ReTAGS Public Lecture | Prof. Anuradha Kapur

ReTAGS Public Lecture: “Dark Things: Working with Material” delivered by Prof. Anuradha Kapur on the 4 November 2022, at 17h00, at the UCT Little Theatre, Hiddingh Campus. This lecture attempts to reflect on the process of making Dark Things, Ari Sitas’s oratorio on the Silk Road that was performed at the Ambedkar University Campus in April 2018 as part of an elective teaching module. The performance was a collaboration between Ari Sitas, Deepan Sivaraman, Sumangala Damodaran, Purav Goswami, and Anuradha Kapur: all of those collaborating at that time were connected to the AUD in different capacities. Sitas’ oratorio is about the Silk Route and how labour practices that lie in its sub-terrain are topographically sensed in the 21st century. The text talks about the histories of materials: from the miniature screw in the iPhone, a citation from the poems of Xu Lizhi, the Foxconn worker who jumped to death from a Beijing factory building in 2014; to the hangman's rope crafted in a particular region of India; to the bones excavated in war zones; to the harvest of body parts used as visa and ticket to enter a dinghy of migrants; to sewers full of excreta that crisscross the underbelly of Delhi and are cleaned manually, by hand. Their concerns as theatre-makers were to materialize these histories for and in performance. Various registers of labour are part of the process of theatre-making. There is the emotional labour of actors, performers and spectators; there is also the labour of all theatre-makers of crafting and handling objects, scenery, and machinery. This is the very prescript of performance, it's nuts and bolts. Sivaraman, Goswami and Kapur devised improvisations that were often instigated by material. ‘Found’ ditches were experimented with; ‘found’ oil drums were brought in and a gigantic skeletal iron hammer was welded. Being attentive to the social histories of material brought the theatre-makers to plastic, ubiquitous in India even when understood to be toxic - used as rain cover, sack, tent, and precarious shelter in the slums. It was the main material to virtually house thousands of farmers who camped at the Delhi borders for more than a year protesting the corporatization of Indian agriculture. Scenographic decisions by Deepan Sivaraman drew attention to material again; factory-like structures of brick and tin that edged a car park on the campus of Ambedkar University were chosen as the performance site. The dishevelled buildings brought to mind the histories of manufacture in India and the effects and affects of large-scale economic migration that neoliberalism has caused within India itself. Production diaries, notes, drawings; lists of materials that instigated improvisations; the process and record of handcrafting tents and other props; interviews with sanitation workers in Delhi and the ways these entered and contextualized Sitas’s text will be part of this reflection on the material residue of the Silk Road as it subsists in our lives today, as Dark Things. Please note the video presentation has been edited to remove the public response section. ------------------------------------------ Anuradha Kapur is a theatre-maker and teacher. Her theatre work has travelled nationally and internationally, and she has taught in theatre schools and universities in India and abroad. She is a founding member of Vivadi, a working group of theatre practitioners, visual artists, film-makers, musicians and writers. Her writings on performance have been widely anthologized and her book, Actors Pilgrims Kings and Gods: the Ramlila at Ramnagar, was published by Seagull Books, Calcutta (1993, 2004). Anuradha Kapur taught at the National School of Drama for over three decades and was Director of the School between 2007 and 2013. She is presently Visiting Professor at Ambedkar University, Delhi.