 Everybody back to Segal talks here on HowlRoundTVhowl.com, my name is Frank Henschka and I'm the director of the Segal Theatre Center here in New York City at the Graduate Center CUNY, the City University and those who have followed our work, we bridge academia, professional theater, international American theater and what we do is host talks, we bridge, we have conversations, it's a place to think and to hear and also really, really to listen, not just from New York, the U.S., Europe, but from the entire world, the global world and the Segal Center has always had that at the center of its mission. Now in this time of corona where the reality truly is stranger than fiction, where we look for meaning and where we have to make meaning of this new world, where everybody is on the same boat, we don't know what will happen, this future is uncertain. We feel strongly actually, as always, that we should also listen to artists, that we should hear their voices. Artists always have been on the side of justice, of the side of social progress and almost always they were right early, early on and their work detected things upfront and so they are significant in their contribution, not only what you see on stage and the aesthetic representation with bodies and symbols and signs that help us to understand our lives better, our families, our relationships, our states, our system, what's right and wrong, but also the way they see the current situation often is closer to what a concrete truth is and what reality is. The Segal Center at the moment is the only institution in New York City, a theater institution that does a daily new programming, we have every day a new talk that is about theater, perhaps even in the US, on the Americas and those are new talks and with us we have two representatives of theater cultures that are thousands of years old, they are significant, they are vast, we do not know enough about it, but they have been to the Segal Center, they have shared with us their great, great work and with us is Shahid Nadeem from Pakistan, Shahid, welcome, he actually also just gave last year the address of the ITI World Theater Day and we have with us the also great Abhishek Majumbar, the great, great theater director, writer, thinker from India, so really welcome everybody to be on board and just joined us as Anu Rupa Roy, she is connecting to our audio, she is a puppet player and one of the great visionaries and socially engaged artists in India and so she will be with us in a second, so maybe we start off maybe Shahid, where are you now and tell us what time it is? Well it's Lahore, Pakistan, 9 p.m. and I'm sitting in my study, I've just had my son married just exactly a week ago in the times of Corona, so we are in a defined celebratory mood in spite of all the lockdown restrictions. How does the wedding or the son of a playwright in India look like? Tell us a little bit and welcome Anu Rupa Roy, can you hear us? Thank you, I spoke about you a bit earlier, but Shahid so tell us how does the wedding and Corona time look like in India? Well I wish I had or maybe I'll see if I can share some photographs, it was a strange thing because the girl was from Islamabad which is about 350 kilometers in the capital and we were in Lahore and tradition is as Abhishek and Anu Rupa would know that the boys family go to the girls family and then they have a lot of ceremonies and then the girl come along with the boy to the boys place, so that was the plan but in this case I because of lockdown and Corona restriction my age and some conditions so I could not go to Islamabad, it was not advised, so as a very unusual thing the girls family they agreed to come to Lahore, get a house and establish it as the bride's house and then we went to that house and we had a simple Nika ceremony, the religious ritual and the most interesting thing which is unprecedented apart from this issue of girls family coming to boy city was that the Mulla or the religious person who then arranges the wedding ritual, he was wearing a mask so normally no religious person is supposed to be wearing a mask, I mean they insist on women wearing a mask but in this case he was wearing a mask and then we had a simple ceremony and they still haven't come to my home because we could not finish the preparation which we had for their part of the house and we put them in a club where they spent a week and now tomorrow they'll be coming and we'll be receiving them and we'll have some floral decoration but something very very small and muted I would say but still on on screen on Facebook it looks splendid, it looks great, it's a great time, so unusual things are happening, rules are being broken, a thousand year old rules I think in Egypt for the first time, mosque up close for a thousand years, so how is it in Pakistan, can you go out, can you do theater, are people rehearsing, are there shows? Yeah well people, I mean there is a lockdown for about three weeks, it has been extended now for another two weeks and in certain parts of the country it is strict, in other parts it is relaxed, in one city like my city law I live in Contourment, it is very strict and it's real proper lockdown but outside Contourment area for other parts of the city is in some inner part of the city, you hardly notice that there is a lockdown, so it all depends which government and which class or which part of the locality you come, what do you mean which class? Yeah people who can afford to be locked down and there are people who have to go out and earn a living, so because I was preparing a part of my house for my son's, the couple's report and because of lockdown it was I mean the workers could not come and the shops were not open so it could not be finished, so every day carpenter turns up but he doesn't have the wood, the electrician turns up but he doesn't have the cables, so a lot of this cat and mouse game is going on because of the restriction, sometimes they let you in but without your tools sometimes they let the stuff in and keep the technician away, so it's quite mixed to the whole thing. Quite big, not clear guidelines, people are not fully listening but what about theatre people before we come to India but what about theatre, are they opened up people rehearsing