Phalguni Rao

In the sixteenth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2), we had Indian Kathak dancer-choreographer Madhu Natraj and UK-based director-teacher Dr Ellie Nixon in conversation with Franc Chamberlain (on behalf of Embodied Poetics) discussing what neutrality means within actor training and if it is a help or hindrance to one’s learning journey. 

In actor training, one of the first things one is taught is to find the neutral body. The neutral mask is one of the principal tools within Lecoq training. Nixon believes a neutral mask can decentralize our dependence on the role of the self. “Neutrality is often defined as feeling indifferent, nothing, in particular and a lack of preference for one way or the other. I believe neutrality temporarily shatters our habitual ways of seeing, doing and feeling. And it brings us back to that state of not knowing,” she said during the session. 

Natraj, founder of the STEM Dance Kampni, found resonance with these ideas around neutrality with the Kathak tradition in India. “So, neutrality as a concept is actually not taught as a separate phenomenon in Indian dance. We are sort of led to that space through several processes,” she shared and added that the common way to do this within Indian dance and martial arts is through iteration or sadhana/ riyaaz. “It goes on till your mind and body are saturated with the learnings, you find a point of counterbalance and equipoise. And there you find your sense of neutrality.”

STAY TUNED! We will be publishing a long-form article about the talk and the ideas/themes that emerged during the session on our blog in the coming weeks.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

In the fifteenth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2), South Africa-based dancer and senior lecturer at the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies, jackï job shared her practice and how she seeks to move away from sticking to the dancing body and rethink the way in which we signify bodies, limiting it by class, race or gender distinctions. 

“What really animates me is the sense that my body is energized by what’s inside, outside and around me. All of these different elements kind of interpenetrate and create something that’s much larger than any part in itself, and much larger than just what this body seems to signify,” she explained further. 

Acknowledging the violence unfolding at present over former South African president Jacob Zuma’s imprisonment, the conversation also veered towards how does one locate themselves in art making in the middle of such conflicts. This is also something theatre-makers around the world have been in conflict with since the COVID-19 pandemic began last year. 

To tackle this, job said, she reflected on the idea of presence. “Other than my being present,” she explained, “as in, you see me in the space, now, in this particular body, in a particular time, there’s also this presence of the things that are invisible. And that is carried through the practice.” She said she needed to remind herself of how presence translates to the presence of what is absent, the presence of what is in one’s imagination.

In her dance practice, job also seeks to push back against dance being only about form, and how high one jumps, one’s musculature etc. That is all external. While that is important, in a performance, when the audience perceives a connection, it is not about how high they jumped or how well they did a split. “There is this other kind of vibration that happens between bodies, and it’s tapping into that vibration that is a lot more difficult. Because that vibration literally makes one shake, and puts you on edge,” job said.

STAY TUNED! We will be publishing a long-form article about the talk and the ideas/themes that emerged during the session on our blog in the coming weeks.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

In the fourteenth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2), South African poet, performer and author Lebo Mashile shared her experience of the pandemic during the past year, things that changed around her, and spaces where there is possibility to make new changes.

Mashile also shared how the pandemic has economically affected black creative communities in South Africa, forcing seasoned professionals to live gig-to-gig again. She also said she has had to work on reduced rates because the nature of the work is online. But she also found that working online has led to discovering new communities. “There’s a kind of an underground quality to the creative interactions that are happening, particularly the ones that are artists driven, particularly the ones that are being driven by creatives themselves. There is this sense of us being able to find the people who are genuinely interested in what we do, truly building tribes and communities around our own unique offerings. And I see particular communities doing that quite successfully,” Mashile opined. 

During the conversation, she also discussed social justice politics and art, institutional collapse with the arts sector, talking back to hegemonies and ruminating on the question of, “Who are my people?”

STAY TUNED! We will be publishing a long-form article about the talk and the ideas/themes that emerged during the session on our blog in the coming weeks.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

In the thirteenth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2), global theatre-makers Eric Ting and Kirtana Kumar delved deep into how the pandemic has changed their communities in terms of who they engage with and who they engage for. Both Ting and Kumar shared their experiences and understanding from across the globe, with Ting, the artistic director of California Shakespeare Theatre, in Orinda, California and Kumar, artistic director of Infinite Souls Farm, on the outskirts of Bengaluru. 

