Projects Indian Theatre and Drama: Onstage and in the
Classroom Teaching, research, and service are the three pillars of academic life for a college professor in the USA. In the arts, demonstrating creativity is acknowledged as a fourth. In most departments of theatre, creative expression is an absolute must. Some see participating in and witnessing of live theatre events as an extension of their teaching. It encourages those who are just learning about the theatre to use and test skills not yet ready for professional exposure. Others in our discipline regard creative acts (directing, acting, and design) as a kind of research, a kind of laboratory for conducting and testing experiments. But whatever performances are judged to be -- teaching, research, or a blend of both -- it should be clear from all who have engaged in the study of India that the production of plays of non-western cultures requires special knowledge not normally demanded of those who produce western works. And in my opinion producing Indian plays with student actors has been one of the best educational means to introduce students and the public to Indian life and culture. What follows are some thoughts on some of my experiences with Indian theatre and drama, both in the classroom and on the stage, as well as through the media, during the past thirty-seven years. To a degree it is more about the work and less about me. However, to some extent you cannot ignore the personal odyssey that is necessary in order to teach any subject. So I hope readers will grant me their indulgence. In 1962 I began my Ph.D. degree program in the Department of Theatre at Michigan State University. As a greenhorn BFA and MFA graduate just out of the University of Oklahoma I had had little contact with Asians and no contact with Asian theatre. My objective in pursuing my Ph.D. was to study directing and to become a professional director. It had not entered my mind to become a teacher and to do research, certainly not in India. Without going into boring details it is enough to know that I was thrust headlong into Indian theatre through the efforts of Dr. James R. Brandon now at the University of Hawaii. Brandon taught at Michigan State in the early 60s. He is a dynamic, dedicated teacher whose work in the theatre of Southeast Asia and Japan was gaining notoriety in our discipline. Today, he is an acknowledged leader in the study of Kabuki theatre. It also helped that my roommate for three years at the graduate dorm was Anant Negandhi, a Ph.D. candidates in Business Administration. Brandon and Negandhi both nudged me toward the study of Indian theatre, a subject little written about or understood at the time in western academic circles. Before I knew it I was off to India on a student Fulbright grant to study the English-language theatre in India. Once in India I was put under the expert guidance of the legendary Ebrahim Alkazi, first Director of the National School of Drama in New Delhi. Through Alkazi’s urgings I traveled widely throughout Indian and collected the necessary material to write my dissertation, entitled English-Language Theatre in India: 1965, a tortured, turgid document of little worth today. To be perfectly honest, writing did and still does not come easily to me. Strangely, on my return to East Lansing, Drs. Ruth and John Useem, both sociologists, befriended me for it seemed that my dissertation had confirmed their theories concerning the existence of a “third culture,” an indigenous population of Indians living and working in India but closely linked with American and British businesses. So in some way at least someone was pleased with what I had written. Beginning in 1966 I started to grow into an assistant professor at Michigan State where I eventually graduated to head the department in 1982. But I’m getting ahead of my story. Our department, like so many other departments of theatre around the country, even today, depended on the faculty to teach and produce work for the stage. Besides teaching classes in acting, directing, theatre history, and introduction to theatre, my contribution to the department was to direct plays as part of my academic duty. Teaching Indian theatre was considered incidental to my main work for the unit. Throughout my career the formula has differed little. Teaching Indian theatre and directing Indian plays has been only a small part of my obligation. Yet all my work has been enriched by my work teaching and producing Indian theatre, work that invariably demanded field research and publication. That is one of the beauties of academic life in the USA. The university encourages you to explore and exploit educational possibilities in a number of interesting ways. Teaching by Doing On Stage Over the years, every production of an Indian play has been the result of field research. All have contributed to my teaching. For selected illustrations and a brief description, please click on each of the titles: 1965 Goa Looking back over the works produced at Michigan State between 1965 and 1979 and at SUNY/Stony Brook between 1989 and 1993, as well as at the University of Georgia between 1997 and 2007, some definite