Fwd: Ghosts of Shakespeare Festival Delhi, 2013 : Events for the 24th of April

[Arka Mukhopadhyay]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: arshinagar project <thearshina...@gmail.com>
Date: 23 April 2013 07:06
Subject: Ghosts of Shakespeare Festival Delhi, 2013 : Events for the 24th of April
To:

The Arshinagar Project

and

First City

present

The Ghosts of Shakespeare Festival Delhi, 2013

Ghosts of Shakespeare is an annual festival that is meant to confront the world of Shakespeare from the vantage of Indian performance idioms and aesthetics, as well as contemporary subjectivities and lived experience. It is meant to exist, both physically and metaphorically, in marginal spaces. This means that it intends to explore non-traditional venues, including open and public spaces, as well as reach out to genres other than traditional theatre, such as dance, performance art, street theatre and other forms of theatre activism, and genres which defy any easy categorization. It looks at Shakespeare not as an icon of elitism, but a living talisman of protest and humanistic articulation, and hence embraces artistic actions that articulate disturbing and perhaps unpopular truths about the world and times we inhabit.

The festival reflects the fact that Shakespeare has a contemporary afterlife in often unexpected forms. The spirit of it deliberately draws upon the anarchic ethos of small-scale, alternative fringe festivals in different parts of the world. We are interested in creative acts which are not big and well-funded, but rather which have rough-edges and are vulnerable. We'd like to bring together established names, emerging artists, as well as campus outfits on the same platform, without creating hierarchies. We are interested in the Shakespeare of in-betweens: between past and present, between east and west, between the sacral and the scatological - a sort of liminal Shakespeare. 

For details, please visit facebook.com/ghostsofshakespeare

Schedule for April 24th:

(https://www.facebook.com/events/320909191345695/)

Performance: Kranti Prem, 

(The League of Shadows, Kolkata)

Kranti Prem is the bridge between Julius Caesar and the Pre Independence Movement in India, stylized and brought to you by The League of Shadows. To be performed for an audience of all age groups, this is the story of how the Extremist Political Movement was always quelled by the Moderates who had more than National Independence on their minds. We have Arjun Singh representing the Extremists after his ideas about the National Freedom Struggle fall on deaf ears. We present a strong compilation of imageries with excerpts from Political Leaders all over the world on how an ideally FREE country should be. The pun played over the word AZAADI is worth the watch. This is a 30 minutes concept where we have Arjun’s best friend falling prey to the temptations offered by the Moderates with regards to financial, social and political benefits. She goes to kill him. Does she kill Arjun, like Brutus kills Caesar? It remains to be seen.

Venue: Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, Sheikh Sarai

Time: 5:30 PM

Performance: Multiplied Monologues: Aloud Asides

(Samudra Kajal Saikia, Kankhowa)

“Multiple Monologues: Aloud Asides” is a take on some segments and characters from Shakespeare by the Disposable Theatre Troupe of Kankhowa. This particular execution does not come under the Disposable Theatre Series as such, but it tries to have a work-in-progress experience with the presence of the audience. Like most of the performances of the troupe this performance also deals with the power equation, the spectator and performer relationship, subjectivity and intervention. Yes, like innumerous people in last more than 400 years we also feel Hamlet as contemporary to us. Kankhowa, the performance troupe that mostly engaged into site specific multidisciplinary practices, finds Hamlet as a major text to relate with the contemporaneity.  Here the performance is about performance, the theatre is about theatre as well as the subjects are also about the subjects.

 

Ophelia, as a poetry based installation performance was first planned in December 2003 and staged in a national campus theatre festival, organized byAbhivyakti, New Delhi in February 2004 and then in Kalabhavan, Santiniketan on 11^th March, 2004. After Delhi and Santiniketan Ophelia was (re)presented on 10^thJanuary 2007, as a part of National Workshop for Students on Gender and Sexuality in the Disciplinary Paradigms, held in January 8^th to 11^th, in the Dept. of Art History and Aesthetics, M S University of Baroda. On the basis of the same text, with another text from Mahashweta Devi alternative theatre director Parnab Mukherjee experienced Ophelia and O connecting the women all over the world referring Steven Bercoff’s The Secret Love Life of Ophelia  as a sub-text. While travelling to Baroda the text of Ophelia turned more space oriented and associated with a lot of activities.

 

This time, again Ophelia claims some importance, refuses to die and stands against the “Ophelia Syndrome”, and likewise Hamlet gets stuck in the “words, words, words”, and in the thoughts that make a man coward. This is a cross genre experimentation that works on a blurred area between performing arts and the performance art practices. 

Performance: It It Be Now

(Arka Mukhopadhyay, The Arshinagar Project)

This is a solo performance based on fragments and impressions of Hamlet and Heiner Mueller's "Hamletmachine", as well as Jan Kott's "Hamlet of the Mid-Century". Combining elements of structured action and improvisation, it looks, not for meaning or a message, but at experience - at an utterly human Hamlet, giving birth to him in the immediacy of the now, responding as much to the physical space ("the courtyard" within the premises of the Gati Dance Forum) and the presence of the watchers, as to the universe of Hamlet. 

Venue: Gati Dance Forum, No. 5, Windmill Place, S-17 Khirkee Extension

Time: 7:30 PM

(https://www.facebook.com/events/146989438812546/)

All performance are non-ticketed. Entry by prior registration. Call: 9999401394

The events for the 24th of April are supported by First City, Shaheed Bhagat Singh College, and the Gati Dance Forum. We are grateful to them for their support. 

facebook.com/thearshinagarproject 

The Arshinagar Project is envisioned as a collective of artists
and cultural practitioners from different traditional and contemporary 
disciplines, as well as practitioners from other disciplines such as 
anthropology, education and ecology, for research into performance 
as transformational action.
'Arshinagar' means 'the city of mirrors', and the name is derived 
from a song by Lalon Phokir, one of the greatest masters among 
the Bauls of Bengal - wandering mystical musician-performers who 
through embodied practice attempt to touch the unbodied.The logo 
represents the 'ektara' (literally 'one-stringed') - a drone-like 
instrument used in different forms and names in different Asian 
cultures, which has come to symbolize the Bauls.
The Arshinagar Project aims to foster a spirit of freedom, respect for 
human diversity, ecological harmony and love, among young adults, 
youth in colleges and universities, educators and others, through 
performances, immersive workshops in urban and natural settings 
based on traditions of mystical performance and practice as well as 
contemporary performance-craft, through lecture-demonstrations, 
seminars, and journeys through inner and outer spaces.