In Conversationâ•¦

itj 1 (1) pp. 5–18 Intellect Limited 2017

Indian Theatre Journal

Intellect

10.1386/itj.1.1.5_7

1 INTERVIEW 1

5 RICHARD SCHECHNER New York University

18 SREENATH NAIR University of Lincoln © Intellect Ltd

2017 In conversation…

Sreenath Nair: Richard, you have a long history of interaction with Indian theatre, people, performances and events. Richard Schechner: I’m familiar with the Ramlila. But, I’m not that familiar with Indian theatre. I have seen a good range of traditional Indian performances, seen few modern Indian theatre productions, directed a couple of productions in India and spoke in few conferences. When I go to India, I mostly go to Varanasi for Ramlila and visit my friends in Delhi. So, I don’t think of myself as much informed about Indian theatre. SN: Can I start this conversation with a basic question? Why do we need theatre and what functions do you think theatre perform in social and individual life? RS: Your question is part of a larger question of why do we need art and what function does art have in social life? We don’t need art to survive physically. But humans don’t live by bread alone. Isn’t it compelling that even the poor- est people, those who barely have food, shelter and clothes, still perform their religious rituals, sing songs and dance? They share what little they have with the gods. Performance activities in the service of religion, or in the service of art or in the service of pleasure – or all of these combined – continue regardless

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of who you are and how rich or poor you are. These activities human beings consider fundamental. A person who never sings or never says a line of poetry, who never dances, who never thrills at seeing a beautiful object, who never gazes at a powerful murti in a temple or sheds a tear during a film or play: we do not regard that person as a full human being. Performance activities are fundamental to the human condition. We eat, we sleep, we have sex, we make art. There are people in the upper Amazon, and elsewhere too, who have no clothes at all, who are 100 per cent naked for most of their life, and other people with almost no shelter at all, who don’t live in a house. But there is no one who doesn’t do some singing, some dancing and some keeping of a favourite object or two. Yes, the aesthetic impulse is fundamental. Another fundamental is curiosity about the ‘big questions’ of life and death: the ultimate. Everyone wonders: Why was I born? What will happen after I die? Who will care for my family? Why do I love who I love? These are large questions are often addressed by religion, philosophy and art. In fact, these three go together, are always infiltrating and affecting each other. Religion is philosophy is art; art is religion is philosophy; philosophy is religion is art. If you want to honour a god or a force of nature or a beautiful or terrifyingly sublime experience, you make something: an image, dance, song, poem, story. This is true not only in India, but everywhere. When I enter one of the great cathedrals of Europe, I am experiencing art that I know is in relation to religion. Or religion expressed in/as art. The same for when I participate in Ramlila in Ramnagar, across the Ganga River from Varanasi. The Ramlila is a religious act, but it is also theatre, it is also art. In the Ramlila, the people address the larger questions of life. Which art was first? The ‘cave art’ of Europe and elsewhere goes back more than 30,000 years. Incredible. Some ‘jewellery’ – necklaces, marked shells and so on – go back even further. I put these in quotation marks because we don’t know what the makers of these thought and felt – whether they could express in terms that we understand, concepts such as ‘art’. What we do know is that modern people, we, respond to these images and objects in the same way that we respond to art. For us, the images of Lascaux or Chauvet are art. Along with those items, in some caves, there are footprints in the clay indicating dancing – circular movement. I would reason that the performing arts are the first in terms of time. Look at the primates, the great apes who are our closest relatives. They move in a rhythmic ways, they make rhythmic sounds. So before humans could paint or sculpt, I believe we were singing, dancing and making music. SN: True. Art addresses some fundamental questions about human existence as does religion, philosophy and science. When did you go to India first, and what took you there? RS: I first went to India in 1970. How I took that trip is an intriguing story. In 1968, I was doing Dionysus 69, my first production in New York. At the end of one performance, as I was milling around with the spectators as I almost always did, an older man made himself known to me. ‘This is a very interesting performance’, he said. ‘You must have been to Asia. There is so much that is Asian in it’. I asked him what he meant. ‘The audience participation, the staging without a stage, the mixture of religion and art’. I said, ‘No, I have never been to Asia, but thank you for your praise’. The man replied, ‘Well! You must go’. Being young – I was 34 at that time – and the man was much older – I brashly said, ‘All right, then. You should send me!’ Without missing a beat, took out his card. ‘When you are ready to go, call me’, he said, ‘Really?’ I

