitive and rapidly changing political scenario, redefining his relationship with the political leadership again and again, getting into violent confrontations with various forces, being driven underground, and getting jailed in the process. His legacy of plays and other writing remain a valuable chapter in Indian theatre history. Rights of Man is the first English-language translation of Maanusher Adhikaré, Dutt s landmark play dramatizing the infamous Scottsboro Trials of African-American boys in the American South of the 1930s. A critical introduction explores the historical context, problems of dramatic translation, and postcolonial aspects of the play. Includes an extensive bibliography and three crucial appendices: other American Scottsboro plays such as Langston Hughes Scottsboro Limited (1931) and Edgar Nkosi White s Ghosts: Live from Galilee (1993) and Judge James Horton s historic trial opinions published in 1931.
Download or read book Decolonising African Theatre written by Samuel Ravengai and published by . This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decolonisation can be pursued in different ways. After many years of developing a critical language to engage coloniality, the most urgent need in African theatre is to develop new theories and methods in our manufactories. This Element uses Afroscenology as a theory to read and comment on African theatre. The Element particularly focuses on the history of laboratories in which it was tested and emerged, the historicization of rombic theatre and the crafting of a theory of the playtext which has been named theatric theory to distinguish it from the Aristotelian dramatic theory. The second dimension of the theory is the performatic technique. This Element also explain Afrosonic mime through examples drawn from the workshops conducted in training performers.
Download or read book An Introduction to Post Colonial Theatre written by Brian Crow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-03-21 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book Brian Crow and Chris Banfield provide an introduction to post-colonial theatre by concentrating on the work of major dramatists from the Third World and subordinated cultures in the first world. Crow and Banfield consider the plays of such writers as Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard and his collaborators from Africa; Derek Walcott from the West Indies; August Wilson and Jack Davis, who write from and about the experience of Black communities in the USA and Australia respectively; and Badal Sircar and Girish Karnad from India. Although these dramatists reflect diverse cultures and histories, they share the common condition of cultural subjection or oppression, which has shaped their theatres. Each chapter contains an informative list of primary source material and further reading about the dramatists. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of theatre and cultural history.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography written by Tracy C. Davis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-03 with total page 972 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography sets the agenda for inclusive and wide-ranging approaches to writing history, embracing the diverse perspectives of the twenty-first century and Critical Media History. Written by an international team of authors whose expertise spans a multitude of historical periods and cultures, this collection of fascinating essays poses the central question: "what is specific to the historiography of the performative?" The study of theatre, in conjunction with the wider sphere of performance, involves an array of multi-faceted methods for collecting evidence, interpreting sources, and creating meaning. Reflecting on issues of recording — from early modern musical scores, through VHS-technology to latest digital procedures — and on what is missing from records or oblique in practices, the contributors convey how theatre and performance history is integral to social and cultural relations. This expertly curated collection repositions theatre and performance history and is essential reading for Theatre and Performance Studies students or those interested in social and cultural history more generally.
Download or read book Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900 2000 written by Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Asian Theatre and Performance 1900 – 2000 is a ground-breaking survey, tracking the advent of modern drama in Japan, India, China, Korea and Southeast Asia. It considers the shaping power of realism and naturalism, the influence of Western culture, the relationship between theatrical modernisation and social modernisation, and how theatre operates in contemporary Asian society. Organised by period, nation and region, each chapter provides: ·a historical overview of the culture; ·an outline of theatre history; ·a survey of significant playwrights, actors, directors, companies, plays and productions. With contributions from an international team of scholars, this authoritative introduction will uniquely equip students and scholars with a broad understanding of the modern theatre histories of Asia.
Download or read book Women Performers in Bengal and Bangladesh written by Manujendra Kundu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering nearly 225 years, this volume tries to capture a broad spectrum of the situation of women performers from Gerasim Lebedeff's time (1795), who are considered to be the first performers in modern Bengali theatre, to today's time. The moot question is whether the role of women as performers evolved down the centuries. Whether this question will lead us to their subjugation to their male counterparts, producers, and directors has been explored here to give readers an understanding of when, where, by whom the politics began, and, by tracing the footprints, we have tried to understand if the politics has changed, or remains unchanged, or metamorphosed with regard to the woman's question in the performance discourse. We have explored, in this regard, how her body, mind, and sexuality interacted with and negotiated the phallocentric hierarchy. The essays included are on (i) Baiji/Tawaif culture in eastern and western Bengal; (ii) prostitute/'fallen' women/ patita, beshya performers; (iii) IPTA and the Naxalbari movement; (iv) group and commercial/professional theatre of Kolkata; (v) women's position in the theatre of Bangladesh; (vi) Cabaret (with an interview with Miss Shefali) (vii) Jatra; (viii) Baul tradition. (ix) Besides, there are chapters on English, Anglo-Indian, Jew, Nachni performers and the illustrious dancer Amala Shankar, and film-music-dance in general.