most part of the world, they don't but how is it in Pakistan? You see when we run acting classes and at the end of a three-month acting class there is a performance, so the last performance was scheduled on the 17th of March and just like one day before lockdown was announced and we had to immediately switch to an online first time live streaming performance, so we still got together the actors and about like 10 actors and 10 participants with the social distance but we made it like public that we will be performing online live stream and the first time we got great experience that while we were performing there were people who are commenting and they were joining in and so there were several thousand people while the live performance which we do normally in the hall is maybe 400, 500 people, so we did that but it was still considered a risky thing. So actors were on stage, 10 actors and directors were all in the room performing which was an open air place like a lawn house lawn but we had lights and we didn't have stage or such technical stuff but still it was a performance and on camera it looked like a fine performance while on the ground it was still something very basic so after that we have been interacting we have been having meetings on Zoom or Skype we have been having classes like writing class immediately switched over to online class that was not a big problem but the acting class students they are finding it hard how to have acting sessions. So if theaters are closed do you have performances? They are closed yeah they are closed. Abhishek how is the situation first of all what time is it where you are telling me your location and yeah now it's about quarter to ten I'm in Bangalore in the south of India in my house yeah the situation is very very similar actually to what Charit Sahib is saying in Pakistan. I think there is a lockdown for a similar period of time as he mentioned in Pakistan here as well and there is a large crisis at least around where I live and I think in most cities even in Delhi where I am rupees which is a food crisis essentially that most of my day now goes into the working on that because there are a large number of people around us who are many of them workers who are from other parts of India who are here at the moment to the migrant workers who have been daily wage laborers and for last several days they simply haven't made a living. So there are cases where people had grapes on the day the lockdown was announced and for three days they didn't have food but they made grapes where those classic problems in economics one learns of when one is in university I mean you see it playing out right now. So there is an imbalance in terms of what does the lockdown mean to different state of society what does one have in order to deal with a lockdown the government has announced that essential services will be provided but then of course what is what it generally means that for someone like me who lives in an apartment the essential services do not include me having to go out and make a living every single day so the essential services are things which come in but the essential service provider is almost out of that the purview of what does the essential service provider need as an essential service I think that's completely unclear and not catered to. So at the moment a lot of my time is dedicated to that with a whole group of volunteers here in Bangalore. So you cook food or you bring food to houses? We are trying to get more and more dry food like ration, rice, wheat, dal that kind of thing because the government supplies have simply not been adequately arranged people haven't received them. So the attempt has been to do that but because there has been a very the lockdown was announced in a matter of four hours it was announced at eight in the evening to be started at 12 at night the grains which was supposed to come in from other cities did not come in. So for the first two weeks or so there was a big dirt of grains in general. So automatically one had to serve cooked food because proportionately you can at least serve a meal to more number of people if you're serving cooked food rather than if you're giving you know five kilograms of rice. So it is moving now from cooked food to being able to provide dry ration to people. Really that's the most important thing that is going on in our lives at least around me even theatre practitioners in Bangalore a lot of them are involved in this work at the moment that is going on. And other than that my daughter is four and she's had a very long holiday so the rest of the time my wife and I are mostly with her and trying to make sure that she's able to have she's able to deal with this as a summer holiday and not as a pandemic. So these are the two kind of extremes of my life at the moment. Thank you Abhishek and Anurupa welcome and tell us a bit where are you now and how is that situation for you? You're one of the great puppeteers of India you're one of the innovators of the genre perhaps even globally and so where are you now? I'm in New Delhi and it's about 9.45 now and the situation is similar to what Abhishek describes except what happened in New Delhi is the day the lockdown was announced. I live on the arterial road of New Delhi it's called the ring road it pretty much circulates all of you know all of the major part of the city. So all the daily wage earners which is essentially the service providers this is carpenters, masons, plumbers, delivery boys a lot of people who basically run the city literally fled the city because the key concerns were what will I eat tomorrow because if I'm dependent on a you know a weekly salary or money that comes in because I have a contractual project and it was also almost the end of the month so there was a question of paying rents to their landlords. So I woke up in the morning to see thousands of people just walk and it's really one of the strangest things one sees because you see it in movies you see it in documentary films but it really doesn't strike you till you see this because it's people carrying children, animals, utensils literally finishing a life in New Delhi where they had probably lived for many years and leaving for their villages very unsure of what the