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replied, astonished. ‘You just phone me, come and see me, and I will sponsor a trip to Asia for you’. This man turned out to be Porter McCray, at that time the head of the JDR 3rd Fund, a nonprofit bank-rolled by John D. Rockefeller 3rd promoting cultural exchanges between the USA and Asia. Later on, the JDR 3rd Fund became the Asian Cultural Council. McCray was 60 when I met him. I took McCray at his word. When I met him in his JDR 3rd Fund office a week or so later he said to me, ‘You can go anywhere you want in Asia. You can stay for as long as you want’. I asked if Joan MacIntosh – we later married and still later divorced – a member of The Performance Group and a key performer in Dionysus in 69 – could go with me. ‘Yes’, McCray replied. I elected to take a trip of around 6 months, starting in October 1971. The time lapse between meeting McCray and my journey was needed to prepare The Performance Group for my absence and for me and Joan to plan our Asian itinerary. I visited almost every Asian country I could get into: China, Tibet, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Burma (later named Myanmar) were off limits. We decided not to go to Nepal, Pakistan and New Zealand, I don’t remember why, and to this day I have not been to those countries. Where did I go? India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. I spent the longest time in India, about four months. Actually, New Delhi was where I landed on a flight from Europe where The Performance Group was performing Commune. After about a week in Delhi, we took off for Kolkata, called Calcutta. Later we travelled to many places in India. In New Delhi, it was my very good fortune to meet Dr. Suresh Awasthi, the Secretary of the Sangeet Natak Academy, India’s national agency of theatre, dance and music. The Akademi specialized in traditional rather than modern, that is, Westernized, forms. Guiding the Akademi was Dr. Suresh Awasthi, a boundlessly energetic, knowledgeable and enthusiastic scholar-promoter of traditional performing arts. Awasthi was like a bird, angular, thin, with poking gestures. He spoke rapidly and seemed to know everyone – performers, teach- ers, producers, directors. Awasthi was interested not only in preserving the traditional but also in encouraging a ‘theatre of roots’, whereby modern and traditional collaborated to make new fusion arts. Awasthi himself was born in a village, he appreciated the way the vast preponderance of Indians, at that time, lived. He knew an astonishing number of Indian performance genres, and he wanted me to see as many as possible. Awasthi knew the history of each form and the leading living expo- nents. He arranged for Joan and I to travel all over India from Mumbai to Kashmir, Calcutta to Kerala, Assam to Lucknow, Vrindavan to Varanasi and more. I don’t remember how many performances we saw, or all the different kinds. It was not the season for Ramlila, so I did not see it. But I saw, at least, bharatanatyam, odissi, pand pather, jatra, tamasha, kuchipudi, kathakali, kutiyat- tam, teyyam, chhau, kathak, raslila. Beyond the fold and art performances were visits to many temples – so different north and south – and so very intense with the crowds of worshippers, the smell of prasad and flowers, the ringing of bells, blowing of conch shells, chanting. A whole new and very different performance world opened up for me. And yet this Indian panoply was familiar to me too. I don’t know why, it would take me some time of reflection to get to the bottom of it, but all this tumult, variety and crush–clash of different senses – smell, sight, sound, touch, taste – the rasa of it! – was profoundly comforting to me. In a way that I still cannot explain, I had come home.

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Talking to you now, my 1971–72 trip to India merges in my mind’s eye with the longer of 1976. It was in 1976 that I first experienced Ramlila. But before describing that, and my time living at the Sankat Mochan Hanuman temple in Varanasi, I need to say more about what happened during my first trip. In Calcutta – I will use that name because ‘Kolkata’ did not exist yet – through the auspices of Awasthi, I met Shyamalan Jalan, a leading director of Hindi theatre in Bengali Calcutta. Jalan was a big man in all senses of the word. Joan and I were his guests in his – and his wife Chetna’s – spacious Chowringhee apartment, right at the center of the city overlooking the Maidan, Calcutta’s big central park. From those luxurious digs, I plunged into both Hindi and Bengali performance. By coincidence, shortly after I arrived in Calcutta the Indo-Pak War started – the war that resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. During that war, Joan and I did a day’s service in the Salt Flats near Calcutta where there were many refugees. We also met Badal Sircar who was just then getting more involved in social action theatre. We also saw some Hindi and Bengali modern theatre. But what really impressed me was jatra. With spectators on three sides of a stage projecting out into the house, vibrant loud committed performances, asides to the spectators – it was what I imagined Elizabethan theatre must’ve been like: popular and literary and theatrical and fun and deep all at once. Of course, I couldn’t understand the dialogue, it was in Bengali. But I got a fine sense of the tone, the feel, the energy of the performances. From that time on, I became more and more interested in the local performance forms. I wanted to learn about them much more than I wanted to find out about the Europeanized modern Indian theatre. SN: Do you think that modern Indian theatre is heavily Westernized? RS: At that time, the early 1970s, definitely. Plays were staged behind prosce- niums; there was more talking, dialogue, than anything else; the acting was generally realistic. Even the plays – many of the plays were translations of Western dramas. Later on, probably beginning at the time I first came to India, people like Ratan Thiyam and Kavalam Narayana Panikkar were starting to explore marrying Western dramaturgy to Indian traditional performance – that ‘theatre of roots’, I mentioned before. And Sircar was starting to leave the proscenium and conventional playwriting. So there were deep changes afoot. But what I saw in Delhi and Calcutta in that first trip to India was orthodox Westernized theatre. Some of that theatre was extraordinary. I remember especially Tripti Mitra directed by her husband Shombhu Mitra. She was a powerhouse, a great actress. SN: Right! You have been talking about your India visit in the 1970s. RS: Yes! Probably, for my life, the most important single thing that happened on my first trip to India was when I went to Madras, what Chennai was called then, and was introduced to the great yoga guru Krishnamacharya. I studied with my incomparable teacher on a daily basis for about a month. Only a month! But it changed my life. More than 50 years later I still practice that yoga almost daily. Krishnamacharya said I could teach what I learned from him, and I have in innumerable workshops and rehearsals. The yoga training and breathing is a cornerstone of my theatre work.

