Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #16 Neutrality in Actor Training: Help or Hindrance
One of the pre-requisites to becoming an actor is being able to embody neutrality. Most drama training programmes around the world circle back to the idea of being neutral – neutral bodies, neutral faces, neutral voices. There is an emphasis on being present in the body, releasing tension within in. A list of do’s and […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #15 Planetary Moves: Dancing Across the Fault-Lines
A year later, our world is still in the midst of a global pandemic while being compelled to engage with social justice movements across the globe. Since lockdowns were announced around the world in March 2020, theatre practitioners were forced to stay inside and figure out how to create art from domestic spaces. What felt […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #14 Offerings of Possibility
In a post-Apartheid country like South Africa, where racialized inequality is deeply entrenched in society, the onset of the coronavirus and the ensuing pandemic adversely affected the gains of economic transformation aimed at rectifying that inequality, shared Lebo Mashile, especially within the creative sector. Sharing her thoughts on the pandemic and the possibilities it offers, […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #13 Theatre for their Communities
Among the many things the past year has made us reflect upon, owing to COVID-19 induced social isolation, one of them is questioning and answering for ourselves: Who is our community? Who are the people we want and need around us? If we take this a step further, what are the many levels of community […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #12 Theatre, no longer the bastard child?
We’re a little more than a year into the pandemic. By now, Zoom has become a regular part of our lexicon, online training doesn’t seem so absurd anymore and online meetings are a comfortable substitute for in-person meetings. In the twelfth session of Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2), members of SITI Company, New York, Ellen Lauren (co-artistic director) […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #11 (Im)possible Futures: Rehearsing Social Justice at the Margins
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 […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #10 Planetarity in the Pandemic: Have we lost the moment?
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 […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #9 MASTER-LESS: Women Teaching Physical Theatre
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 […]
What does success mean to you?
We are in the middle of what seems like a never-ending pandemic. For the theatre industry, it has meant closing its doors and opening new virtual ones. Nearly everything has migrated online – learning, teaching, performing and experiencing the performing arts. The pandemic has given us a much-needed pause that has compelled most to rethink […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #8 Universality vs Plurality: Notes on Intercultural Practice
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 […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #7 After the Fall: Thoughts on Theatrical Interventions in/from the Global South
When the Black Lives Matter protests took place across the world year, their impact could be felt in academic institutions around the world, who took up the task to decolonize their pedagogy further. But what does this decolonization of a pedagogy entail for theatre academicians? One of the things it includes is re-evaluating which texts […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #6 Serious Play: Towards Decolonizing Physical Theatre Pedagogies
Being locked up in one’s homes for the past year, the pandemic has triggered an identity and perpetual existential crisis (apart from the devastating health and economic crises) for everybody, in some shape or form. Last year, theatre pedagogues and practitioners were faced with working with a new medium – what did that mean for […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #5 Carcerality, Ritual and Spectatorship: Prisoners Coming Home
One of the things that the past year has compelled theatre-makers to think about the nature of participation in theatre in physical and virtual spaces. It has compelled makers to introspect the role of theatre in a society. At the fifth Unrehearsed Futures session, Australian theatre-maker James Brennan and Dr Asher Warren, Head of Theatre […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #4 Theatre Making: Transference and Transposition – Notes from across the boundaries of the original medium
As the world continues to battle coronavirus and theatre practitioners engage with the idea of what theatre is and can be, creators Amitesh Grover and Benjamin Samuels have been pushing the boundaries of the form and creating interdisciplinary work for a long time. At a recent Unrehearsed Futures conversation, they shared their foray into using […]
Marathi theatre in Mumbai: Then & Now
For the past 84 years, Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh (MMSS) has endeavored to promote the Marathi language and literature through a variety of initiatives. As art is an important vehicle to promote language and literature, they built an association with the Drama School Mumbai (DSM) in 2013, to help forge a new generation of […]
Unrehearsed Futures (Season 2) #3 The Many Lives of Red Peter: On Theatre Making (it), before and after the pandemic
One year on from when the COVID-19 pandemic took over our lives, uncertainty has gripped our hands again and is unlikely to let go any time soon. As India battles a devastating second wave of the disease, theatre-makers and pedagogues are back in their houses again discussing and reflecting on what theatre is and can […]