patterns emerge. Students, primarily theatre students, were provided a means for better understanding an aspect of India and Indian theatre by experimenting in doing it on the stage, not just reading it or talking about it. Audiences were provided an indication of some of the themes that interest Indian audiences, themes that are often similar to those which occupy our own attention in the west. Among the positive results that I have noticed over the years are the following: 1. By performing in an Indian play students are put in the shoes of those who differ from themselves in fundamental ways. They learn a different way of speaking, walking, use of space, use of costumes, use of gestures, use of facial expressions, and so forth. In short, they learn to cope in a different world from that in which they live and work in this country and yet who exhibit characteristics with which they may identify. 2. By studying those who are different from us, we may learn something new about ourselves. 3. Audiences are confronted by material that they do not often get a chance to see or experience in any other way. 4. All are confronted with foreign words or phrases in the Indian works that expand their vocabulary. 5. Performers and audiences are introduced to new tastes, smells, textures, sounds, objects (masks, makeup, musical instruments, etc.) with which they are unfamiliar. 6. Indian theatre enlarges our world and hopefully expands our worldview about others and about ourselves. There are bound to be difficulties along the way: 1. Actors and audiences alike are bound to be confronted with characters with a different vocabulary and speech patterns and rhythms of speaking. 2. They also experience unfamiliar patterns of behavior with unexpected outcomes. 3. They come to learn that there is a decidedly non-western aesthetic at work in the plays with which they are obliged to acknowledge and contemplate. In the Classroom I have always taught Indian drama and theatre, no matter what university I have been associated with. Fortunately, over the years I have been aided in this effort by numerous guest artists and scholars. As I have grown to better understand aspects of the subject, the courses have taken different directions. In every case, my publications have assisted my teaching. Please see my CV. As with most professors, remaining current in the field is essential. Research tours to India, made possible by the generosity of various granting agencies, such as Fulbright Student and Senior grants, the JDR 3rd Fund (Rockefeller) now known as the Asian Cultural Council, and the American Institute for Indian Studies, as well as from Michigan State University, SUNY/Stony Brook, and the University of Georgia, have been crucial to keeping my teaching fresh. Moving from my early interest in English-language theatre which initially put me in touch with various genres of performance throughout India, in Gujarat, Kerala, South Kanara, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Bengal, Assam, Rajasthan, to name the places where I have spent much of my time, I began to concentrate on the kutiyattam of Kerala beginning in 1974. I also had an opportunity to update my knowledge of contemporary drama and theatre in 1986. In the 1970s classes and workshops in kutiyattam and Indian acting techniques resulted in a major video-production series on Asian acting techniques. Thirteen tapes were made focusing on various Asian Acting techniques and genres of performance -- kabuki, noh, martial arts of China and India and Balinese topeng. Three of the tapes concentrate on India -- Acting Techniques of Kutiyattam, From India to East Lansing, and Seraikella Chhau: The Masked Dance of India. All are available from Insight Media, New York. (Insight Media, 2162 Broadway, New York, NY 10024-0621. Telephone 1-800-233-9910. http://www.insight-media.com/IMHome.htm. These videotapes, among many others from other sources, assisted me in teaching classes in Asian acting techniques for undergraduate and graduate students. New Media With the emergence of multimedia technology I attended the EDUCOM conference in Cincinnati in 1993 where I took a full day course in authoring material for multimedia applications. The experiences were frustrating because the instructor talked of authoring material that was funded by grants of over a million dollars each! Soon I learned that any one could produce a multimedia program using HyperCard, ToolBook, or other powerful authoring software at a fraction of the cost. In the spring of 1994 I persuaded the Director of Stony Brook’s Electronic Writing Classroom housed in the English Department to teach me to use HyperCard on a MAC. At the time I knew next to nothing about multimedia. I had not seen any commercial packages like those being produced by Voyager, because our computers were so slow, we could not show them. After the initial frustrations of learning how HyperCard works and wading through instructional manuals on HyperCard, I soon realized that I had to reevaluate what I wanted to do and attempt to limit my goals to smaller more manageable objectives that could be accomplished within a shorter time