For all practitioners who’ve been in a devising rehearsal room, the rehearsal space often has elements of democracy playing out – participation, ensuring inclusive agency, making space for multiple voices and multiple opinions and more. However, when we think of democracies around the world today, citizen empowerment may not be the first thing that comes…
The day is 6 March 2020. It’s the day Ghana became independent in 1957. Celebrations are galore. A festival is going on inside the Baba Yara Sports Stadium, in Kumasi, a city of more than 3 million people that was once the capital of the Ashanti Empire. The president of Ghana also happens to visit….
With students and facilitators spanning over a decade, coming ‘back to school’ took on a new meaning last month. The Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh was buzzed with excitement as people – alumni, long-time collaborators, well-wishers of the school gathered to celebrate the school’s 10-year anniversary. It wasn’t just about commemorating DSM’s existence, but more about…
Can art really heal us? Last autumn, UK-based Limbik Theatre headed into the woods in Norwich, England with a multi-generational cast of local community performers, most of whom ran around wearing masks and hessian sacks. The company was trying to stage an outdoor show, but in the process learned something fascinating: Working on the show…
This is an unstructured response to the idea of imagining queer futures. It is a collection of musings about the past, present and future, attempting to queer the concept of time itself. With excerpts from Hina’s collection of queerfuturistic tales, personal histories, lists, memories, questions, observations and a fair bit of rambling, the author attempts…
After an intellectually stimulating season opener on creativity, AI and fungi, we revisited an older conversation from Season 1 which was based on the open letter “White Colleague, Listen!”, where co-curator Amy Russell had invited one of the signatories, Mojisola Adebayo to speak further with our audience on the responsibility and “response-ability” desired from the…
A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The “you” of five years ago was made from different stuff than the “you” of today. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds & Shape…
What happens when we see theatre as a necessity, a lifeline, a sanctuary? At a recent Unrehearsed Futures (Season 3) conversation with theatre-makers Rosie MacPherson and Juan Ayala, we explored the works and working of the theatre-maker as a global citizen, and how theatre can become a site for social transformation. The arts are an…
Last month, we discussed the ambivalence theatre practitioners feel about our collective prospects as a society, and how the chaos we find ourselves in can leave us feeling overwhelming. What can one do with the overwhelming feeling that we all have around the state of change? To understand this better, all the co-curators of Unrehearsed…
Much like the R.E.M. song, it’s indeed the end of the world as we know it, declares Mbongeni Mtshali, one of the co-curators of Unrehearsed Futures at the start of the conversation. “It feels like we’re constantly stuck. I certainly wouldn’t confidently assert that I feel fine about anything right now. I think I’m at…