There Will Be Trouble

It is perhaps more relevant now than ever before to prepare the ground for a pedagogical discussion on theater curation. Theater festivals have recently become prominent in India. It is true that India has cherished a ubiquitous tradition of festivals—utsavs and mahotsavs—for hundreds of years. Take, for example, the staging of Kudiyattam at ancient Sanskrit koothambalams, which would last several weeks in a festival atmosphere; the touring circuit of Assam mobile theater, which has created festival-like events since the 1950s; or the Marathi (political) theater, which has an active culture of more than a century of traveling and festival-like events. These are not the kind of festivals I am interested in for the purpose of this article—they have a “traditional” logic built into their purpose—but the kind that have emerged along secular lines in post-independent and urban India. These “new” theater festivals are primarily sponsored by the state, are supported by public funds at the regional and national level, and are therefore open to public participation and scrutiny. These festivals, wherever they are held, commonly include a multilingual and multicultural itinerary of plays. The intent behind the selection is largely driven by the post-colonial project, which is to “put together” an idea of modern India by including plays that have a critical outlook—these could be contemporary scripts, modern adaptations of classical plays, and works that explore contemporary vocabularies of performance (body-based, post-dramatic, experimental, etc.). Currently, India has over a dozen of these new theater festivals of varying scale; each running annually, each claiming to show the best of contemporary theater. In the absence of a touring circuit, these festivals provide artists with the opportunity to travel, to seek new audiences, to mingle with peers and masters, to be written about, and to woo award committees. Festivals are now doing for theater what exhibitions have done for visual art; they are highly visible events that offer immense resources and the promise of further influence. Festivals seem to bestow legitimacy on artistic work of a kind not seen before.

Face Mask Face-Offs

In the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be especially destructive and divisive. One of the few things that has united Americans during the pandemic, however, is the experience of watching a new genre of viral videos—face mask face-offs—that showcase citizens going toe-to-toe in public places because someone refuses to wear a mask. These videos are not mere political theater; they are replete with sociologically meaningful data about the nature of Americans’ cultural divisions. By closely analyzing recorded conflicts over collective coronavirus risks and individual freedoms in public settings, the authors identify six justifications for not wearing a mask. These justifications point to emerging cultural discourses and practices organized around phones that not only point to new ways for us to observe social life but participate in the reconfiguration of social life—and social conflict—itself.

Ceremony, Genealogy, Political Theology

This chapter begins the work of interrogating the concept and practice of ceremony historically and theoretically. There has been some important recent work that examines the question of ceremony and its contemporary political instantiations and that examines specific ceremonial practices in different historical periods. This chapter discusses this work, develops an argument about how to understand ceremony in relation to political theology, and shows how tracing the etymology and history of ceremony can be helpful in understanding it today. All ceremonies have at least the trace of a religious lineage, even if they appear to be for purely secular purposes. The chapter explores themes around bodies and materials—gesture, choreography, clothing, and objects; the texts or liturgy of ceremony; and the temporality and spatiality of ceremony. The ceremonial is an aspect of the performance of politics but also of the politics of performance. Through a brief discussion of Shakespeare’s play Henry V, the chapter explores this question of political theater.

From Exile to Migration

This chapter discusses the aesthetics and ethics of staging exile and migration as one of the focus points in the political theater of today. It argues that political theater has the power to engage with the strategies of critical countermapping of migration. Using affect, immersion, and embodiment, it can rehumanize migrants, the underclass, and national abjects. It can also stage the uniqueness of individual journeys within the impersonality of the global movements. Political theater can give voice to an asylum seeker and can return dignity to a victim. Telling stories about migration and confronting the bodies of the performers-refugees with the bodies of the spectators–their hosts, it can turn a nameless migrant into a proper individual, someone who possesses their personal history, memory, agency, and identity. Bringing stories of migration to the homes of those people who practice mixophobia, political theater can make the stranger relatable. The play The Jungle (2017), written by Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson, directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin for the Good Chance Theatre, and presented by the National Theatre and the Young Vic in London, serves this chapter as its primary example of how political theater can educate its audiences about the other and help them realize that this other is already within us.

Theatrical component of protests against Covid-quarantines: socio-philosophical reflection

The socio-political life of society presupposes communication between the authorities and the people, and the people with the authorities. This communication can be carried out in various forms, including with elements of theatricality (play, performance, artistry, costumes and sets, drama, direction, etc.). The Covid-19 pandemic has largely changed the socio-political life of different countries, but has not canceled the desire of people to theatricalize this life. This is evidenced, in particular, by the protests against the Covid-quarantines, which added new techniques and subjects to the repertoire of the political “theater”. The purpose of this study is to identify elements of theatricality in protests against Covid-quarantines and to interpret them in a socio-philosophical aspect. The methodological strategy of this study is based on the concept of theatricality of socio-communicative manifestations of culture. This concept allows us to comprehend the essence and forms of existence of social reality in the dynamics of their changes with a change in the cultural (political, socio-economic, informational, etc.) context. As a result of the study, it was found that many protests against quarantine restrictions are characterized by theatrical component withe elements such as play, performance, costumes and scenery, corresponding drama, etc. This is due to the fact that any protest action (whether it be a mass meeting or an individual protest) is a public event addressed to a specific audience to which a specific message needs to be conveyed. However, it was found that in protests against lockdowns, the theatrical component manifests itself in different ways at different stage of the pandemic. During the first wave, elements of costumed performances and comic antics prevailed in them, but for the second wave mass rallies became characteristic, most of which end in clashes with the police. There is much less theatrical content in these actions. This indicates that the theatrical component of the protest action lasts only as long as there is hope for a dialogue with the authorities. When the people do not receive answers to their questions, they begin to use other forms of communication with the authorities.