future held and the first conversations I had with a lot of them was how some of them had been walking from Rajasthan for example. Now any place in Rajasthan, Albert to New Delhi is 800 kilometers 1200 kilometers and would be walking to Bihar so we're talking you know all of north from northwest to northeast India which could be up to between 1200 and 2000 kilometers and so the first thing very much like Abhishek was saying was firefighting for us so I live in a little community of apartments and we set up a kitchen and it was immediately cooking and handing over these plates of food to people who were walking some would sit and eat some would just take this packed lunch and keep walking because they didn't want to lose time and very unfortunately the day after the borders were sealed and a lot of these people were sent back so then we were we received a whole reverse population because they got stranded at a bus stop and 600,000 of us yeah six laps is 600,000 that's a huge number 600,000 people marched on feet possibly if we're ready to walk a thousand kilometers 600,000 people yes with women and children pregnant women people I mean it was really it was really something and there were people who were who hadn't eaten in three days because they had left Rajasthan the day of the shutdown and they were walking they were on on their feet lots of young children so the first two days was literally feeding this moving population which stopped very soon because the minute the borders were shut and I'm very close to not one of the borders but one of the key gates to the borders and this entire population turned back and what was very interesting is the way people in New Delhi literally rose to the occasion and kitchens popped up everywhere people were feeding people every day and once this situation died down one realized that now there are people in shelter homes with inadequate russian supplies and the other thing that came to us was so puppet theater in India is a pretty diverse and very marginalized community so a lot of puppeteers are seasonal workers a lot of them are traditional puppeteers in fact a mere handful of us actually live in the cities and are what would be called contemporary artists a lot of them carry on generational work and they're puppeteers for many generations and the ones who don't farm ones who don't have this piece of land to farm on are often the ones who end up in a slum in urban India so the first crisis call came from an artist's colony in New Delhi in fact a year ago this colony was broken down and it has existed for 30 years and they performed the marionettes of Rajasthan which is a very traditional very colorful form and it's a community which is puppeteers, singers, drummers, circus artists, musicians, street magicians and the first distress call was that there were there are about 800 family 1800 families and about 800 were shot of food so the next firefighting was getting enough food to this group of people the first thing that happened was that a kitchen was set up the kitchen led to this stampede so immediately it was you know who can we give dry rations to who can get food the minute this was addressed which took about two days to address we started getting phone calls from Rajasthan saying Jaipur doesn't have any food Udaipur doesn't have any food so it just the first two weeks was just getting food to artists getting food to daily wage workers so and now it's a little bit better there are systems in place there are donors there are kitchens there are dry ration units and there are suppliers so it's getting a little bit better incredible it was an artist's colony of 800 families you said just 1800 1800 1800 families of artists and 800 of them were not able to provide and they would starve if not and so you did god's work there that is just existential it's I just listening to you I get the chills and I never heard of such things and then in peacetime and so Abhishek and Shahid do you even think about theater or do you now think about theater in a real way or a different way well we I just got a question from Dr Fawzi Abdel Khan if we have traditional puppet masters in Pakistan so I was just responding to her so obviously we shared the tradition of the string puppets especially the Rajasthan type of puppetry but it's almost dead in Pakistan unfortunately anyway about your question of thinking of theater yes in fact in isolation you think of you had the time to wonder to wonder to to think of what to do now because theater as I said earlier theater means interaction physical interaction live interaction that is the thrill and that is the force of theater and here we are asked to be isolated even at an individual level be alone having a gathering or having some kind of audience so this is a question which we have been thinking as I said for the acting class which was basically improvisation and then working on a script and rehearsing and then performing so we are at a loss because our main strength was this interaction physical interaction live interaction either in training or in performance so we have been wondering I mean we were not very keen on social media or online performance or online teaching but now we are thinking on those lines and in our acting class which we are now we have had for two weeks two classes we have been discussing this how to capture or how to really feel this experience of an invisible enemy and the fear of each other stay away from each other each one is the other person's enemy so to speak so this so they are working on this some stories or some ideas about fear done that how fear affects us especially fear of the invisible fear of the unknown so we are at this stage just discussing various concepts or storyline and then we are thinking of having some kind of rehearsals and auditions on online like prepare your work your not only monologues but also prepare your dialogues or your piece and record it and put it on zoom or skype class and then the other person also not only seeing those lines but also keeping the point of view or the positions so how we can like I've seen some images of orchestra how different musicians are playing instruments and then they are able to combine so we are just wondering whether we can have a