Theatre, Feminism, and Society: Notes from a Practitioner

ISSN 2319-5339 IISUniv.J.A. Vol.3(1), 1-11 (2014), 2014

This study addresses a number of Indian feminist plays (both by men and women) that were written and performed in the last century and early years in this century. The paper focus specifically on Indian theatre because of its long established theatre tradition that goes back to 1 st century B.C. Ironically in such a country there were hardly any women dramatist to speak of before 19 th century. At the core, the belief of a Feminist theatre is in the efficacy of theatre as a tool for conscientization, for critiquing social disparities and for self exploration and expression. Feminist theatre is a source of empowerment; it enables women to speak out. It is at the intersection of art, activism and social relevance and sees theatre as an instrument of real change in women's lives. It is an exploration of women's own unique idiom, their own form, their language and ways of communication. It is a challenge to the established notions of theatre.

Indian writers have written excellent prose, composed poems and written in English for more than a century, but it was not earlier than the thirties and forties that a suitable and systematic attempt was made to view their output as an independent literature and not a mere part of Anglo-Indian literature. It is, however, only after Independence that the volume of Indian writing in English has gone up considerably, and the need for its critical evaluation has become more urgent than ever before. When it comes to the early form of theatre, it featured various kinds of performances, often in the narrative form with singing, dancing, and reciting. The first significant contribution to Indian theatre was made by Bharata Muni, who authored the thirty-six books of "The Natyashastra". It is a theoretical description of theatrical performance, elucidating its style and motion. While the amateur movement gave way to the drama school theatre, towards the turn of the century, some existing active troupes turned into semi-professional drama schools with the help of amateurs. They continued to keep the theatre scene operative. Prayoga Ranga (Bangalore), Lokadharmi (Kochi) and Sopanam (Trivandrum) are examples of this trend. This article attempts to encapsulate the evolutional of Indian literary landscape with special emphasis on the evolution and growth of theatre and women playwrights. Traditionally women have never had, nor were allowed a voice of their own. "Because a woman has patience, she is not allowed to speak; And she never learns the words" is said by the narrator in the play Mangalam by Poile Sengupta. One of the major concerns of this study is to analyse a new trend in theatre-the Theatre of Protest and showcase its relevance in the plays of Poile Sengupta, one of the foremost contemporary Indian playwrights.

IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 2014

That every individual is a performer in one way or the other, has preserved theatre from the threats of extinction and initiated its consistent progress. Theatre acts on a given moment and speaks directly to the audience; hence it has proved to be an effective medium of expression. Theatre has been among many other things propagandist, interventionist and also liberating. But it has also been criticized for not holding enough space for women to express themselves. The present paper addresses this issue in the light of Indian theatre, which has a long tradition but for the most of time remained a male preserve. It makes an incisive reading of the feminist theatre and goes on to critically look at the evolution of 'womanist dramaturgy' in the Indian context, in opposition to not just the male tradition but also the western feminist theatre. Exploring through the aesthetics put forward by the Indian women playwrights and directors, the paper tries to find or create a theatre of their own for the Indian women theatre practitioners, which ceases to be just a theatre of protest and ultimately establishes itself as a theatre of emancipation and of identity.

Bharatiya Prajna: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Indian Studies, 2016

Playwriting is a mixture of site, history, representation and audiences within the context of ideology. It tries to establish relationship between the reader and the text. "Playwriting, which is an intricate and complex interweave with site, history, representation and audience as well as conventions of realism, narrative and stage practice, emerges as a crucial arena of exploration for contemporary feminism, providing insights into the politics of writing and the possible basis for a feminist theory of reception"(Forte, 1996, p. 19). The 'fact of power' accounts for much of the lack of appreciation of women's texts; until there is an appreciable change in power structure, it is unlikely that women's fictional accounts of their lives lying in drawing rooms, the parlour, the nursery, the kitchen, the laundry will have the force to induce masculine jouissance (1996, p. 28). Men's traditional disregard for women's writing and women's mode of existence is caused due to the reality of male power.

When speaking and writing about their theatrical practice, many women working in modern Indian theatre reject the terminology and teleology of what they see as neoliberal feminism. Taking my cue from the thoughts and writings of the most well-known female directors, actors, and playwrights of post-independence Indian theatre, I argue that theatrical performance in modern India offers a unique vehicle for agency, authorship, and engaging with the challenging task of creating a discourse of women and women's rights. Significantly, this discourse is formulated around the decolonial notion of not-feminism, rejecting Western feminism and in the very action of rejection creating its own space of future-oriented aesthetic articulation. K. Frances Lieder is a PhD candidate in interdisciplinary theatre studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her current research interests include the ethics of witnessing and the role(s) of violence in performances in " the Global South, " political performance in public spaces, and the performance of gender in popular culture in South Asia. Her most recent performance credits include directing a staged reading of Harvest and a site-specific performance of Lights Out, both by Manjula Padmanabhan. This paper proposes a theory of " not-feminism, " which emerges from analyzing contemporary Indian women artists' discussions of the theatre they are making. Not-feminism is exactly what it looks like, a theory that takes as its starting place the negation of the term " femi-nism, " but refuses to put a concrete term in its place. I trace this negation using discourse analysis to focus on how and why these women create theatre that they explicitly describe as not a feminist practice (not-feminism). This paper does not evaluate the success or failure of their attempts; its starting point is a primary tenet of a theory of the

Theatre Research International, 2012

Review of "Theatre in Colonial India: Play-House of Power. Edited by Lata Singh. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009 and Performing women, Performing womanhood: Theatre, Politics and Dissent in North India by Nandi Bhatia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010.

ACME: an international e-journal for critical …, 2002

A bstr act T his e ssay explore s the inte rse ctions be twe en pe rf ormanc e, ma te ria lity, a nd mar ginaliz e d women's struggles by de lving into the me anings of public a nd pr ivate , and the nua nc e d and var ied me anings of gende r ed r e sista nc e. Foc using on thre e ver y dif fe r ent kinds of the atric al pe rf or mance s by w omen in N orth I ndia , I a na lyz e how e ac h per f or ma nce a ppropriate s, c omplic ates, or r einf orc es the inter w oven pa tr iar cha l conce pts of public a nd priva te on the one ha nd, a nd f e mininity a nd ma sc ulinity on the other . In so doing, I also c onsider how both spa ce a nd kinship ar e str ate gica lly de ploye d in these per f or ma nce s, and the diff er e nt me anings of re sista nc e a nd fe minist politics e mbe dde d and implie d in ea c h per for ma nc e . I argue that a focus on these processes allows us to grapple with the ways in which gendered materialities -shaped by class, caste, and geographical locationbecome central to the articulation of politics. This framework opens up new "spaces" to examine how multiple publics are constituted and reconfigured in terms of their sociopolitical identities and provisional alliances in and through publicization/privatization struggles, without essentializing or fixing the meanings of either public or private or of the spaces in which public/private acts are enacted.

Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures, 2007

This is a short encyclopedia article surveying the role of women in South Asian theatre history. It highlights theatrical development and gender issues in Indo-Muslim society.

ARIEL: A Review of International English …, 1992