I offer you two ideas...
1. In
the Deccan Herald, dated 8th November 2010, an interview with the Pandavani artist Teejan Bai, who had
just performed her Draupadi Cheerharan at the Rangashankara Classical & Tribal
Theatre Festival.
“As
an artiste, my duty is to just perform and leave the rest to God.”
2. In
the New York Times, October 31st 2010, an article on a massive
street art exhibit called The Underbelly Project.
“Known to its creators and participating
artists as the Underbelly Project, the space, where all the show’s artworks
remain, defies every norm of the gallery scene. Collectors can’t buy the art.
The public can’t see it. And the only people with a chance of stumbling across
it are the urban explorers who prowl the city’s hidden infrastructure or employees
of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
That’s because the exhibition has been
mounted, illegally, in a long-abandoned subway station. The dank, cavernous
hall feels a lot farther than it actually is from the bright white rooms of
Chelsea’s gallery district. Which is more or less the point: This is an art exhibition that goes to
extremes to avoid being part of the art world, and even the world in general.”
I’m making this personal.
I’m using these two very interesting
ideas to refract events and phenomena in my world. To me, the flagrant corruption of
the sort we are seeing today points to a complete departure of values and
absence of morality. I use both words carefully, not having much faith in
either family or traditional values and fearful of morality being part of the
chastity/virginity gang, who I mistrust even more than family values. I refer instead
to something that is perhaps overarching and fundamental to our existence on
this planet - practiced values such
as civility, honesty, dignity, cooperation and solidarity with the marginalized
or under privileged. Values that would make it unbearable to illegally
accumulate anything. Inconceivable that you could dip into public funds, take
from war widows, optimize personal gain over community growth and so on.
Assuming there is something of
worth in these values one would imagine they would be part of every child’s
education, right? So what are we doing
to facilitate this education of the heart?
As a theatre artist, I often interact
with local schools. Sometimes in order to facilitate a workshop, sometimes to
judge an event, often to teach a class, screen a film or do a lec-dem. And then
the ball drops. About three times a year I get invitations to direct an “Annual
Day Play/Founder’s Day Play”. The inverted commas are because its part of a contagious
Bangalore disease called the Annual Day Syndrome. While a whole year can pass
uneventfully, without so much as a nod to the NCERT National Curriculum
Framework*, everyone gets into a lather about the Annual Day Play. Two months
prior to the big day, scripts and cast are cobbled together, parents (or these
days, corporate sponsors) dish out generously for grand costumes, auditoria,
lights, PA system and the children are routinely yelled at so that they learn
their lines and are par for the course. The latter basically involves not
speaking out of turn and doing what the adult in charge thinks is the “right” thing
vis-à-vis performance.
Why am I lamenting a clearly
bourgeois approach to art that endorses the “sitting room” culture? Oh, please!
Because of the dangerous stuff embedded within that makes it less harmless
exercise in bad taste and more cultural pruning and indoctrination.
Consider what the process and the
end result teach a child:
-
It is all about the exterior; how GOOD the product
looks is the mark of its success
-
Performance is everything, so never mind how
undemocratic the process might be
-
Art is…don’t be daft, let’s not bring art into
this
What do these credos bring to
mind? Capitalism? Advertising? Military training?
Huh. Strangely, the school
would call it theatre.
It’s a crying shame. Theatre,
more than any other art form, offers students the possibility to see life in a
microcosm and to play with its many options. To have fun, experiment, seek
their voice and fail again and again
and again.
I stress the word “fail” because about
a year ago, parent told me a story. Her 13 year old son, quite out of the blue,
stepped in front of a moving train and killed himself. She never saw it coming.
His note mentioned doing badly in a Math paper and a girl who had rejected him.
His mother looked at me and said “The problem was he had never known failure.”
Yet we, the adults in charge, continually
dismantle the huge learning potential inherent in theatre (and other arts) in order
to put on a “show”. Sanjay Iyer (program director of the Kali-Kalisu program
for arts education) puts this down to the administration’s overwhelming desire
to “increase the prestige of the school” at the expense of the child’s growth. In
short, we are dissing what is natural, organic and joy-inducing in favour of an
elaborate sham that eventually will not bode well for the child. We are
teaching them double speak and to believe in a narrow notion of success that is
dictated by external indicators such as wealth accumulation, fame and the
affirmation of others. And this child will grow into an adult whose immutable
values include pretension, lies and covert activity, basically anything to come
off looking good. Net-Net: An adult who
is terrified of failure.
At the Rangashankara Symposium on
Theatre Pedagogy for Children (2009), I mentioned in my paper that if we have
to extract four core values from theatre, they would be TRUST, PLAY, IMPROVISATION
& INSPIRATION. Those would be the exact four values that go missing from
the average school experience, where children are encouraged to compete,
mistrust adults, stay within the box, intellectually dumb down and eventually have
their every natural instinct socialized into submission and subsequent
extinction.
Extrapolate the Annual Day
Syndrome to the national scenario. How many students wish to study the
humanities these days? Have you ever met someone who wanted to study philosophy
or ethics or even literature? Why would they when they are taught that
education is for the sole purpose of becoming a cog in the Market Wheel and the
Market apparently favours material productivity over a wealth of ideas. All
fair enough, except for the huge fallout in those aforementioned fundamentals –
civility, honesty, dignity et al.
So when Teejan Bai says she just performs
and leaves the rest to God, let us pay close heed. And when a group of street
artists decide to curate a show for themselves alone, fantastic works painted
onto damp walls that will fetch no money and that will inevitably decay in a
short time, let us stop and ask why.
I seriously wish that our students
would revolt and say to hell with this crap. Let us make plays about our lives and
what concerns and interest us. If it involves death and disappointment and drugs,
so be it. If we love Eminem, PS 3 and Rajnikanth, help us locate this love in a
larger cultural context. If English is our second language, endorse
multi-lingual theatre. But we’ll be damned if we do another Broadway/Westend
rip off or Bollywood extravaganza. So shut up and listen to what we have to say.
You might well learn something. We are 53% of this country’s population. Best
we learn to articulate our own deepest feelings, fears and vulnerabilities
rather than continue to mimic someone else’s voice and assemble feeble imitative
theatre. Democracy needs our informed voices and opinions, right? Right?
* The present NCF proposes five
guiding principles for curriculum development:
(i) connecting knowledge to
life outside the school; (ii) ensuring that learning shifts away
from rote methods; (iii)
enriching the curriculum so that it goes beyond textbooks;
(iv) making examinations more
flexible and integrating them with classroom life; and
(v) nurturing an overriding
identity informed by caring concerns within the democratic
polity of the country.
Also, that:
Art as a subject at all stages
is recommended, covering all four major spheres, i.e.
music, dance, visual arts and
theatre. The emphasis should be on interactive approaches, not
instruction, because the goal
of art education is to promote aesthetic and personal
awareness and the ability to
express oneself in different forms. The importance of India’s
heritage crafts, both in terms
of their economic and aesthetic values, should be recognised
as being relevant to school
education.