Download or read book Theatres of Independence written by Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2009-11 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatres of Independence is the first comprehensive study of drama, theatre, and urban performance in post-independence India. Combining theatre history with theoretical analysis and literary interpretation, Aparna Dharwadker examines the unprecedented conditions for writing and performance that the experience of new nationhood created in a dozen major Indian languages and offers detailed discussions of the major plays, playwrights, directors, dramatic genres, and theories of drama that have made the contemporary Indian stage a vital part of postcolonial and world theatre.The first part of Dharwadker's study deals with the new dramatic canon that emerged after 1950 and the variety of ways in which plays are written, produced, translated, circulated, and received in a multi-lingual national culture. The second part traces the formation of significant postcolonial dramatic genres from their origins in myth, history, folk narrative, sociopolitical experience, and the intertextual connections between Indian, European, British, and American drama. The book's ten appendixes collect extensive documentation of the work of leading playwrights and directors, as well as a record of the contemporary multilingual performance histories of major Indian, Western, and non-Western plays from all periods and genres. Treating drama and theatre as strategically interrelated activities, the study makes post-independence Indian theatre visible as a multifaceted critical subject to scholars of modern drama, comparative theatre, theatre history, and the new national and postcolonial literatures.
Download or read book The Popular Front and the Global Circulation of Marxism through Calcutta 1920s 1970s written by Prasanta Dhar and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the global circulation of Marxism seen from one of its most highly charged sites: Calcutta in India. Building on but also revising existing approaches to global intellectual history, the book presents the circulation of Marxism through Calcutta as a historically-sited problem of mass mediation. Using tools from media studies, the book explores the way that Marxism was presented to the public, the technologies used, and the meanings of Marxism in twentieth-century Calcutta. Demonstrating how the Popular Front was split between the so-called 'people's group' and those whom were called 'intellectuals', the book argues that the people's group generally identified themselves as Marxists and preferred audio-visual media such as theatre, while the so-called intellectuals privileged academic rigour and print media, usually referring to themselves as Marxians. Thus, the author reveals a polyphony of Marxisms in the Popular Front. Tracing Marxism back to the Bengal Renaissance and the Swadeshi and Naxal movements, this book shows how debate around the meaning of 'Marxism' continued throughout the 1970s in Calcutta, and eventually engendered the historiographical movement that has come to be known as Subaltern Studies.
Download or read book A Poetics of Modernity written by Aparna Bhargava Dharwadker and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 632 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The urban theatre which emerged under Anglo-European and local influences in colonial metropolises such as Calcutta and Bombay around the mid-nineteenth century marked the beginning of the ‘modern period’ in Indian theatre, distinct from classical, postclassical, and more proximate precolonial traditions. A Poetics of Modernity offers a unique selection of original, theoretically significant writings on theatre by playwrights, directors, actors, designers, activists, and policy–makers, to explore the full range of discursive positions that make these urban practitioners ‘modern’. The source-texts represent nine languages, including English, and about one-third of them have been translated into English for the first time; the volume thus retrieves a multilingual archive that so far had remained scattered in print and manuscript sources around the country. A comprehensive introduction by Dharwadker argues for historically precise definitions of theatrical modernity, outlines some of its constitutive features, and connects it to the foundational theoretical principles of urban theatre practice in modern India.
Download or read book Shakespeare and Indian Theatre written by Vikram Singh Thakur and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at adaptations, translations and performance of Shakespeare's productions in India from the mid-18th century, when British officers in India staged Shakespeare's plays along with other English playwrights for entertainment, through various Indian adaptations of his plays during the colonial period to post-Independence period. It studies Shakespeare in Bengali and Parsi theatre at length. Other theatre traditions, such as Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi, have been included. The book dwells on the fascinating story of the languages of India that have absorbed Shakespeare's work and have transformed the original educated Indian's Shakespeare into the popular Shakespeare practice of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the unique urban-folkish tradition in postcolonial India.
Download or read book Performing Shakespeare in India written by Shormishtha Panja and published by SAGE Publishing India. This book was released on 2016-07-18 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: · This collection is unusual in that the essays are not written from a single perspective and instead cover aspects as diverse as socio-political issues, translation, performance, language and identity, literary analysis. · The style of all the essays is jargon-free and accessible to the lay reader. · Given the fact that the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death comes up in 2016, this collection would be in the nature of both a retrospective appraisal as well as an anticipatory homage. · Its approaches are multi-disciplinary - from socio-historical analysis, to political commentary, translation studies, literary criticism and performance studies. · It will interest researchers interested in translation studies and performance studies, and literary critics.
Download or read book Native Shakespeares written by Parmita Kapadia and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explored in this essay collection is how Shakespeare is rewritten, reinscribed and translated to fit within the local tradition, values, and languages of the world's various communities and cultures. Contributors show that Shakespeare, regardless of the medium - theater, pedagogy, or literary studies - is commonly 'rooted' in the local customs of a people in ways that challenge the notion that his drama promotes a Western idealism. Native Shakespeares examines how the persistent indigenization of Shakespeare complicates the traditional vision of his work as a voice of Western culture and colonial hegemony. The international range of the collection and the focus on indigenous practices distinguishes Native Shakespeares from other available texts.
Download or read book New Postcolonial Dialectics written by Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book closes a gap in postcolonial theory through its scrutiny of how four Indian and Nigerian English plays that are situated in national traditions reframed their own cultural terrain in international terms. It maps the trajectory that Indian and Nigerian dramatists, such as Rabindranath Tagore, Wole Soyinka and Badal Sircar, adopted as they moved from the specific to the bicultural to the global. The intercultural dialectic validated here provides a protean comparative scaffolding that evolves out of, and reflects, the interculturality of the literatures it is critiquing, allowing the book to be an entry point, practical guide, and reference for those interested in studying and comparing literatures from Asia and Africa written or translated into English. Its approach and dialectic can also be expanded for use in comparative literary studies on all intercultural encounters.
Download or read book Rehearsals of Revolution written by Rustom Bharucha and published by Honolulu : University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
