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Tasting Life Twice
Samik Bandopadhyay and Tanvi Shah in discussion on Indian theatre criticism
Speakers
This month’s Exploring Exciting Texts embarks on an exploration into the landscape of theatre writing and what these texts have meant for our understanding of the art and the times we live in.
‘TASTING LIFE TWICE’ is conceived and moderated by Tanvi Shah, who in part 1 of this series will speak to Samik Bandhopadhyay, someone who has played a huge role in the Indian theatre landscape for decades. We will listen to the stories of performances performed and written about in the context of Indian theatre criticism from the 1950s till the present. Over the whole series we will explore the idea of theatre reviewing itself, the history of our multilingual critical writing, how it has affected our theatre movements in turn, how writing about the theatre is rooted to it being a people’s medium, and Indian theatre’s current need for more rigorous and accessible theatre criticism across languages and perspectives.
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect,” wrote Anaïs Nin – and this singular sentiment may illuminate just how crucial writing to memorialize an impermanent art form can be.
There are many ways of living with the arts. Theatre is meant to be an individual as well as a collective experience. The latter is key – and needs to be fed and nourished by conversation. Such discourse serves to map not only the shifting coordinates of our times, but also of our personal quicksilver identities.
We’re innately wired to perceive reality and come to terms with it through the stories we tell and the stories we read. If we accept this, we reinforce the need for cultural memory keepers and their living cultural archives – and in this case, provocateurs who write about plays. Their provocations sift for intersections between story, expression, form, craft, context, politics, personal philosophies, and how each performance furthers our understanding of the theatre and its myriad possibilities.
The experience of theatre exists in a space between foreignness and familiarity. Theatre reviewing serves to bridge the gap between the two, while also building bridges between the Fourth Walls that have been and the Fourth Walls that will be. This reiteration of a live medium contextualised through the written word welcomes audiences from both the present and the future to learn from the visions and revisions of the spotlit stages of the past, and so that we needn’t reinvent the wheel.
This session is the first in a series of conversations by Exploring Exciting Texts seeking to spark an ongoing conversation about how we can rejuvenate and create spaces for theatre reviewing and writing, and how they might play a critical role in bringing conversations about theatre into our living rooms.
About Exploring Exciting Texts:
Exploring Exciting Texts, that began in 2017, is a series of monthly events that use a text as a starting point to generate conversation around a particular theme. The programme was started in 2017 by Indian Ensemble with the aim to engage with different kinds of texts and debates, and is now run by Bangalore based theatre group, KathaSiyah.
Speakers
Samik Bandyopadhyay
Scholar, editor-publisher, translator, lexicographer, bibliophile, Samik Bandyopadhyay is currently the Rabindranath Tagore National Fellow at the School for Arts and Aesthetics, JNU, New Delhi (2015-2017) and Member, Publication Committee, Sangeet Natak Akademi, New Delhi (2016–). He was Visiting Professor, SAA, JNU, New Delhi (2005-2012, 2014); Visiting Professor: ICCR Chair at the Department of Theatre Studies; Freie Universität, Berlin (April-July 2014); Vice-Chairman, National School of Drama (2006-2010); and Member National School of Drama Society (2005-May 2014).
Mr. Bandyopadhyay has lectured extensively in the USA, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and England; he gave a series of lectures on Indian cinema at Pittsburgh University 1988; a seminar on Indian Culture at Brown University, Providence 1990. He was also Lecturer, Departments of English Literature and Drama, Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta, 1966-73.
Additionally, he was Regional Editor, Oxford University Press, Calcutta, 1973-82, and was Founder-Editor, Seagull Books, 1982-88. More recently he was Founder-Editor, Thema, a small publisher based in Kolkata (estab. 1988).
His vast experience includes stints as Producer Emeritus, All India Radio and Doordarshan, 1989-92. Research Professor, Asiatic Society, Calcutta, 1995-97; Member, General Council, Sangeet Natak Akademi (2 consecutive terms) and Central Board of Film Certification (1970-80); Member, 14-Member Indian Delegation to the East-West Theatre Seminar organized by the International Theatre Institute, New Delhi 1966; Panelist at seminars on Indian Theatre as part of Festivals of India in USSR (Tashkent 1987) and Germany (Berlin 1992).
He has translated plays and fiction by Badal Sircar and Mahasweta Devi; contributed introductions to plays by Vijay Tendulkar, Mahesh Elkunchwar, G P Deshpande, Satish Alekar; and reconstructed for publication, filmscripts for films made by Shyam Benegal and Mrinal Sen. He has contributed several essays in numerous film and theatre periodicals in English and Bengali, has interviewed Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Mahasweta Devi, Richard Attenborough, Natalie Sarraute, Salman Rushdie, Derek Malcolm, Reinhard Hauff, etc. for Film Society periodicals and All India Radio and Doordarshan; several of these interviews have been later included in books.
Tanvi Shah
Tanvi Shah is a multi-lingual theatre maker from Bombay, India.
She has worked as director, writer and adaptor, documenter of oral narratives and archivist of theatre history, dramaturg, curator of arts experiences, Indian folk dancer, and conductor of literary encounters. She has worked – as apprentice, as collaborator – with theatre organisations like CRY HAVOC Company (New York), The Woodstock Players (New York), Tamaasha and Arpana Theatres (Mumbai), Junoon Theatre (Mumbai), and Indian Ensemble (Bangalore).
She was one of seven individuals trained under Indian Ensemble’s Directors’ Training Programme 2017 – ’18. She received a Trust scholarship from The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland – ranked in world top five for performing arts education – and graduated with a Masters in Theatre Directing (Classical and Contemporary Text) in September 2019. She was one of four directing students selected for the course. The Masters included a month-long residency at Shakespeare’s Globe, London that culminated in a mainstage directorial showcase.
She approaches theatre – a form that encompasses all her preoccupations – as an investigation into identities, histories, languages, and perspectives.