frame. Also, the Electronic Writing Classroom had its limitations. It was not designed as a multimedia lab. I was authoring with HyperCard 2.2 that has a color program, but couldn’t see the results because the monitors in the classroom were black and white. And the scanning devices were low resolution meant for text and not for photographs. At the time there was no way to digitize or transport video to the Hypercard stacks. Through the ingenuity of Dr. Rose Zimbardo, a foresighted faculty member in our unit by 1994 the Department of Theatre Arts at Stony Brook was able to open an Innovation Lab designed for use by faculty and graduate students and to author either on a MAC and a DOS platform. I felt lucky to have a Power Mac at my disposal with a two gig hard drive. That seems very small by today’s standards. Shortly thereafter, we opened an Innovation Classroom where undergraduates and graduate students could develop multimedia programs themselves. Carmine Guida, a sophomore computer science major, joined me in this effort to author multimedia materials on Indian theatre. Although an avid DOS enthusiast, Carmine quickly took to all the new MAC equipment that was off limits to him in the Computer Science Department. The first day we imported video to one of the HyperCard stacks was a memorable occasion for both of us. In the fall of 1994 Dr. David Saltz came to work at Stony Brook. David is a Stanford graduate who worked under Larry Friedlander on the Shakespeare Project in Stanford’s multimedia lab. He joined me at Georgia in 1997 and became Interactive Designer for Kutiyattam: Sanskrit Theater of India. Through his efforts my work on kutiyattam migrated to Director and is now cross platformed. Today Dr. Saltz heads a million dollar grant project on 19th century vaudeville designed for the web and supported by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Saltz now heads the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the university. The Laboratory for Technology in the Arts and the Interactive Classroom at Stony Brook were good places to wed technology with Indian theatre. Astound software was introduced to the faculty by a bright and enterprising graduate student. I taught two classes in Asian theatre in the classroom and using Astound I had students express their view of Asian theatre both visually and aurally, as well as in writing. Students no longer needed to depend exclusively on the written word to express their opinions about the genres of performance they were studying. They could include photographs and sound, and even short bits of video into their work. Among the many original contributions was a sensitive exploration of the place of ritual and religion in Indian folk theatre. Using Astound’s easy means of developing screens of information one of my Puerta Rican female undergraduates produced a fascinating work that integrated music, video clips, photographs, and text. A Chinese student developed a question and answer game concerning Beijing Opera face painting and costuming that rewarded or punished players. (The idea might easily have been used for any number of Indian genres of performance.) There were many more experiments, including my own attempt to develop a CD-ROM presentation on the Ankiya Nat of Assam. Astound Project Examples:
Guest Artists and Scholars It is not possible to name all the various artists and scholars from India who have enriched and educated generations of theatre students with whom I have worked over the years. Mansukh Joshi of the Bombay’s Indian National Theatre, an expert in Bhavai of Gujarat, was the first Indian theatre scholar who I met in 1963. The late Asif Currimbhoy, playwright and poet, worked with me at Michigan State in 1965 to produce his play Goa. The late C.C. Mehta, Gujarati playwright, storyteller, poet, and scholar, taught at Michigan State on a grant from the JDR 3rd Fund during the academic year 1966-67. And Kalamandalam Raman Cakyar, the kutiyattam actor and my teacher, and Kalamandalam Eswaran Unni, the mizhavu drummer, taught at Stony Brook for six months in 1989 on a generous grant from the Asian Cultural Council. A troup of Yakshagana and Kathakali artists visited classes at Michigan State, and UGA, respectively. B.V. Karanth, contemporary director, Dr. Sivaram Karanth, expert in yakshagana of South Kanara, Dr. Thomas Kutti, University of Calicut, Kerala, the late Pearl Padamsee, Bombay stage director, film and stage actress, Satish Alekar, playwright and director of the new theatre program at Pune University and Rudraprasad Sengupta, professional director and actor, and Swatilekha, his actress wife, have enriched my classes for short periods of time over the years. Most recently Satish Alekar taught at UGA on a Fulbright grant and directed his play Begum Barve during the 2005-2006 theatre season. Photos of the show may be found at drama.uga.edu/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=90. Direct contact between scholars and artists and American theatre students has been invaluable in communicating an Indian point of view about drama and theatre, as well as various opinions about Indian life and culture. |