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Also in Madras, because I lived near Kalakshetra I saw Balasaraswati perform. The dance I remember most clearly is when Yashoda, Krishna’s mother, make her naughty little boy spit out some dirt he had put into his mouth. Bala was such a great artist, such a master of abhinaya, acting. She played both Yashoda and Krishna. Finally, after shaking his head ‘No’ many times, and after Yashoda scolds him by wagging her index finger, Krishna spits out the mud. Then Yashoda looks in to make sure he’s spit out all the mud. What she sees is the whole cosmos. She stumbles back terrified by a sight too powerful to comprehend, the great god Krishna, now manifest in all his Bhagavad Gita self:

See all the universe, animate and inanimate, and whatever else you wish to see; all is here, as one in my body. [...] As moths in a frenzy of destruction fly into a blazing flame, worlds in the frenzy of destruction enter my mouth. [...] I am time grown old [...] set in motion to annihilate the worlds.

All this Bala showed to me, and the others in that auditorium that night. I still feel in my whole self the trembling, the tears, the thrill, the terror conveyed by this thickset 53-year-old woman, a dancer hardly moving, all the expression focussed in and radiating from her face and hands, and the slight adjustments she made in her torso and hips, with her feet, ankle bells softly sounding, keeping the tal. Balasaraswati, too, changed my life. I don’t recall if I saw kathakali on that first trip or not. It might have been during my second much longer journey to India in 1976. At any rate, after travelling around India for 4 months in 1971–72, Joan and I left for about 2 months going around Asia seeing performances, both aesthetic and ritual. Even as I left India, I laid the groundwork for returning. I wanted to bring a production of mine. Back in America, I directed first Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime and then Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. I brought Courage to India in 1976. We performed in Delhi, Calcutta, Sinjole, a village near Calcutta, Bhopal, Lucknow and Mumbai. In each place, we built an environmental theatre – in a gymnasium, a motor garage, a schoolyard, a village square. We moved among the spectators interacting with them. SN: At what point did you come in contact with the traditional Indian theatre, especially Ramlila, the performance you’ve been studying now for so many years? RS: After Courage was over, the tour took about a month and a half, I stayed in India for the rest of 1976, about seven more months. I spent the summer in Cheruthuruthi in Kerala and studied kathakali at the Kerala Kalamandalam. I also read the Natyasastra and Christopher Byrski’s Concept of Ancient Indian Theatre. I also travelled extensively. I met many Indian theatre directors like Ratan Thiyam and scholars like Kapila Vatsyayan. I was impressed by Thiyam’s work. I began to understand how a new generation of Indian directors was exploring the relationship between the traditional and modern Indian performances – actually integrating elements and principles from yakshagana, teyyam and other forms into contemporary productions; reconceiving how to stage Sanskrit plays; taking seriously the concrete performance knowledge of the Natyashastra. As Suresh Awasthi wrote a few years later in 1985, recount- ing the origins of the Theatre of Roots and laying out its basic principles:

[The directors Ratan Thiyam, B. B. Karanth, and K. N. Panikkar] have reversed the colonial course of contemporary theatre and put it back on the track of the great Natyashastra tradition. It sounds paradoxical, but

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their theatre is both avantgarde in the context of conventional realistic theatre, and still belongs to the Natyashastra theatrical tradition. (Sangeet Natak 77–78: 85)