During this past year, there has been a shift towards seeing art through the world, Ting expressed, where art is not at the centre of things but the community is, and art happens to be simply one of several tools available to people. It has changed what it means to be resilient, he said.

Similarly, the pandemic resulted in an enormous change in how Kumar viewed her community as she moved out of an urban space to live on her farm and found new engagements with theatre through the land. 

During the conversation, Ting and Kumar also spoke about finding new ways to shift the centres of power within theatre and performance and reject the cannibalistic ethics of otherness. Other thoughts around white adjacency, connecting to a community, understanding what allyship means and asking ourselves, as theatre practitioners, whether we are giving our community a wonderful way to live and get past the dark moments of life also came up.

STAY TUNED! We will be publishing a long-form article about the talk and the ideas/themes that emerged during the session on our blog in the coming weeks.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

In the twelfth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2), members of SITI Company, New York, Ellen Lauren (co-artistic director) and J.Ed Araiza (principal actor) shared what the past year has been like for them, the opportunities and possibilities it opened up in theatre and pedagogy and what they reckon they need to do as they move forward.

For Lauren, the medium of Zoom has been revelatory where she found people making an effort to connect with another human being on the other side of the screen. “We’re now into the phase where we’re making a great deal of work. And the tools are all there. The (Zoom) frame is another piece of material. The frame is another way of seeing and exploding the way we can work together. It is a time of great experimentation,” she emphasised.

As the head of graduate acting program at the University of California, Los Angeles, Araiza found that while Zoom made learning accessible, it also made visible the deeper divides between different sections of society in his classes. He uses his training in the Suzuki method and Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints as a way to empower younger artists to tell their own stories. “My job is not to tell artists the stories they should tell, but to try to give them the tools to tell their stories. And that is my primary interest nowadays,” he said during the conversation. 

STAY TUNED! We will be publishing a long-form article about the talk and the ideas/themes that emerged during the session on our blog in the coming weeks.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

Theatre, performance and social justice are natural bedfellows. But often theatre and performance are seen as a mere source of entertainment. The theatres of social justice aim at engaging communities and actually changing societies. 

For our twelfth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2), we had Sara Matchett, artistic director and co-founder of The Mothertongue Project (and director of CTDPS, University of Cape Town), Yaliwe Clarke, interim director at the African Gender Institute and Phoebe Kisubi Mbasalaki, an early career researcher at the University of Cape Town, exploring the relationship between performance and social justice work. 

To engage deeply, the three speakers use the GlobalGRACE Project as a point of departure to engage with how performance can be used to engage with communities at the margins. According to its website, GlobalGRACE “employs arts based practices and multi-sensory research to investigate the production of cultures of equality and enable gender positive approaches to wellbeing internationally.” Matchett, Clarke and Mbasalaki currently form the South African team at GlobalGRACE, which also has academic and non-academic partners in the Philippines, UK, Brazil, Mexico and Bangladesh. 

What GlobalGRACE does, describes Clarke, is look at equality as a cultural artifact. Each team investigates the various ways in which equalities are made but also contested in different parts of the world. “And the other thing it does, is it looks at the ways in which cultures might best be understood as practices through which people create the worlds in which they inhabit,” Clarke explains. “So, we investigate how people’s creative practices challenge inequality, and also engender new possibilities for more equitable ways of living together. And it’s tough work.”

The South African team, comprising Clarke, Matchett and Mbasalaki, works closely with a group of sex workers that are part of an NGO in South Africa called the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce (SWEAT). They have been, for many years, pushing to decriminalize sex work in the country. Apart from the legal processes, SWEAT has also been creative in destigmatizing sex work. “They’ve created some very interesting forms of what they call creative activism,” says Clarke. 

The research project that the three of them work on with SWEAT is called ‘Participatory Theatre and the Production of Cultures of Equality Amongst Sex Workers in South Africa’. 

Art, activism and sustainability

The GlobalGRACE project is funded by Goldsmith’s, University of London. Speaking of their project, Matchett says that being given three to four years to work on it has given them the time and space to deeply engage with SWEAT and the sex workers to form a sex workers’ theatre group. 

“But having said that, the project has a lifespan, which is dependent on funding. And, in fact, the project is drawing towards a close,” Matchett says. “Initially, the idea was to get us to a point where we could launch an independent sex workers’ theatre company, a first in South Africa. And yes, that still is the plan and still is the dream.”

