International Theatre Festival of Kerala
Curation (2020)
“Amitesh Grover curates an urgent and boldly political theatre festival” - The Indian Express
“As a curator, Grover brings profoundly moving narratives to the stage this year.” - The Hindu
“Amitesh Grover talks about curating ITFoK Theatre Festival with Vidur Sethi” - Art Dose Podcast
My Curatorial Note:
Imagining Communities
As Festival Director, it gives me immense pleasure to share with you the curatorial vision and festival program for this year. Declaring newness amidst continuities is what ITFoK stages in 2020. The plays included this year bring attention to profoundly moving narratives, complex subjectivities, and artistic authorship that presents an opportunity to scrutinize not only the shifting political implications of our world, but also an interrogation of the relationship between art and community. The international section includes plays from Brazil, Norway, Iran, Poland, Australia, and England. The national section invites plays from Hyderabad, Bhopal, Bangalore, Pune, Jaipur, Goa, with a dedicated focus on Malayalam plays from Kerala.
The year 2019-2020 is significant for people’s movement in India. Through multiple and spontaneous protests across the country, the notion of the public has been expanded from a geographical scope - India as a territory, to a constitutional proposition - what is the idea of India? Art and artists have responded to these urgent questions by painting, performing, writing, and singing on the streets, and by dedicating their professional practice and research to alternative voices and histories that are threatened and face erasure from the onslaught of intolerance today. ITFoK 2020 stands witness to a ‘change of heroes’, from an individual to a collective, from one person in the crowd to the crowd itself, from one leader for the many to the many who are leading together today. This seismic shift in the topos of the hero, who is the hero/what is the hero/where is the hero, is developed and discussed in several works in the festival through stories, performances, poetry, and films on theatre.
A panoply of plays explore themes of defiance, unrest and forced migration in ITFoK 2020. In Eidgah ki Jinnat (Bangalore/Jaipur), ‘Bilal is torn between escaping the myths of war and the cycles of resistance’. An Evening with Immigrants (UK) ‘tells the performer’s ridiculous, fantastic, and poignant immigrant-story of escaping fundamentalist Islam’, while Bhaskarapatelarum Thommiyute Jeevithavum (Kerala) presents the story of a Christian migrant labourer, and Cherala Charitham (Kerala) follows ‘Irani Moss, who leaves his homeland in search of his birth mystery.’ Avyahat (Goa) foregrounds the ‘threats that absolute concentration of power through religious sanction pose to the freedom of people’, and Chaheta (Pune) presents a ‘dysfunctional family misplaced in time, walking a fascinating line between Inclusivity and alienation’. Old Man and Sea (Kerala) interprets the widely known tale of Santiago, a fisherman, and the sharks he survives, while Kala Dhabba (Bhopal) begins with ‘two actors confronting the audience with raw flesh to ask: how does a mob become a pack of wolves?’. Fixing our gaze on the disenfranchised as a consistent challenge to our humanity, Silver Epidemic (Brazil) brings on stage ‘characters stigmatized by society, characters who, little by little, get completely covered up in silver powder by the end’.
No Rest in the Kingdom (Bangalore) foregrounds issues of marginalisation and agency by ‘interrogating the female performer’s body’, while Salma Deewani (Hyderabad) looks closely at the dreams and desires of ‘a lonely woman residing in an old city, who also happens to be a die-hard Salman Khan fan’. The play Coriolanus (Iran) revolves around themes of popular discontent with governments, a theme that finds echos in Chillara Samaram (Kerala) which 'raises the protest of common people against anti-people development plans for their town’, and in Veendum Bhagavante Maranam (Kerala), which depicts the struggles of a Theatre group to “dramatize a story by K.R.Meera about the assassination of the renowned writer Kalburgy.” In Bombay Sketches (Kerala), the communal space ‘evolves like the red of the displaced, terrifying the city as a silent scream’. Finally, to meditate on the experience, economy, and expression of collective grief are two plays - The Director (Australia), which takes up ‘a universal experience and taboo topic to demystify, expose and expand elements of the death industry’, and Tree of Death (Poland) which explores ‘longing and love in a world in which death does not exist’. Told by the Wind (U.K.), a devised production inspired by theatre of quietude and String Theory, reminds us, that in the end, ‘stories are evoked and told by embodied silences, splintered interactions, and slowed down motion’.
With the main festival of plays, the program builds three additional ‘platforms’, one each for performance poetry, films on theatre, and public talks by artists and experts.
PLATFORM I: Kalitthatt is a conceptual space inspired by the architecture of resting stations for pedestrians and travellers on the road sides of Kerala. The famous performance artist and poet, Kunchan Nambiyar, is known to have employed such spaces and structures as his stage for tullal performance. While naming the proposed poetry event as Kalithatt, the festival accentuates the memories of a performance tradition which has historically emerged as a composite of theatre and poetry. This program pays a tribute to the performance tradition of poetry in Kerala by featuring eminent poets from all generations. This program is co-curated by Sudheesh Kottembram and M R Vishnuprasad.
PLATFORM II: Films-On-Theatre addresses a growing need to archive the tradition and practices of theatre across India, especially of forms of theatre that are vulnerable to the forces of modernisation and urbanisation, and as a consequence are struggling to sustain themselves. In addition to the endangered performing traditions, modern practices of theatre that were led by iconic personalities find themselves discontinued and lost posthumously. An emerging interest in film-making has attempted to document these almost extinct performance practices by initiating a new dialogue between the medium of theatre and film, and by pushing the boundary of both mediums. This program screens a selection of six national and international films for the ITFoK audience, so they may access radical forms of theatre that are otherwise inaccessible, to nurture their love for theatre archive.
PLATFORM III: MASTER KEYNOTE for ITFoK 2020 is delivered by Dr. Phillip Zarrilli, Emeritus Professor of Performance Practice at Exeter University, U.K. and internationally known as a director and performer. His talk is titled ‘Embodied Consciousness:’, in which he unpacks the ‘studio’ as a site for philosophical exploration, a site where the training/practice of the actor offers the possibility of “doing” philosophy “in the flesh”. In addition to this, three distinct seminars - International, National, and Malayalam - invite theatre scholars, experts, thinkers, and practitioners from diverse backgrounds to discuss and debate urgent and pressing subjects in contemporary theatre such as ‘Theatres of Migration and War’, ‘Theatres of Emergency’, and ‘The Secular In Performance Traditions’.
The curatorial prompt driving ITFoK 2020 solicits a multiplicity of trans-disciplinary and transnational voices, to produce a temporary history of the present. These voices are inextricably entangled with history, society, and cultural identity, and are invited to the festival in the hope that the provincial and international are brought into a dialogue once again, and beckons us to unsettle the categories of citizenship and nationality, performance and spectatorship. In the age of weaponised fake news, disinformation, and unceasing attacks at the idea of culture, what should the role of art and theatre be? ITFoK 2020 continues to disrupt the ‘imagined communities’ by reassembling histories, by performing new alignments, by calling forth new communities. The intention is to employ the theatric to form a community of interest, to imagine new geographies of space, of body, and of the mind. ITFOK 2020 will imagine our theatre as a deep, horizontal comradeship.
For more details about the festival, please visit the official website - http://theatrefestivalkerala.com
Dates: January 20-29, 2020 | 18 Plays: Australia, U.K., Brazil, Poland, Iran, Singapore, and plays from across India in multiple languages | Films On Theatre | Performance Poetry by 12 renowned poets | Public Talks | Supported by Kerala Sangeet Natak Akademi