Awasthi traces this amalgamation of traditional and modern forms back to the work of Habib Tanvir – and to his own labours at the Sangeet Natak Akademi from 1965 to 1975 – especially the groundbreaking 1971 ‘National Round- table on Contemporary Relevance of Traditional Theatre’. It was in 1976, while I was familiarizing myself with the Theatre of Roots, various traditional Indian performances, and the Natyashastra that I saw the Ramlila of Ramnagar for the first time. I only saw a few days, but I vowed to return to an experience all 31 days. I did that in 1978. After that, I kept returning to do in-depth studies of Ramlila. The last time I attended Ramlila was in 2013. I hope to return again. SN: Can you tell more about your transition from environmental theatre to performance studies? RS: I got the idea of environmental theatre back in the early 1960s when I was a Ph.D. student. I read Erving Goffman’s book The Presentation of Life in Everyday Life, published in 1959. A few years later, I began reading Victor Turner. In between, I read Milton Singer’s When A Great Tradition Modernizes (1972) – Singer theorizes his study of Madras in the context of ‘cultural performances’. At the same time that I was doing this academic work, I was passionately involved in the African American freedom movement. Many demonstrations took place in the streets, in stores and in churches. Public spaces were clearly performance spaces. I thought of the demonstrations as performances in Goffman’s sense. I also became more and more aware of, and participated in, happenings – today called performance art – and other site-specific highly physical performances. The notion of ‘character’ and the ‘well-made play’ – the foundations of modern Euro-American theatre – were breaking down. At the same time, I was directing with the Free Southern Theatre and with the New Orleans Group, which I was a co-founder of. I took the opportunity to put all this theory into practice. To summarize what was going on, I wrote ‘Six Axioms for Environmental Theatre’, published in TDR in 1968. And then there was Grotowski, whom I first heard about in 1963. SN: So, environmental theatre! RS: Yes, environmental theatre was formed from multiple streams. My notions of ritual performance, my notions of the streets in the Freedom Movement, my familiarity with happenings. I got to know Allan Kaprow and his teacher John Cage. Kaprow’s 1966 Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings gave me the term ‘environment’ and the basic gist of environmental theatre. By ‘environment’, Kaprow meant designing a whole space, turning art galleries into total theatres, not just hanging framed pictures on walls. At the same time, I had been editing TDR since 1962 and I began seeking articles about what Michael Kirby called ‘The New Theatre’, the title of his 1965 TDR article and his 1974 book. Even before ‘Six Axioms’ was ‘Approaches to Theory and Criticism’, published in TDR in 1966 (volume 10, number 4) where I discuss the idea of ‘performance’ – as in performance studies – asserting that so many human activities – play, ritual, theatre, dance, music, popular entertainments, sports – are performances. So I had been thinking about ‘performance studies’ long before I moved to NYU in 1967.

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SN: Was it Grotowski who brings new change in your thoughts, writings and productions in New York? RS: Well, everything and everyone I just talked about were very important. But Grotowski had a special and profound impact on me. As I said, I knew about Grotowski’s work from 1963. I translated for a 1964 issue of TDR on Christopher Marlowe, Eugenio Barba’s description of Grotowski’s production of Dr. Faustus. This may have been the time something about Grotowski was published in English. I first met Grotowski face-to-face in 1966 or 1967 in Montreal. I invited him to come to the United States and do a workshop at NYU. That workshop was very important for me, and for others too. Working with Ryszard Cieslak, his principal actor at that time, Grotowski instilled in the 23 participants his basic principles of performing. It was a transformative experience for me – as my first trip to India, still several years in the future, would be. Actually, thinking about it now and knowing of Grotowski’s exten- sive extraction of knowledge from Asia, from China and India especially, I wonder if my direct work with him prepared me in some way for what was to happen to me in India. At any rate, what I learned during November 1967 has stayed with me for my whole life. The techniques from Grotowski and Cieslak fed into the forma- tion of The Performance Group and my production of Dionysus 69 in 1968. In fact, I began to transfer what I was learning from Grotowski immediately. During the day, I was part of Grotowski’s workshop. At night, I taught some of what I learned – plus some of my own ideas – to the young people who would become The Performance Group. The key things I learned from Grotowski: the actor’s work is personal, as much, or even more, about her/himself as about a character; the text of a play is the starting point not the end goal of a production – you can, in fact, you must ‘deconstruct–reconstruct’ the text; the whole theatre needs to be redesigned for each production – this was in keeping with what I was learning about environmental theatre. But, even before I met Grotowski and before Dionysus 69, in the spring of 1967, just before moving from Tulane University in New Orleans to NYU, I directed Eugene Ionesco’s Victims of Duty as environmental theatre. And even earlier, when I co-founded and directed the East End Players in Provincetown, Massachusetts in the summers of 1957 and 1958, I staged Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken in the Town Hall and Sophocles’ Philoctetes on the beach. So I was into these kinds of explorations from way back. But for sure Dionysus 69 put it all together in a new way. D69 – a version of Euripides’ The Bacchae – added audience participation, nakedness and men kissing each other. And because D69 was done in New York and got a rave review in The New York Times, the ideas and techniques I had learning and playing with for years got lots of attention. Environmental theatre went public in a big way with Dionysus in 69. SN: When you visited India, did you see the idea of environmental theatre already in practice with centuries old performance forms in the rural villages? RS: Certainly, in India, I saw the forms of environmental theatres in practice, especially, in traditional performances in the villages. On the contrary, the modern theatre in India, what I felt, basically, was old fashioned and not so interesting to me. I was no more interested in the proscenium theatres in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata then I was in that kind of theatre in New York. But there a theatre person, and he is very important, who was different. Badal Sircar (1925–2011) who started as a more or less conventional playwright and director but then moved out of the proscenium, moved into the streets.