The ethical question for Matchett here is: What happens to the sex workers’ theatre group beyond the research project? How do we ensure the ongoing-ness of the project?

“But essentially, as academics, as practitioners, our role in the project comes to an end at the end of this year. And then in a way one goes on to the next research project, because that is what the university requires of us. That’s what the hierarchical structure requires of us,” she further explains. 

Adding to Matchett’s point, Mbasalaki says there are barely any spaces without contradictions built into them. Having been gender studies scholar primarily, GlobalGRACE was the first time she interacted with theatre and performance. Going deeper into the question of sustainability of the project, she calls on South African dancer jackï job’s practice wherein she works in relation to culture and building cultural elements and engages the body. 

“It interrupts inherited cultural elements, such as related to structural inequality. And with that, I point to the element of healing which is very much embedded with the kind of work we do. And this is something that will remain with the sex workers’ theatre group, as a material means they can draw on moving forward and does not necessarily play within the framework of finances, money, or economic aspects within which we root and locate sustainability,” Mbasalaki asserts. 

She goes on to add that the tools they have shared with sex workers, in terms of living on the street and navigating trauma in their bodies, is a way of producing new cultural epistemologies that will live on in their body, a critical apparatus that they can deploy in other scenarios and in other spaces in their lives beyond just the moment of performing in the theatre. “Structural inequality has placed sex workers on the margins. So, these new epistemologies live on in the body. That’s my way of looking at this element of sustainability as opposed to the economic aspect in relation to that.” 

“This is a different kind of sustainability that cannot be monetized. It remains invisible,” adds Matchett. 

Embodying a community

Engaging in theatre with a community involves using it as a means to meet oneself. The impact in this case cannot be measured in quantifiable numbers. The moment we stop thinking of success in terms of metrics, newer possibilities and moments emerge of understanding that impact. It is intangible and less easy to grip onto, but it is definitely present. 

In terms of using theatre and its tools to embody a community, Clarke talks about how the sex workers use their body, breath, movements to tell their story and create the script. “They felt a shift in their body, a change,” describes Clarke, “They felt that they had addressed something that was sitting uncomfortably in their body and memory, in terms of how they process what happened to them, the kinds of things that happened in childhood.”

“And in the process of developing those powerful pieces, they get to see each other and process perhaps trauma and pain that is sitting uncomfortably in the body, together. That’s a shared memory.” 

In terms of understanding what remains with the sex workers beyond the research project is the memory of sharing stories, creating together and using that to draw on. “And they have a community in which they can do that with, beyond the end of this funding. It just means they need to find a way to physically get together to do it or do it online at some point, although with quite tight facilitation,” Clarke adds further.

Using theatre and performance for social justice is about connection and in this case, possible reconnection and felt perception, feels Matchett. “So, the feelings in the body and coming to terms with them are the drivers of expression. Feelings are the thing from which the expression of our stories emerge. 

In my work with the theatre group, I have deeply invested in breath. And how breath can connect us with our felt perception, how breath can connect us to the stories that live in the body and assist us in finding ways of expressing those stories through the body. So, the body is central. And for me, it’s about reconnecting with a body that I think a lot of the participants have disconnected from.”

Matchett also believes in pursuing practice-led research in theatre and performance. As the conversation comes to a close, she asserts that what theatre-makers do is vital within an institutional structure – It opens up possibilities for interdisciplinarity and trans-disciplinarity with the University structure, allowing researchers and practitioners from different backgrounds to engage with another and build a new vocabulary. 

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

We’ve been living through a pandemic for more than a year now. Lockdowns, work-from-home, vaccinations – these are terms that have become commonplace and accepted as the new normal. When we began Unrehearsed Futures last year, we reached out to a global community of theatre pedagogues, students and practitioners to understand the terrifying moment we found ourselves in and share ways in which we could move forward and through it.

At that point, we all felt we were in the same boat, and it invited us with an opportunity to reflect on the moment, what could we, as theatre-makers, do to introspect and change the way we worked and viewed the world. We agreed we couldn’t and wouldn’t go back to what we considered as “normal”.

Over a year later, with the development of vaccines and many countries rolling them out, the emphasis is again on hurrying back to the “normal” way of working, of getting back into the theatres. This led us to question, have we lost the moment?

For the tenth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2), we decided to have no guest speakers and instead invite people in the room to reflect on what ‘Possibility, Plurality and Planetarity’ meant to them, what the pandemic moment has been for them, and what does the present moment feel like for them.