performance in which we can have on zoom or skype like seven or eight performers in their own isolated space and then interacting and performing uttering dialogue singing songs interacting with each other this is something obviously not what we normally accept as theater but I think we have to have some open-minded innovative experiments thank you Abhishek is that at all on your mind do you question your practice of theater will it change or is it too early to know actually in one sense I'm not really able to think about theater very much at the moment in terms of performance having said that I also think that you know till about last week I was trying very hard to work on the things that I had committed myself to work on so I was trying to maintain that sort of the number of hours I work within all of this till I realized by the end of you know last week which was already about three weeks into the lockdown that it's futile I'm pretending to I'm pretending that nothing is going on outside which is big enough in a way that I will continue to do what I'm doing which is simply not true it's kind of also the sort of issue I find you know university students facing now that many university students I talk to right now are doing these zoom classes and so on and so forth but nothing in the curriculum is really provoking students to go out and you know look out of their balconies and windows and see what's happening how do you how can we in a way continue to do what we are doing in terms of intellectual thinking or creative thinking when we are just not not in what we term as a normal period of time so in one sense I think I haven't been able to think of performance but on the other hand this week early this week I stopped doing that I stopped telling myself that okay I have to finish this much writing and that much reading and I spent started spending much more time thinking about and working on the field and I think there is something not about performance but you know just as somebody who makes work deeply disturbing about our society which which is revealing itself every day very practically as one steps out and comes back because at one level we are saying this is a time of isolation so anybody who's stepping out is potentially risking themselves and the society on the other hand if you don't step out there is a clear risk which is just present people people are going to starve before they die of a virus it really is that simple last evening I had a list of 1200 families around me in a three kilometer radius who who would need food by tomorrow afternoon like we would have to make sure that they get it it's just it's really that simple and the other thing that brings up is that I think we do not have a government anymore you know we just we just have an administration because a government in its like classical Hobsonian idea is that you place your security in the hands of a government but many of the governments that have come into power right now in the world maybe are seeing all these collapses they have not come to power because people have placed the security actually people have placed their supremacist ideas in the hands of these governments so all that these governments are doing is protecting a certain class of people I know places where one kind of person gets food and the other kind of person doesn't get food you know like in the same place there are five children who lick a packet of salt after they get it but five houses down the line they've sort of got food twice and this is at the lowest level this is how elections are won this is how this is how we have ended up framing our society I'm very worried about that I'm very concerned it moves me immensely last night I mean this is the cliche but I just simply couldn't sleep for very long because the imagery of the streets of the Mohallaf it just refuses to leave you because it's so stark it's no longer I don't even know how to represent it if I ever wanted to make something so I'm not even thinking about representation at the moment yeah yeah so you basically how old is your daughter four she's four and a half so you put your life at risk in a way to go out help people you put your family in the possibility they will have no no father so and you're not even doing your job your job is to do theater to write direct in such an existential situation and so what what do you think it will have an impact on society on government will there be a change or people upset enough some people say well as long as it's not bad enough people will not go on this heat about it do you think this is a turning point actually I I think unfortunately it isn't a turning point that's what that's what worries me even more because what we are doing here right now the big crisis that everybody is in a lockdown Kashmir has been in a lockdown for you know now several months I mean for 20 years actually but okay technically say nine months or something and people have been fine with it it's all right it's all right that Kashmir has been on a lockdown because it's always that you know we always have this explanation that somebody else deserves to be punished for our security this is the premise in which you know big countries like India America they seem to be working on this notion that we have to be defended at somebody's cost it's just that you know this virus it simply tells us that you're not special it is that simple this is nothing special about us so there was no turning point when this whole thing happened in Kashmir there was no turning point when this happened in northeast of the country there have been several protests over the last three or four months in the country which was to do with this new bill that the government came out with which was clearly a very anti-muslim bill there were people sitting in processions overnight for months in one place there was a complete like there was no press release from the government there was complete like this notion that somebody deserves to suffer for the well-being of essentially the upper caste Hindu and I think we see versions of this in England we see versions of this in America we have seen versions of this in different countries but this is a great leveler in that way I don't think this is going to be