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I think I was an important influence on him. We met on my first journey to India in 1971–72. Badal asked if he could come to America to do an environmental theatre workshop with me and The Performance Group. He joined us for six weeks in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia where The Performance Group was in residence during the summer of 1972. Badal took to our techniques and theories. I urged him to abandon the proscenium. When he returned to India, to his group Satabdi, he began working in the streets and other site-specific venues. In Sircar’s work, I see a convergence of traditional Indian performance forms and modern western experimental theatre. I kept in touch with Badalji for years. He was a very humble, intense and determined person. When I first met him he was the city planner for Calcutta, the most chaotic city I’ve ever been in. What a thankless job. We both laughed at it. And yet, of course, there is something noble in trying to wrest order from chaos. That’s the essence of creativity, isn’t it? Finally, for me, what I experienced in India, especially at Ramlila, confirmed my evolving theories and practice. Ramlila was the most environmentally total environmental theatre that I ever have taken part in or heard about. Ram’s story is enacted in locations throughout the town; the audience participates and moves from location to location. Each place becomes the site it represents – really participates in a transformation into Lanka or Ayodhya or the forest or Janakpur. The whole city for a month becomes mythopoetic-religious Hindu India. I fell in love with Ramlila, and I am still in love with it, a Ramlila-bhakti. SN: Richard, you are responsible for the development of a discipline called performance studies. Postmodernism was a prominent mode of thinking in the American universities when you started publishing many of your earlier writings. You have been doing theatre, thinking and writing about it through the age of postmodernism where academic practice is heavily influenced by linguistic philosophy. But, you played a historical role in this discourse, placing ‘performance’ as a critical paradigm to understand the fundamental nature of meaning and experience. What was your transition from environmental theatre to performance studies? RS: Well! I don’t know. There are always parallels. I was preparing to be a scholar – earning an MA and Ph.D. – even as I was devising environmental theatre. I never thought of myself as a single unity or a single persona. I was doing several different things: environmental theatre, scholarship, editing, writing, and I was involved in social and political actions. The academic me saw that American theatre departments were teaching proscenium style theatre. And they were teaching drama mostly, theatre somewhat, and performance not at all. The social activist and theorist saw that people performed their beliefs, ‘demonstrated’ their beliefs, put their physical bodies on the line. I was interested in learning more about that process. When the bodies appear in a political demonstration, for example, it is all about the testimony of the bodies, about physical presence and witnessing. People sat-in or went to jail in order to prove a point, in order to make change in the social and political world. But it was also true that the ‘personal is political’. It wasn’t an abstract ‘them’ or ‘other’ who marched or sat-in or went to jail. It was specific people, with specific experiences, desires and relationships. And demonstrat- ing – being with others who shared your beliefs, who had the determination to embody those beliefs – wasn’t only about what you get in the end, but about the whole thing, the process of participating. That’s why the movement was one of ‘participatory democracy’. So, even as I participated, I began to write about the kind of things I did and encountered – I saw these actions

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as performance, as theatre. When I became the editor of TDR, I shifted the emphasis from drama to theatre and then to performance. As performance studies began to take shape in the late 60s and throughout the 70s, as I recognized that Grotowski had introduced a radically different way of doing theatre and then, when he left theatre for paratheatre, theatre of sources, objective drama and art as vehicle, that he was pointing the way toward a vastly expanded field of performance. Even more than Goffman. Or, rather, comprising Goffman – secular performance, social performance – and exploring beyond Goffman in the direction of the spiritual and mystical. I did not always go as far, or in the same direction, as Grotowski. But I always deeply respected, admired, his discipline, his probing, his truly experimental practice. I published lots of stuff about Grotowski in TDR. And also an issue about happenings, articles about street theatre and so on. The link to performance studies was that I wanted to bring all of this activity and experimentation into the academic realm: ‘performance’ not just drama and theatre. In my 1966 essay ‘Approaches to Theory/Criticism’ – which I mentioned before – I made a chart, which I titled ‘The Performance Activities of Man’ – I wrote ‘Man’ instead of ‘Humans’ because I wasn’t yet sensitive to the gender bias in language. In this chart, for the first time, I used the word ‘performance’ in the sense we are talking about it now. ‘Approaches’ outline the broad spectrum of performance studies. In the early 1970s, I met Victor Turner and we began to work together. During the 1970s, I was still doing environmental theatre in New York. After Dionysus 69, there was Makbeth – with a ‘k’ because it was my reconstruction of Shakespeare’s text – and then Commune, The Tooth of Crime, Mother Courage, a whole bunch of plays. When I met Turner, we talked about rituals and the ritual process. I already knew Turner through his published works, especially The Ritual Process (1968) and Dramas, Fields and Metaphors (1974). Like Goffman, Turner showed how people enact their beliefs, not just state them. Turner and I developed a very close relationship both personally and professionally. We collaborated in conferences; he lectured at NYU; we had many discussions – not only with Victor but also with his wife Edith and some close friends/colleagues such as Barbara Myerhoff. At NYU, I began to devise a series of courses, which I called ‘Performance Theory’. NYU gave me a budget so that I could invite key theorists and artists lecture to BA and MA students one night and then the next day meet in a seminar with Ph.D. students. The flyer for the first such course, in 1979, reads:

