Our Stage

Theatre practice in India is like the country itself - vast, diverse, pulsating. Theatre in India happens anywhere and everywhere - in badly designed auditoria, in schools and colleges, in parks and gardens, in restaurants, on rooftops, in the open fields, on the streetcorner, and even, sometimes, on moving trains. At times it gives pure delight and touches aesthetic peaks, at others, it is brazen, rude, outspoken and blunt - or both simultaneously. And yet, surprisingly, the actual practice of theatre in India - beyond the work of this or that practitioner - remains vastly undertheorized. In Our Stage: Pleasures and Perils of Theatre Practice in India, leading theatre practitioners, administrators and leading scholars, social scientists and activists interrogate theatre practice around the themes Locales, Experiments, Assertions, Pathologies, New Realities and Training and Institutions. They also interrogate the implicit and explicit premises and projections of the 1956 Drama Seminar. Together, they give a fascinating insight on how theatre happens in India, as well as on the most important issues animating this practice.Theatre practice in India is like the country itself - vast, diverse, pulsating. Theatre in India happens anywhere and everywhere - in badly designed auditoria, in schools and colleges, in parks and gardens, in restaurants, on rooftops, in the open fields, on the streetcorner, and even, sometimes, on moving trains. At times it gives pure delight and touches aesthetic peaks, at others, it is brazen, rude, outspoken and blunt - or both simultaneously. And yet, surprisingly, the actual practice of theatre in India - beyond the work of this or that practitioner - remains vastly undertheorized. In Our Stage: Pleasures and Perils of Theatre Practice in India, leading theatre practitioners, administrators and leading scholars, social scientists and activists interrogate theatre practice around the themes Locales, Experiments, Assertions, Pathologies, New Realities and Training and Institutions. They also interrogate the implicit and explicit premises and projections of the 1956 Drama Seminar. Together, they give a fascinating insight on how theatre happens in India, as well as on the most important issues animating this practice.