TABLE RADICA
‘De gustibus non est disputandum’
(There is no disputing about taste)
30 Guests | Taster’s Menu | A Radical Life
Table Radica is a food table, an archival table, a listener’s table. Audiences are invited to gather around the table, become visitors, friends, tasters, and witnesses to a radical life led on stage and beyond.
If we form ourselves by the books we feed on, the friendships we savour, the camaraderie we let simmer, and the journeys we relish, a radical life has a beginning in what is consumed. Table Radica is an edible mashup, historical archive, a recipe of life, performance, and critique. In an immersive experience of memoirs with food, found documents, and music, all sorts of stimuli are brought to the table to touch, to taste, to see, or to hold. Foregrounding the relationships of aesthetics and personal sensibilities, we contemplate taste as and in performance.
Table Radica is created as an episodic five-part series, that sharethe lives of reformers from Modern Indian Theatre, those that challenged the status quo and forged their own paths.
Episode #1
HABIB
Table Radica’s first episode presents the life, loves, and food of Habib Tanvir, an iconic Urdu & Hindi playwright, a director, poet and actor of the modern theatre in India, a man of the world. The show journeys with Habib to reveal not only how the worldremembers him today, but also the strife, the precarity and the many vulnerabilities that accompany a life dedicated essentially to the arts. The narrative anchors itself in the modest beginnings of an ordinarymiddle-class Muslim household and the extraordinary influence it hadon his life as a boy. The story unfolds the gentle, the accidental, and the spectacular ways in which the middle of 20th century and Central India- shaped his taste in poetry, philosophy, and politics.
Table Radica pivots around encounters with love, questions about theatre, his relationship with the homeland, and the turmoils of makingchoices that eventually lead Habib to be remembered as a radical life.One who insisted for a humanistic vision, toiled for a higher aesthetic sensibility, marched on fearlessly, and inspired generations of people, young and old.
Duration: 90 minutes | Language: Hindustani | Taster’s Menu: Contains meats, gluten, dairy, nuts & is not customisable.
Written by Sarah Mariam | Directed & Performed by Amitesh Grover | Gastronomy by Bela Gulab Juhi Champa Chameli | Lighting Design by Ankit Pandey | Designed & Produced by Poppy Seed Lab