Leading American and world figures in the performing arts and the social sciences will discuss the relationship between social anthropology, psychology, semiotics, and the performing arts. The course exam- ines theatre and dance in Western and non-Western cultures, ranging from the avant-garde to traditional, ritual, and popular forms.

Over the next four years, I was able to invite to the Performance Theory course the Turners, Grotowski, Goffman, Myerhoff, Rothenberg, Clifford Geertz, Msao Yamaguchi, Alfonso Ortiz, Eugenio Barba, Augusto Boal, Colin Turnbull, Spalding Gray, Laurie Anderson, Peter Pitzele, Brian Sutton-Smith, Ray Birdwhistell, Steve Paxton, Joanne Akalaitis, Yvonne Rainer, Meredith Monk, Alexander Alland, Joann W. Kealinohomoku, Julie Taymor and Peter Chelkowski. Each term the course had a different focus. The topics ranged from ‘Shamanism’, ‘Cultural and Intercultural Performance’ to ‘Performing the Self’, ‘Play’ and ‘Experimental Performance’.

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I realized that ‘Performance Theory’, and my whole way of teaching and what I was teaching, was different than drama – and our department was still called the Drama Department. Also the people I was working with – Michael Kirby, an expert on happenings, Brooks McNamara, an expert on popular entertainments, Marcia Siegel, a dance critic, and Theodore Hoffman, a teacher and theorist of acting – were not teaching ‘drama’ either. Taken together, we were forging a new academic discipline. We were not reading plays. We were ‘reading’ performances. So, at that point, the academic year 1979–80, I suggested that we change our department’s name to Performance Studies. But who was to lead us academically? At around the same time, I met Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, an anthropologist who was teaching in the Department of Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. BKG – as everyone called her – had far-ranging interests spanning museums and cultural displays, Jewish studies, tourist performances and the aesthetics of everyday life. I invited her to chair the newly minted Performance Studies Department at NYU. She accepted and chaired the department from the spring of 1981 through to 1993. At present, BKG is the programme director – the lead curator – of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. While she was chair of Performance Studies at NYU, BKG shaped our Ph.D. and MA programmes, regularized our curriculum, recruited students and faculty. She did the actual day-to-day work of forming a world-class academic department. During those years of department-making, I concentrated first on directing plays with The Performance Group. Then when I left TPG, I directed in other places, including India and China. I also was writing a lot – resulting in four key books: Performance Theory (first publication 1977), The End of Humanism (1982), Between Theater and Anthropology (1985) and The Future of Ritual (1993). Also in 1985, I became the editor-in-chief of TDR again. I had left TDR in 1967 to devote myself more fully to directing The Performance Group. But once TPG was in my rear-view mirror, I had the itch to return to editing. Michael Kirby who had edited TDR since 1970 wanted out. And I happily replaced him. As of this moment, I am still TDR’s editor. My directing and the texts I adapt do not illustrate my theories, nor do my theories derive from my performances. There are of course parallels and cross-feeds. I leave to other scholars to see what the parallels are. For me, I live several lives simultaneously. When I am working artistically – either directing, adapting or leading a workshop – I am working from my heart, I am working with a particular group of people, I am trying to be specific and not to be general. But when I am writing I am trying to identify and describe general theories. Or I pay close attention to a particular performance or group of performances. Or, and this has been an abiding passion, I work closely on the Ramlila of Ramnagar. Also, I have been editing the Enactments book series for Seagull Books, Calcutta, for a couple of decades now. SN: When you talk about ‘performativity’ I think of ‘lila’, the Sanskrit term referring to ‘act’ without ‘beginning and without end’. It is ‘playfulness’, which is central to Indian thought and performance knowledge. Is this something that you bring back into performance studies? RS: Indian thought, as Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty says, suggests that the world, the cosmos, is a great performance. It is iconographically represented in the dance of Shiva. The conjoined notion of maya-lila as ‘play’ and ‘make- believe’ introduces a religious–aesthetic–philosophical bundle of the cosmos as illusion, as theatre, but not in the Shakespearian sense, which is almost

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whimsical, but in a much deeper sense. In the maya-lila cosmos, there is a ‘reality’ beneath the ‘world’ we perceive. Ordinary reality becomes illusion at some point. This sounds very Platonic, doesn’t it? But it’s not a theory of forms – of some ideal actuality elsewhere. For Plato, there is a real world, but humans do not have direct access to it. In the Indian system, the ‘real world’ is exactly what we have – and don’t have at the same time. In the Indian system, ‘elsewhere’ is also ‘here’, the ultimate reality is also the immediate reality. It is all play. This understanding is closer to quantum theory than to Plato. We need to comprehend energy that can transform into matter and matter into energy, particles or bundles of energy existing in more than one place at the same time, space–time itself as a conjoined system. Big bangs and singulari- ties, dark matter and dark energy, absolute relativity. All this queer stuff is very consistent with maya-lila. I am also fascinated with Vedanta. There is no form at all. Neti-neti is the perpetual negation which is the source of all that is. ‘Not-this, not-this’ is the answer to each, every and all ultimate questions. This kind of thinking is at the limit of rationality, of what language can handle or express. I am drawn to these contradictions. I don’t think that every issue can be resolved. We live a life where things don’t fit together. Or, if you want a metaphor, we are sailing in a small ship of knowledge on an infinite ocean of ignorance, of not-being- able-to-know. But that should not deter us from increasing our knowledge, or from the determined and passionate search for more knowledge. Especially, if we can use that knowledge to augment, if not create, justice and peace, both within each of us as individual kernels of humanity and in our overall social and political enterprise: the human societies. In the Ramlila when those boy actors have their crowns on, they become gods, gods who ride on the shoulders of the people who worship them. But, when the boys don’t have the crowns on, they are ... just boys. It goes back and forth throughout in the performance and their preparations. They are not worshipped in the morning when there is no performance. I have seen them being instructed by their vyases-gurus who tell them what to memorize and how to speak their lines, who instruct them in their every movement during Ramlila. So do these vyases-gurus-theatre directors – each one of them a brah- min Hindu priest – accept these boys as gods, as Ram and Sita, Lakshman, Bharat and Shatrughan? Of course, the vyases do and they don’t at one and the same instant. How different is this from a totally engrossing play? I have theorized the ‘not’ and the ‘not-not’ to describe this situation. That actor is not Othello at the same time as that actor is not-not Othello and Othello is not the actor at the same time as Othello is not-not the actor. The profound neti-neti again. Effective performer training focuses not on how to make one person into another but on how to permit the performer to be between identities. In this sense, performing is a paradigm of liminality. The beauty of maya-lila in Ramlila is that the swarups are this and that, neti-neti, at the same time. Non-human animals have a hard time with this doubling. Other animals tell the truth or they lie. Not tell the truth and lie at the same time. Other animals can’t perform, or enjoy, this in-between being. SN: Richard, you use a variety of ritual and performance models from Africa, the Pacific and Asia to formulate a methodological framework that we call performance studies. Do you agree with me if I say that performance studies is inherently intercultural, particularly, in the light of your own work. RS: Yes, I use a range of resources in different cultures from across the world in my theories and theatre practice. I have been criticized by some that I am

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too eclectic. My response: humans are a single species. At one point in time, we were a single group. The tree of many branches has one root. Human indi- viduals, groups and cultures interact and influence each other. There is unity in this diversity. People, ideas, practices and theories all travel across cultural boundaries. We do learn each other’s languages and customs; we do take from each other and give to each other. We do make children willy-nilly. Cultures are about difference and sameness at the same time. One can be inspired or influenced by a number other cultures and widely divergent practices and beliefs. I took many things from your culture, from India, the same way you take things from my culture. We are speaking English here. If I were better at it, we could speak Malayalam. I feel comfortable doing the yoga I learned from Krishnamacharya and concluding each practice recit- ing both the mantra he gave me and a Hebrew prayer. Me, an atheist in terms of who/what is the cosmos, but a Jew–Hindu–Buddhist in terms of human cultural practice. To do this is as natural as putting one foot in front of the other when I walk. I think, when people insist on purity of culture, they are not really aware of what human history has shown us. SN: In 1990 in Toronto, you said to Patrice Pavis that intercultural theatre is not a phase, that it has a big future. Twenty-six years later, I am asking if you still have the same hope that intercultural theatre will have a future? How do you tackle with the political issues involved in cultural transactions? RS: I do still think so. We are intercultural, in our thinking, artistic practice and ways of living. Yes, there are lots of problems with globalization, political, economical and so on. But globalization is not reversible. It is the logic of human knowledge, history and experience. People have been, and are being, exploited by aspects of globalization, but overall the world is better off, in many ways, than it was a hundred years ago. Especially, in terms of commu- nications, poverty – even with billions still in poverty – women’s rights, health and so on. Read Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature (2011). I am talking to you from New York as you sit there in England. It is six hours later for you, as I can see on your watch. As soon as I finish this conversation, I am going to meet my grandson who has come in from Paris. There is cross-cultural integration, temporal and spatial. I wish to see diversity in performance at the same time as an overall integration between cultures in the world. Both the local and the global, the diverse and the same. Obviously, we’ve learned some already and will learn more in the future how to do away with economic and racial exploitation and oppres- sion. It might look hard, at times, even impossible especially these days with the rise of neo-fascism and jingoism in many regions. People are greedy. But they are also generous. I am hopeful that there will be a better world, a fruitful integration among religions, cultures and ideologies. Yes, in America. Trump is the President, which is awful. But he won’t be president forever. In four years, there’s another presidential election. During his presidency, he will try to do lots of bad things, building walls etc., but, finally the solution is to continue working for progressive change. Yes, there will be periods of negativity, in relationship to interculturalism as well as other matters. But, I think, it is going to be a relatively brief period. I believe that finally we are going to learn to truly enjoy cultural diversity along with increasing technological integration. I wish to see multiple systems of belief, multiple ways of performing. I think it is possible in the overall human scheme. More than possible: inevitable.