Intimacy and acceptance

For US-based playwright Kamili Feelings, he’s had to have some difficult conversations with friends where things became contentious. In that process, he lost of couple of friendships too. But what this helped him realise is that there is an intimacy when you criticize someone and still choose to stay in the room. “It’s an intimacy when you criticize their work, because you put some time and thought into it. And now you’re actually breaking through all that to say, ‘I don’t like this’. So, that always struck me as something very intimate, yet very destructive. There’s some central truth or radioactivity that we’re always shielding ourselves from,” he shared during the conversation.

While Feelings reckoned with such “radioactivity” in his life, South Africa-based theatre maker and co-founder of the Johannesburg School of Mask and Movement Theatre, Kyla Davis encountered spaciousness in her personal and professional life in 2020.

From being a person who simply hustled all the time, Davis says she has now understood and begun embracing the act of slowing down. “I mean, we were forced to slow down but I really embraced slowing down and seeing what benefits it brought forth, for both myself personally and as an artist and a creator. I can see how much that has transformed me really and allowed me space to look at things that I haven’t,” she shares and adds, “I’ve just turned 40. And I would say that probably for the last 20 years, I have not been looking at things. I’ve just been doing and going, going and going. And so yeah, I’m really appreciative for this reflective time and this spaciousness.”

What the past year also brought forward for Davis was accepting who she is as a practitioner. As her peers and colleagues began making their foray into the digital space in terms of performance, Davis chose to stay away from it and says she felt guilty for quite some time.

“It brought up questions about why I find it difficult to watch things online or participate in things online. I felt very guilty, ashamed and like an underachiever, at first. I felt like I wasn’t avant-garde enough for this time,” she shares.

“But there has also been reaffirming of my practices and understanding what live performance and teaching in person means to me. And then I relaxed into it and accepting to myself that it’s okay, I am who I am as a practitioner, and I am drawn to liveness.”

‘Finding something new in the moment’

When the pandemic began, there was a sense of kindness people extended toward each other, reflects Dr. Lazlo Pearlman, a creator, performer and teacher at Northumbria University, UK. Within the UK university system, there was a moment where anything one did was enough, he recalls.

“There was a kind of expansiveness. If you just came and if you came for five minutes, and you couldn’t handle it, you could shut Zoom and leave. And that was true for our students and all of our colleagues. It felt very expansive, and holistic and non-hierarchical. There was this sense of ‘we can find something new in this moment’.”

However, this lasted for a while, and then it shut down, believes Pearlman. For him, the moment highlighted a lot of good within the system and then threw up the deeper flaws within it. “I’m not the only one this happened to, but I am curious too. What is the moment and the potential of what is a missed possibility? What are the other possibilities?” he wonders.

UK-based lecturer at De Monfort University, Leceister, Funmi Adewole also feels similarly. “I believe we missed a moment. I wonder what it was in the moment that made us able to be that expansive,” she asks, adding on to Pearlman’s comments.

“We found ourselves on the same level. And therefore, there were no hierarchies to protect. And therefore, we could give, receive, make allowances for and we could support each other. If we’re able to capture the thing that enabled that kind of connectivity and empathy, then we haven’t lost a moment,” Adewole reflects further.

Kirtana Kumar, a Bangalore-based director and theatre-maker finds herself in a very different place than where she was in March 2020. “In 2020, I was completely willing to embrace the online space. I had no problem. This was the space that my students anyway had inhabited for more than 10 years now. I wasn’t averse to it,” she shares.

However, today, Kumar is more concerned with and curious about how theatre practitioners are going to make things different for young people. What are the ways in which the community is going to really tackle issues of mental health within the digital space?

“Because personally, I’m not keen on going back to the old hierarchies. I’m not keen on the old verticals that existed before the pandemic. I personally wish to embrace this way and go forward,” she asserts.

But within this, what and who are the gatekeepers, Kumar asks further. She is also curious about what are the inequalities inherent within this digital space. “How do we build equality and equity into it?

I feel terribly invested in the local. So, when you say planetarity, it’s great. And on an abstract level, I get it and I’m with it. But I really am into reinforcing and supporting the local at a very, very primary level right now,” she shares.

