TABLE RADICA

Immersive Performance (2019-ongoing)

‘Performance artist Amitesh Grover creates a table for food, for archiving, for listening.’ - The Indian Express

“A vision, a kitchen, an eternity - Amitesh Grover cooks all these ideas together.” - The Asian Curator

“With seven sold-out shows, Table Radica offers more than just a performance.” - The Hindustan Times

“Grover creates an expansive idea of taste — in poetry, morals, strife, and failure” - Indian Curator

“A unique taste-performance comes to the city” - Ahmedabad Mirror

TABLE RADICA is, on the surface, biography theatre. It is based on the life of the iconic Indian theatre personality Habib Tanvir. Born in 1923, he was one of the most popular Indian playwrights, and a theatre director, poet and actor. A pioneer of Urdu and Hindi theatre, he was most known for his work with Chhattisgarhi performers and singers at the Naya Theatre, a theatre company he founded in 1959 in Bhopal. I first watched Habib Tanvir’s play Charandas Chor in 1999, 25 years after it was first performed. It was my life’s first stage play, and it gripped my imagination in so powerful a way that it made it impossible to consider life without theatre. While that profound moment of inspiration drove me to become a theatre artist myself, I encountered the rich archive of Tanvir’s life two decades later. Mr. Tanvir was long gone by now, his theatre troupe packed up, but the archive presented an artist whose humanity I had yet to grasp in entirety.

Tanvir is more than the sum of his work. In his theatre company, actors, singers, managers, wife and daughter lived together, ate together, travelled together, as they performed throughout the country for an astonishing 50 years. But, Tanvir’s illustrious career, made even more glamorous by becoming the first Indian to win the Edinburgh Fringe Award, was also embroiled in personal and political controversy. At home, his plays were routinely banned, his political allegiance faced critical interrogation, his financial management was fraught with trouble, and his private life was riddled with moral and ethical questions. His archive and the counter-narrative of his family, friends, and companions made us question what was written, what was remembered, and what was left out of the archive.

Table Radica is an immersive experience with food, found documents, and music, where all sorts of stimuli are brought to the table to touch, to taste, to see, or to hold. Love letters are read alongside meticulously drawn sketches; photographs of a play on stage are seen right next pictures from a family album; Hyderabadi biryani is tasted while listening to nacha (folk) music; traditional sherbet is sipped while comprehending an artist’s predicament in exile: TABLE RADICA is a food table, an archival table, a listener’s table. It is also a taste-performance. The show is based on diary entries, vintage photographs, never-seen-before letters, notes & sketches, interviews, recordings, scandal, gossip and anecdotes, some of which contradicts the written archive.

Duration: 90 minutes | Language: Hindustani & English | Menu: Contains meats, gluten, alcohol, dairy & nuts.