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SN: What theatre can do in the time of such political desperation as Trump’s Presidency or Brexit? RS: In my new book Performed Imaginaries, the first chapter is about how we can perform in the twenty-first century. I cite as a model Jawaharlal Nehru’s idea of a ‘third world’. I propose a new third world of artists, of performance. I note that today the dominant worlds are religious fundamentalism, corpo- ratism – corporate greed and militarism. Those three worlds are in conflict. I propose a fourth world of art and performance that will counterbalance the bad behavior, the evil, in the world. In bad times, we need arts for wisdom, solace and political motivation. SN: Following Rustom Bharucha’s 1984 publication of ‘A Collision of Cultures…’, there was a heated debate between you and Bharucha about intercultural theatre. What do think, when you revisit that debate? RS: I think, I was right and Bharucha was wrong. I answered him thoroughly in Asian Theatre Journal. Basically, I said that we humans learn from each other. If human beings can’t learn from each other, the world’s future will really be very bad. But, I think we can learn and we are learning. We are a performing species and a learning species too. There can be exploitation in intercultural exchange, we know that, and we need to make things better. But, we cannot say that interculturalism is impossible on the basis of the argument that there can be exploitations. Cultural exchange is a process, a way of life without which there can’t be a healthy human civilization. And it is more than colonial and post-colonial exploitation that we must get rid of. There are a lot of people who are not exploiters, who actively do good. I think of myself, even at my age, as a student who is learning from your culture as you are learning from mine. We exchange; these exchanges are essential for our cultural existence. SN: We are living in an age of science and technology. They influence every moment of our life more than any other time in the history of human civilization. What future you see for theatre and performance in this century? RS: I see a wide range of different kinds of performances. There are performances taking place in front of people, and there are media-enhanced performances, there are performances that integrate different media, there are tradition performances and avantgarde performances, immersive performances and performances for witnessing only. We can’t imagine exactly what is going to happen with virtual reality, artificial intelligence and so on. Maybe our species is going through the next step in evolution toward the post-human. I don’t know. But I am sure of one thing: performance, the performative, is and will be part of human civilization no matter what form that civilization takes. SN: Thanks, Richard, for your time. RS: You are welcome, Sree, and good luck with your journal. Namasthe!

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS Richard Schechner, one of the founders of Performance Studies, is a performance theorist, theatre director, author, editor of TDR and the Enactments book series, university professor, and professor of performance studies. He founded The Performance Group and East Coast Artists. His theatre productions

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include Dionysus in ‘69, Commune, The Tooth of Crime, Mother Courage and Her Children, Seneca’s Oedipus, Faust/gastronome, Three Sisters, Hamlet, The Oresteia, YokastaS, Swimming to Spalding, and Imagining O. His books include Public Domain, Environmental Theater, Performance Theory, The Future of Ritual, Between Theater and Anthropology, Performance Studies: An Introduction, and Performed Imaginaries. Contact: Richard Schechner, New York University, 1 Washington Square Village, 1U, New York, NY 10012, United States. Sreenath Nair is Senior Lecturer at the Lincoln School of Performing Arts, University of Lincoln, UK. His research continues to explore embodied meth- odologies and practices of Asian/Indian performance investigating the corpo- real connections between various performance traditions, theory and practice, in the region. He is the editor of ITJ (Indian Theatre Journal). Contact: Sreenath Nair, University of Lincoln, School of Fine & Performing Arts, Brayford Pool Campus, University of Lincoln, Lincoln LN6 7TS, United Kingdom. Richard Schechner and Sreenath Nair have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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