WOULD I LIE TO YOU? ON THE USE OF DOCUMENTS IN THEATRE
Application Deadline: 15th July 2022
Dates: September 1st to October 22nd, 2022
Sessions: 3 sessions per week | 4 hours per session | 21 sessions total
Twice a week with facilitators and once a week collaborative/group work at a mutually decided time.
Mode: Online
Course Leaders: Kai Tuchmann and Anuja Ghosalkar
Fees: INR 6000/-
If the price of this workshop is prohibitive, and the fees prevent you from participating, kindly contact us at saf.edu@serendipityarts.org. We have a limited number of supported places to enable participants to attend this workshop, with a fee waiver.
“Today here and now the document belongs to the power of the State and to very specific figures representing the State. It carries the stamps of well-known faces, figures and names. There are new actors, new heroes, and new men of the state. To that extent, we need to tear the document away from some people—without tearing it. Our job then today is to make documents illegal, not as documents of the state, but documents of existence.”
[Excerpts from Soumyabrata Choudhury’s closing lecture for Connecting Realities— a symposium curated by Ghosalkar and Tuchmann.]
The entry point for documentary theatre practice is, as the name suggests, a document. The nature of this document is varied, complex, amorphous, and shapeshifting. As an entry point — a memory, a metaphor, a gesture, an image, a site, an artwork can all be considered documents. The nomenclature of the “documentary” is overloaded with truth claims, that are constituted through the permeable border of reality and fiction.
In the symposium, titled CONNECTING REALITIES curated by the facilitators of this course, theatre scholar Rustom Bharucha stated that approaching documentary theatre through aesthetic-formal definitions will always fall short, if one does not consider the different institutionalized frameworks of cultural funding. In the spirit of this reflection, our course will set out to nurture organizational architectures that fuel this form, for which a blueprint may not exist.
We will do so in a time when almost any pursuit of truth, intermingles with (social) media`s performativity—destabilizing the logical contradictions of truth-lies, fact-fiction, and real-fake. In our times of ubiquitous computing, real events instantly transform into media and data, housed on servers. Eventually, almost all human expression becomes storage, and an object of computable manipulation—beyond the control and knowledge of the entity, classical philosophy referred to as, “the subject”. What does it mean then, to tell stories under this condition of a shifting idea of subjectivity?
Our course will equip theatre-makers and artists with techniques and aesthetics to deal with an updated notion of the document in our digitized age. The methodological starting point for the course is rooted in practical experiments, while theoretical frameworks and texts will have an interpretive function, to enable and inform understanding. In addition, there will be curated conversations between invited international artists that the participants are mandated to attend.