Radical intimacy

Going back to the idea of intimacy and planetarity, Mbongeni Mtshali, lecturer at Centre for Theatre, Dance, Performance Studies at University of Cape Town, proposes an expression of a planetary city in the form of radical intimacy and empathy.

“It’s about recognizing our closeness to one another but without consuming the other entirely in order to erase specificity and difference,” he explains. Mtshali acknowledges that Zoom has opened up people’s networks and allowed them to interact with others all over the globe but wonders about the impression it creates that one is being intimate with the other across the digital space.

“I add the word ‘radical’ in front of it because it about recognizing that this actually isn’t a moment of intimacy in that way. We need to push to recognize positioning, perspective and not try and resolve difference. Instead, we need to recognize where those very differences come from. The real work can begin happening when we begin to acknowledge the different positions from which we come into the conversation,” Mtshali expresses.

Adding to the conversation, Adewole says the digital space can create mirages of intimacy. “So, what is it that we have experienced in life before COVID that we need to mine, that we need to bring across? And I think this situation is making us look deep at what that is, and really understanding it. Because without that, we can’t reimagine this space, or re-rework this space to make it a place where intimacy can happen,” she asserts as the conversation comes to a close.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

The ninth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) witnessed a rich conversation about the women who contributed significantly to European legacies of “masters” Jacques Lecoq, Jacques Copeau etc. During the session, Cass Fleming, founder of The Chekhov Collective, and Paola Coletto, the pedagogical director of Padova Arts Academy discussed that though the nomenclature of physical theatre methods are predominantly the names of male “founders” (with notable exceptions!), instances of influential women practitioners abound through history.

While both Fleming and Coletto trained in Lecoq-based and under Lecoq’s pedagogy respectively, they’ve sought to move away from the idea of following in the ‘master’s’ footsteps. “I love the idea of master-less,” Coletto shared during the conversation. “Often, I have been pointed out as a ‘master’, or even worse a ‘guru’. I’m horrified by that. The reality is, I don’t want that responsibility because I have always felt that when one gives you that title, they make you responsible for their journey. You are looked at as someone so powerful and so potent, that you can do anything. You should, you must make something happen for them. And then if it doesn’t happen, it’s your fault.”

As women in professional spaces, there are barely any conversations around pregnancy, childbirth, kids, menopause, looking after elderly family members. “As professional pedagogues and theatre directors, it’s almost as if it’s sort of squashed in the cupboard,” commented Fleming in the conversation. 

She then went on to describe her research into women practitioners, such as Suzanne Bing, Margaret Naumburg, Marie-Hélène Dasté and Jessmin Howarth, who played an instrumental, unappreciated role in developing training pedagogies of Copeau, Lecoq and Michel Saint-Denis. The European legacies we attribute our learning to today had women at the genesis of it, who existed outside the dominant male frameworks of power at that time. 

A deeply enriching conversation followed with those in the room, where women and men shared their experiences of working with theatrical lineages of Lecoq and others. 

STAY TUNED! We will be publishing a long-form article about the talk and the ideas/themes that emerged during the session on our blog in the coming weeks.

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel:

In the eighth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2), renowned Indian director and founder of Theatre Roots and Wings, Sankar Venkateswaran called for a world that moved slower, closer and is more tolerant in a post-pandemic scenario. Quoting a Japanese economist, he added that this can be achieved through theatre and performance. 

To explain this further, Venkateswaran gave the example of Japanese performance artist Kubikukuri Takuzo who used to hang himself daily in the backyard of his dilapidated home in a posh locality of Tokyo. “Every month, for a week or so, he would open his garden theatre to the public. Ten people could squeeze in and watch him come out of the house, approach the noose. He would step on an anvil. The anvil was very significant for him. And then, he would hold the noose, and put it around his neck. It was supported by the jaw, so it wouldn’t really strangle him, but was holding all his weight on his jaw. And he would hang. He would just, you know, hang himself and oscillate like a pendulum for say, five minutes. And then the body would come to a standstill,” described Venkateswaran. 

He added that it might sound horrible but it was actually very peaceful and quiet watching Takuzo. Going back to the ideals of being slower, closer and more tolerant, Venkateswaran said that it helps him find a way ahead in these tumultuous times. 

The conversation had rich offerings from the room where people shared their thoughts on what it meant to create a slower, closer and a more tolerant world through theatre and performance. 

Compiled and written by Phalguni Vittal Rao

Access the entire session on our YouTube channel: