A conversation between two theatre practitioners and a journalist about the afterlife of documents, nature of evidence and the role of the artist.

This conversation was the aftertalk to Kai Tuchmann’s lecture Do We Still Want To Remember? –Afterlives of History in Theatre, held on 19^th January 2019 at Harkat Studio, Mumbai. In his lecture, Tuchmann presented excerpts of his works Happy that you are here! (Schön, dass ihr da seid!), that he directed in 2015 and RED (a collaboration with Wen Hui from 2015) for which he developed the dramaturgy. Tuchmann introduced his approach towards a particular kind of theatre that takes as its point of departure, the problem of how to represent and perform history. ^[i]

Happy that you are here! used the field research of master students of cultural anthropology to investigate the historic and present condition of the German refugee camp in Friedland.

RED is based on the revolutionary model ballet, Red Detachment of Women. It utilised the embodied memories of four Chinese dancers to revisit this cultural icon of the times of cultural revolution.

Central to Kai’s presentation was the notion of afterlife — as developed by Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. A notion, that once turned to the realm of theatre, implies that the theatrical repetitions of the past have the potential to expand our being beyond the limits of a ‘homogeneous and empty time’. (Walter Benjamin).

Post the forty minute talk, Kai Tuchmann and documentary theatre maker Anuja Ghosalkar spoke in depth with journalist Kunal Purohit on the changing idea of evidence-gathering and the blurring lines between fact and fiction. When evidence can be manufactured, can artists uphold their own agency while dealing with truth claims associated with it, especially in countries like India, China and Germany? At a time when social media is curating our everyday reality with ‘Alternative Facts’ and ‘Deep Fakes’, how can documentary theatre-making respond to it?

Kunal: Thank you so much for the lecture. It also throws up so many questions for us in the current context, especially in the use of documents, and the use of evidence, and that’s something that we’re going to now discuss in the second part of the evening, which is going to be a conversation between Anuja, Kai and me.

I’m not too sure how many of you have had an exposure to documentary theatre —Kai, you spoke about evidence, about documents, about the importance of the archive. Anuja, you want to just quickly deconstruct what evidence is, for someone like you?

Anuja: That’s very tough. I actually think the way I work and the way it progressed in my performance work, whether it’s Lady Anandi or the Reading Room or other things that I’ve been doing with children around memory and the neighborhood — I’m more interested in the idea of the missing evidence, or absences. For example, if there was a murder and the weapon was missing, that’s of more interest to me. With Lady Anandi, a show about my great grandfather, he was missing from the archive. Therefore for me, there was no evidence of him. The fact that things find their way into archives or are documented is quite a privilege; so the idea of a missing piece of evidence to me, is actually interesting to follow, a sort map of gaps.

Kunal: Kai, do you sort of, relate to that? Especially when you were, you know, working on the refugee camp, looking at all of these accounts, looking into research. Did you question what was missing in their work as well? And, you know, the idea of representation.

Kai: In the film that depicts my work on the refugee camp in Friedland, you saw Marius, who is one of the anthropology student-researchers with whom I collaborated. There is this image in the film, in which he sits in that room that is totally filled with green boxes from which he takes out documents. This scene is taking place in the state archive of Lower Saxonia. This state archive collects documents in the context of all administrative issues related to Camp Friedland. I would say, in this particular archive, there is not so much missing, actually. That is why my constellation is a little bit different from Anuja’s. In this Friedland project I was rather concerned with the question — which understandings of historical narratives are dominant and why? And I wanted to find out possibilities for starting counter-narrations.

Kunal: And I find that interesting, especially for the times that we’re living in India, where we’re looking at history, and we’re sort of trying to understand why is it that one part of history is today much more dominant than you know, it was a few years ago, right? So why is history constantly being thrown to you? But in ways that you didn’t really imagine it was. So suddenly you are flooded with photos of Nehru, with all of these women, and he’s sort of a womaniser. So this idea that suddenly this form of history is now being thrown back to you in ways that you don’t know, is this evidence for you, then? Do you see this as evidence, because that is what is presented to you? Of course, the other side of the story is that fact checks will reveal that these are all photos that are depicting Nehru with his sister, with his niece, and with all kinds of people. But for that moment, when you’re consuming that piece of evidence, you may believe that this is real. So how do you respond to that? How do you critically look at that?

Anuja: I am very cautious of the word ‘evidence’. What is evidence? Because then I feel a great sense of responsibility, when I’m handed over that evidence. There’s such a reverential idea to it. I instinctively challenge it because I am suspicious of authority and anything that sounds so important. But I would look at a piece of evidence and then break it down. These are the clues, and what can I do with it? And then where does it take me imaginatively? For example, if I find a piece of information on my great grandfather and I say, oh maybe this is not real. It is a construct. Then I’m saying, what can I do as a performer. What does it do to me as a storyteller? What does it do to me as a woman in this body? How can I respond to it? Or in Reading Room, when people bring letters, they say these are real letters, but we don’t know for certain.

I take that as evidence, that this is a letter that a mother wrote to her daughter, but it could be constructed completely. But sometimes we totally believe in them, in that moment of performance. I’m a little bit afraid but irreverent of the idea of evidence; however, I acknowledge that in today’s times with Whatsapp and fake news, it’s not an appropriate position to take.

Kunal: I mean, I feel like this connects very well with your work, Kai. You worked in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). You must have come across state documents, and we all sort of see how Communist China has been trying to rewrite history in so many ways. You find historical references being removed from textbooks. You find that certain episodes are whitewashed completely. When Anuja says that she’s skeptical of the evidence that is presented to her, especially from the state, do you share the feeling? Do you feel like, you know as an artist in the PRC, you have to negotiate it differently?

Kai: Well, you say that you have found that there are certain episodes, whitewashed or taken away from history books. You know,I know; but about whom are we talking? I know that in certain contexts, especially among young people within the education system, our knowledge is no longer a common and shared one. The problem here, I would say, is not even that students or other people really believe in what they are taught, but that they are getting cynical or nihilistic towards the representations of history and reality. So, I think our knowledge about all this whitewashing is already a kind of a strange privilege. The state’s aim is the creation of amnesia. And it achieves that through the creation of a culture of cynicism and nihilism.

Kunal: I want to get my journalistic self into the conversation now. Typically, the definition of evidence for journalists is that it has to be factually correct, it has to be irrefutable, it has to be trustworthy. But we’re living in, you know, interesting, different times. For years, I have been writing about how farmers have been committing suicide. We go into these places, and since the last year, I find that the government has now stopped doing service and bringing out reports, which say how many farmers are committing suicide. Suddenly, after all these years, I have no data. I have no evidence to actually go out and report. And that’s something that you’re dealing with as well, when you talk about archival absences. How do you then ethically try to represent something, or respond to something when there is an absence?

Anuja: With Lady Anandi, it was my own body, my own story. I had to be honest to myself, and my craft. And I think that went fine. But with the Reading Room it gets very complicated, and this question has been raised several times, because, in the Reading Room I ask people to read letters. There are no actors, the audience brings ‘real’ letters. They read these letters together in a circle. They bring personal letters and I curate letters from the public domain, and at the end of the Reading Room, they donate those letters to me, if they like, there is no compulsion.

After which I use these letters in the next Reading Room. It’s the idea of collecting an archive. And that’s a little bit daunting for me, because you handed a very personal letter to me. I am forthright, and I openly say I’ll use it. People liken the Reading Room to a therapy circle, I have to be honest and deny that, because for me, it’s a performance. I’m not a trained therapist. And one enters that consensually; we’re all part of this performance.

Kunal: I wanted to throw that to you. Do you think documentary theatre has to be ethical with evidence and documents? Or do you agree with Anuja when she says, you know, you can push the envelope a bit?

Anuja: But not at the cost of ethics though. What I’m saying is, the exciting thing is also…

Kunal: You take liberties with some documents that you have…

Anuja: With consent. Unless, the material is my own. Like, for example, after one show of Lady Anandi , I said no, he’s not my great grandfather. What the audience witnessed was a construct, a lie. But I could take that liberty because that’s my material. But I will not do it in another’s project.

Kunal: What about you Kai?

Kai: The question of how to relate to the pain of others is a question where everything intersects—aesthetics, politics and ethics. I think the representation of the pain of others is an ever-recurring configuration in documentary theatre. You cannot get rid of that. There is also no role model answer towards it, because every situation is unique. Like Anuja, I feel a little bit inconvenient with your journalistic notion of evidence as something that is factually correct, because it assumes that there is an ontology of that what has happened. But I think there is no ontology without interpretation.  So even if the document gives me something — for example, an administrator has written this and this note, pointing to the fact that something happened in the Camp in 1957 —still it is me who has to make sense of this document. By trying to understand the document, you already effect its facticity. This is what I also mean with afterlife, and this is why I have brought up this notion in my talk.

Anuja: Also, I thought of honouring or the ethics of a document. I was re-thinking the Reading Room where people bring letters. I make it clear that I am the postmistress. I don’t read, I only listen. At the start I request the audience/ performers to read everything in that document, including errors. If there’s an inconsistency, a spelling mistake, the performer reads it. If there is a typographical or grammatical error, you read it, you don’t censor it. You don’t even correct it. I think, in that situation in that act, it is ethical, to that document, in that moment.

I see my role very much as a researcher. For example I did a  personal project on my grandfather who was a makeup artist in the Bombay film industry from 1945 to 1995. I transcribed my interviews with him in great detail. We played the roles of a ‘subject’ and ‘researcher’. Because  I had heard all his stories in my growing-up years. During the interview process I would stop and request him to re-tell the stories in the way that I remembered them. And because he was 85 and his memory was failing, the retelling altered. In my transcription of the interviews, I documented this start-stop style with my interjections and alterations. I felt I was being ethical to that process of a granddaughter conversing with her grandfather, who also happened to be researcher and subject.

Kunal: One of the interesting things for me when I attended a workshop that Anuja did in 2018, was that social media can be a very interesting document for documentary theatre, for example Tinder. So, there were a couple of participants who basically read out their Tinder conversations, and said, this is my document, and this is what my documentary data is going to be about. And you know, both of you, do you sort of constantly critically see how social media is providing documents, and all the baggage that social media is bringing…

Anuja: This is being documented on social media as we speak.

Kai: I engage a lot with this context. We just had this discussion this morning during my workshop on Documentary Theatre here in Bombay. We were reading this canonical text on documentary theatre by Peter Weiss called, Notes Towards the Notion of a Documentary Theatre, where he says, documentary theatre represents life. This thought alone is not very interesting. This is what art almost always claimed to do. But he continues and adds, ‘Documentary Theatre represents life as represented by mass media’. So in this sense, reflecting on reality as mediated reality is very important for my practice.

Kunal: I just want to sort of, pick on those words, represented by mass media.We live in times where social media, especially, is often curated, is often bought, is often manufactured, you know. You can buy likes, you can buy retweets, you can buy all of that. My point of saying this is that the perception that one would look at from social media is often a manufactured one. Do you buy that? So you know, if I’m saying that a certain leader in India is the most popular because he has the most number of Twitter followers; a lot of that might be bought. So do you sort of see the problem in it as well? Do you see how social media is again challenging the medium, and saying, you know, it’s possibly not enough to look at social media, and say, this is how society is being reflected today?

Kai: Your question is, if social media is a new stage of mass media?

Kunal: I think my question very simply is, is there an accurate indicator of what is happening in society?

Kai: No. Already the traditional mass media hasn’t been an accurate indicator of what is happening.

Kunal: As a journalist in the room, I would say, we were slightly better than the mass media.

Kai: Depending on the paper.

Anuja: When I think of social media and its relevance or use in documentary theatre, I am always excited or confounded by its mode as an archiving tool. Because it’s so ephemeral. What is it? The fifteen-second Instagram story, 100 people have seen it. Do they remember it? Do they remember it after this evening? Will they remember me tomorrow morning? How would we like to be remembered? How is social media allowing me to etch my name in eternity? Is that going to happen? For me these questions around the role of social media as an archiving tool—that relationship would be interesting to explore if I were to make a documentary theatre performance.

Kai: I wouldn’t say that the medium is the message; it is rather about how we use media. I think social media has potentials as well. If we look at certain rebellions — for example, the ones that happened during the so called Arab Spring —then we have to bring to our mind that these rebellions were in large parts organised and coordinated through social media. And if there wouldn’t be certain WeChat groups in China, there wouldn’t even be this tiny scene of semi-official publishing. So we cannot say that social media is the evil, it’s rather in the way how a society or other groups make use of it. In my workshop here in Bombay, we’re working with professor He Jiankui`s self-published You Tube clip, in which he claims that he would have, for the first time in human history, genetically edited the sex cells of two babies. The very interesting thing was that happened like two months ago, and it went viral, everybody reported it. But in every report journalists mentioned, this is something that allegedly has happened. So it was a news, although nobody really knows until today, if the reported event is true or not. But it has become a news. And this is telling me something about our relationship to time. Most people, producers and consumers of media, cannot wait until the proof is there. And this is a problem that not just the journalists have, or their consumers. Everybody is lacking time more and more. This lack of time and patience is also something under which we artists are suffering, too. We’re also losing the breath for long projects, for deep research. I think time is such a precious resource.

Kunal: I feel like that’s a very interesting thing. It is that, we in the media, in journalism, have this constant pressure that things are out on social media already: So do you just quickly report whatever is coming? Or do you take your time and verify? But then if you verify, what if he’s running it and I’m not?So, all of these questions. This idea that even videos could be manipulated using artificial intelligence, like in Deep Fake phenomenon, that itself, isn’t that a dangerous sign of where we’re headed with social media?

Kai: Well, I think my answer to this would be very much related to that what I just said. To me, it’s about taking time, and I’m not so much concerned about topics on which I work. But I’m rather concerned about constellations of people with whom I work. So, for example, the selection of the two works I showed to you is no coincidence. Both works are the expression of very long working processes. In Germany, I have friends with whom I graduated from drama school and they are doing like four, five works a year, always working for six weeks on one play. I decided at some point in time, this is not the way I want to work any longer.

Anuja: I have a counter question — is this idea of Deep Fake and video evidence being manipulated new at all? Is that a phenomenon of 2018? I think not. In India, we grew up watching newsreels, made by Films Division, before every big Hindi film in theatres. These newsreels were about, nation building — first we’re building an agrarian economy. ‘Look at Our Industry’, funded by the Nehru regime. We were all going to the movies believing that. ‘Oh, this is our state. What a great state’. The notion of the state propaganda existed then, but I think we naively viewed it. Now a days we are clever viewers, questioning everything we see, more obviously, because there’s proliferation of images, we’re more visually literate, or video is so accessible. Then, at that time we were all a bit naive in receiving this information. Before the film we applauded, when the bullock cart went across or when the tractor replaced it, we participated in that nation building exercise, all a bit naively. Now that we’re questioning it, maybe that’s a good thing? I don’t think this idea of Deep Fake is now, or today. It’s existed for as long as the visual …

Kunal: So it’s the form, which has changed.

Anuja: I suppose. The Arrival of the Train by the Lumiere Brothers — when people went to the cinema, they were taken in by the reality of those images. The likeness of film to life was unbelievable for the audiences. The beginning of film, is documentary film. But when there’s a cut, we know there’s a manipulation. I like the term Deep Fake, but I am not sure it’s so new. It’s been that way.

Kunal: Okay, I feel it is good time and good note, to sort of throw it back to the audience. Any questions. Any comments on what has been said so far? What you heard so far?

Audience Member: I’m Mohit. I primarily work on medieval history. I’m trying to look at history in a sense of personal histories. And where does that start in the Indian context? And I think, for me two things that immediately came to my mind were Dalit Autobiography and then the documentary film, where it kind of breaks out of the grand narrative, and kind of Anand Patwardhan’s device of moving away from the main events and looking at what the common people have to say, and stuff like that. And Kai showed us a beautiful way of integrating documentary film with documentary theatre.

But my question, then, is, what is the ethics there? Because we know how invasive the documentary approach was, how it constructs a narrative of world in itself. So with your work, where you’re talking about refugees, and where the state is always been this invisible body that goes into the camp and documents people, the undocumented. When you enter, how does your process become participatory in essence, and how are you aware of the ethics of your more creative ways of documenting that camp as opposed to how the state would do it?

Kai: When I use this word, participatory, I didn’t mean that we let refugees directly participate in   this documentary theatre play. I primarily referred to the collaboration with the cultural anthropology students. In devising this play our main concern was deconstructing mainstream representations of migration and asylum: How do ‘We’, as the majority society, represent the issues of refugees? And where do we misuse these representations? And it was not primarily about empowering, or giving voice to the refugees.

Kunal: Anu, do you also want to take a go at it? I think this is interesting, especially the idea of ethics in representation.

Anuja: I find it problematic, I have taught and studied film. And documentary film made me uncomfortable for extremely long. I love fiction film, because it makes its fiction obvious. I always found it problematic— the politics of an upper caste person, most often male, going into the village and telling us the plight of the farmers, and that happened for a long time.

Then it came to the city where the privileged were making films about the construction worker. So, of course, on the face of it, it’s problematic. But then should their stories not be told? Who should tell them? Should we tell our own stories? And this is something we’ve been discussing through the workshop as well. Can I tell your story? Am I in the right position to represent you? Of course all that is very, very complicated. Especially in film, the editing technique is highly manipulative because you manipulate time. You are contracting–expanding time.

So yes, of course, there’s a problem of representation. But I think we also need to go beyond this debate now, because through my teaching film for nine years, I thought about, oh shall I represent you? I can’t. Of course I can’t. But then what? So I’m asking this question— so what now? Because one has been there. One has been critical of issue-based documentary filmmakers, but now what next? Now what can I do that may represent, better? Can we make the means of representation apparent? And I mean this, making the seams apparent. Can I say I’m upper class Brahmin. I’m shooting a film about a Dalit person. Can I turn the gaze onto myself ?

Kunal: It is problematic in its own ways.

Anuja: No, it’s uninteresting now. How do we now complicate it? Because these are very murky times. Because of these Deep Fakes…

Kai: There is this sentence by Adorno in his aesthetic theory;  he says, ‘the unsolved problems of aesthetic forms are pointing to the unsolved problems in society’. So I think these problems of ethics in documentary representation are connected to the very essential fundamentals of capitalism, and the way we do economics and politics. We as artists will not do the first move in solving these dilemmas of ethics, which primarily are indicators of economic contradictions.

Anuja: But, I think the representation also has to turn towards the representation of the privileged. That’s something that in India now needs to be talked about a lot more. Recently I heard in Germany that there was a theatre festival, examining the idea of privilege. What is this idea of privilege?  Can we deal with it? This situation in India,of its new money…

Kunal: Okay, Priyanka there has a question.

Audience Member: I’m Priyanka, a journalist by background, now working in the development sector. I want to understand from both of you, how you deal with public memories and public records. How does one counter public memory, there are more than two sides of a lot of stories. How does that synergy work? How does that response work? Is there a scope for interaction of these public memories to understand this is where they are coming from?

Kunal: Yeah I mean, if I sort of, quickly add to that. I was in UP, a couple of weeks ago. Uttar Pradesh, is India’s most populous state. A lot of hate crimes, a lot of communal riots there. And every hate crime spot that I went to investigate, there was one guy who would show me videos and say, ‘Dekho usne maara. See that guy hit me first’. And another one would show me some video and say, ‘I was standing here, he came and hit me’. I feel that ties in interestingly with what she’s trying to say as well.

Anuja: If I understood the first part of your question, how do two differing public memories come together? How we represent two very varied public memories about the same issue as artists? Is that what you’re asking?

Audience Member (Priyanka): Yes.

Anuja: That’s very tough. It’s a long, complicated process. I’m not a journalist, I am an artist. I think I will pick a side. I will make my politics known. When we go to the newsroom, and we know our newsrooms are also notnot-prejudiced, right? So, when news is so partisan, I think as an artist, I should make a claim. I should stand my ground. I should take a position. For me, I would veer towards the public memory that agrees with my ideology, that I think will create empathy, that might create healing, and healing is a part now of a lot of our work that we do.

It’s important as documentary theatre makers, when I do the Reading Room, it’s important— the act of reading is the act of healing. Also as a woman in India, I may take a side. And that, is part of an artist’s responsibility—nay as a response. It is my response. Whether that’s my responsibility I am not certain. But that’s what I mean with ethics. Like, I’m willing to push the ethics slightly. I will take a position, and as an artist, I must do that. That’s when my art becomes political. Not when I do a play about Kashmir, but howI do a play about Kashmir, and what I’m saying on it— is my claim as an artist. And that’s what makes me political.

Kai: I just support this. There’s no question that one should highly acknowledge post-colonial studies, cultural studies, gender studies, minority studies, all these studies that made us more sensitive about questions of representation.

But there is something at stake, and this is the very game of art. Because, if we start just to measure our practices according to political standards, or making us just valuable and visible by submitting to ethical standards, then it’s us artists who will have abandoned the game of art. And, that would be sad, because this game is an own mode of engaging with and experiencing of reality.

Audience Member:  I am Thiago, I am a Brazilian anthropologist, researching about scientific racism in colonial memory in Germany but also about anthropologists, who were doing scientific research on race and custom. In this connection, my question—I want to hold it to the topic of ethics, but then thinking about the genre of documentary theatre, and thinking about again, if there is… My question with it was, if there is an ethical commitment to truth or to the actual, in a genre that calls itself documentary? And of course we talked about the problem of lack of evidence, or lack of archival materials and how to fill in these gaps.

And how much can you go with your artistic interpretation of that? Of course, I think every archive will have its gaps, and I think these gaps are very interesting as well. Because they speak up or something. But I wonder, I mean, how to go with this ethical responsibility to documentary, if it’s responsible to the true or to the actual? Especially now in times of post-truth, with science strong again on holding ourselves to the idea to truth or the actual.

Kunal: Back to the question of responsibility. Kai do you want to go first?

Kai: Responsibility is a concern of mine. But I would also be worried if it becomes the primary concern of artistic practice because then it’s no longer artistic practice. Then it becomes ethical commitment. So, there is this border, which is very fragile between a certain understanding of aesthetics and ethics. I would rather uphold the idea of gaming with documents, the idea of gaming with reality. Because this game can provide us with a sense for our own futurity.

Audience Member (Thiago):  I understand there might be multiple realities, but I’m just thinking about the term documentary. Of course, you can play with the archive in your control. Different takes on multiple realities because in my view there are multiple realities. But there is one truth, or one actual something. And the question was, does documentary as a genre, does it have a connection to being close to the truth or to the actual?

Kai: I think that this actual something exists, but it has to go through language. Otherwise, we cannot make this something appear in front of us. We have to represent this actual something. My point here basically is: language and being is tied together. And I think what documentary theatre is about, is the study of language. And in this sense, documentary investigates ways of representation, and games with them, too. It is a playful form.

Anuja: When I go to a theatre to watch a documentary performance, what is my understanding with the audience? What is the contractual obligation that I may have with them, is what I’m trying to think about. What have they come to see in a documentary theatre performance versus if I were a mime artist? If I climb an imaginary wall as a mime artist or as a clown, they completely believe it. I’m trying to examine my relationship with audience. Is the mime artist, who climbs over the imaginary wall more truthful to his audience than me, who presents the story of my great grandfather. And says actually, that’s not my great grandfather at all. Did I betray the trust of my audience?

I am interested in understanding my truth, in relationship to my audience. What is the contractual obligation I may have to them?  The obligation I have to my audience is my pursuit, not this ideal of of the one truth. But I’m responsible to my audience. Will they believe what I’ve shown today? What have we decided between each other? For me, that’s very important. And that artistic truth changes. It changes from city to city, audience to audience, country to country, performance to performance.

For example, I wanted to cry today in a show, but my ‘performance’was horrible.  But I truly cried. But the audience’s reaction was,  ‘Oh God, it’s terrible, it was so fake’. On another day the performance was received well and my crying was realistic and the audience cried with me. But I felt nothing. It was not truthful at all.

For me, more than truth, the idea of vulnerability is my aim. Do I make myself vulnerable? Is my audience vulnerable? Have we found a moment in this time where we’ve all become vulnerable in the lie that I told you? I am a mime, I am jumping was over the wall. You believed it. We clapped. I showed you a photograph. It’s trickery, in a way. You have come to documentary theatre, what I’ve shown you, I may have tricked you. But if we agree, as artist and audience, then I think that bit of trickery is fine. We all like it, we love falsehood.  It’s just a joke between us. I feel like a contract with the audience is important. I can’t cheat them without their knowledge. Without this fine line of trickery and believability we would all then only be confession boxes, and even confessions can be highly narrativized fiction.

Kai: Another take on the ethics of representation would be that theatre is not the only responsibility of the theatre makers. Theatre is this space, where audience and performers meet. And there is also all this theatre before and after the performance— discussion among spectators, discussion in blogs, press coverage, word of mouth etcetera. All these are elements in the permanent process of creating the meaning of a performance. So I think, yes, the artist should care for politics and ethics; but all these categorial ethical demands which construct the artist as the only person in charge of ethics are quite dangerous, because they’re promoting an understanding of theatre that is based on the dominance of the theatre-makers and totally forget those other people involved in meaning creation. This ethical demand tends to dis-empower the authorship of spectators and of the other parts of the theatrical public sphere.

Audience Member: I am Radhika. I am a student of literature. I’m not coming from a theatre background. But I was very intrigued to know what exactly this entire genre is. I just want to know, how is it, vis-à-vis in India, how is this genre of theatre, in our Indian context, how is it…

Kunal: So do you mean how popular is it?

Audience Member (Radhika): Not popularity, what is the current state of…?

Anuja: That’s very difficult for me to answer. I met Kai in 2013, and we started working on an amazing text of Virginia Woolf, called A Room of One’s Own. At that time, I was working in conventional, and it didn’t excite me.

But working on the Virginia Woolf text liberated me in a way, this process of making documentary work was invigorating. We dived into the document, and chapter three really spoke to me—It talks of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister, Judith; would she have killed herself; or would she continue to do theatre? She probably would have killed herself. And I felt the same about women in India making theatre in 2013. That text brought me to documentary theatre and it’s quite serendipitous that we’re sitting here in Bombay, talking about that six years later. Ever since then, I’ve been practising this form, through Lady Anandi, Reading Room, Walk Back to Look, Walking Around etcetera.

Kai and I reconnected again in 2017, and we felt the need to create more audiences, because I felt that I was doing it alone and was lonely. I wanted people to come to my shows, and wanted people to understand the form, pay more ticket money, get into it. We felt, we should share our tools, because I stumbled upon it and made my own work. In 2018, I ran a series of workshops on documentary theatre, that I conducted in Bangalore, Bombay, and Cochin. And this year, with Kai, we’re curating an international workshop series. It kicks off with his workshop, and there will be three more in 2019—a Chinese practitioner, Zhao Chuan; a Swiss theatre practitioner, Boris Nikitin; and another German practitioner, Daniel Wetzel. We hope to curate a festival of documentary theatre in 2020 in Bombay, possibly the first of its kind.

So this is where documentary theatre is. We are the practitioners. You are the audience. This is the field. It is intimate, exciting and sharp. I would like to say, I came here first and I said it all of last year— the only company to do documentary theatre, the first of its kind in India. But then I realised that I was falling into the trap of my male counterparts those do theatre. The claim to be first somewhere, like Vasco Da Gama.

But I gave up that claim. I feel because now I’m more secure, I made friends through my workshops. My community is here. I’m not insecure anymore. I have a community now that’s building, so I don’t want to say I’m the first. But this is us. This is the scene.

Kunal: Yeah, you’ve found a good way of saying that you’re the first, but without saying it…

Kai: That it is also part of artistic practice — to shape your audience. And I think that what Anuja just referred to, is that what artists have to do. You have to shape audiences, and spectatorship. You just cannot go in the old institutions doing new things. You will fail desperately.

Anuja: The old tools of dissent don’t work any more.

Kunal: Okay, so do you have any last comments?

Audience Member: No I think you covered it. That’s a great note to end on.

Kunal: Thank you again to people who supported us and made this possible.

Thank you Kai. Thank you Anuja. Thanks to all of you. Yeah.

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