a turning point for the simple reason that we are not able at the moment to come together ideologically on anything and hence even when I go to the smallest the poorest place I see the four Hindu houses and the two muslim houses separately when there is no reason for that to happen there is there is simply no no case for it but it's gone that deep if there is a turning point I think it will be when we recognize that there are so many people trying to help people out even people who are otherwise on completely opposite political opinions political positions working together to get food to somebody's house if that solidarity can remain after this crisis we have some chance we have some hope of reviving anything but otherwise I think I don't I think this is just the beginning I think we'll see many more of these things because in the grand scheme of things there is nothing special about this virus as well it simply is asymptomatic that's the only major thing it's not the most infectious thing that has ever happened on this planet it is not the most lethal disease that has that has affected this planet it's just one of the many things it's going to happen again chances are quite high but we are not I don't think we are equipped for it because we simply do not have a government we have an administration yeah thank you Anurupa when is the last time you had a puppet in your hand very recently I'll just pick up from some of the things Abhishek was saying that I had my first moment of crisis during one of these sessions of you know of running a kitchen and the two things the two things that I realized which are very key one is what Abhishek just talked about is you know in New Delhi this this whole protest over the law the very draconian law which was passed which was clearly an anti-minority anti-muslim law saw a huge number of protests and sit-in protests which were protests by women and one of the things that the protest did is artists and people from really all walks of life were just physically present and what is really interesting is that it has set up these really dynamic networks of people and when I look at the feeding groups now I'm on these WhatsApp feeding groups where someone says hey you know east of Delhi needs 30 food packages west of Delhi needs 168 food packages you see that this network is not new it's not post a lockdown this network was made in December when this law came into being and the protests started so what is really heartening for me is that a we have a network b as an artist I feel this is a very important moment to have that conversation with people who I had boycotted for a very long time you know with people with whom my opinion does not match and I feel they are bigoted or they are you know it's like we have this deep chasm in our society so you're always on you know on this side or that side and I did pick up a puppet so day after the lockdown I decided to do these very something I've been meaning to do for a while just talk puppet theater for five minutes and talk about the different forms of puppet theater across the world and we literally talk about stories and narratives and how stories and narratives are transformative through puppets because there's something about puppets and dead material which kind of takes judgment away you trust a puppet you don't don't trust a human being you're judging the human being for color of skin for gender but the puppet is just the puppet is just the puppet and it's incredible because it's the first time I realized I think like a lot of theater people I've had enormous disdain for showing my work online live performances ought to be live performances but suddenly it became very clear that there is a whole lot of people especially in a crisis who are seeking stories who are seeking reassurance and one of the things a parent told me which was really interesting a parent of a six-year-old girl said there are no stories about uncertainties all our fairy tales have happy endings when are we going to tell our children that life is uncertain and it's okay that life is uncertain and it really struck a chord with me so one of the things that I really am trying to do with puppets is perform something and tell stories regularly to children and to young people to literally engage with this idea of it's an uncertain world it's a difficult world we are all really angry frustrated and all of that is happening what are the stories we need to retell because for me draconian laws you know self-seeking governments dictatorships are really about loud one person two person vested interest narratives so where is the other narrative and I think the arts now really we have to we have to seek this other narrative very deeply and wonderfully this internet space is a great equalizer you know you might find it very difficult to get to that prestigious theater and rent it for the day to run a show for a thousand people but online everybody can watch whatever you're performing so yes I'm sort of in that space and now we're running a festival which is essentially a fundraiser to feed the the essential food services so our shows are going to be ad online completely for free but people contribute then and this money goes to the the food collections because the food collections need to run for a long time we don't know how long this lockdown is going to be it's not enough to collect for a week or two weeks or you know a month this is something long term till everybody can come back to jobs and we don't know if there'll be jobs we don't know what situation the economy will be in so so I'm sort of in a space where I'm looking at can the can the arts have a life online can it generate funds and this feed into all of the things we really need to raise money for right now including artist pensions or you know those artists who can't afford to pay rent right now so it's all of these questions as well I want a crazy world here's Shahid and his son has to marry Ken marry in the traditional way and you guys are looking out of the window seeing 600,000 people I never heard that story I'm stunned to hear that you know marching was on their feet with their children on their back without on a walk that could be a thousand kilometers long it's biblical and in its dimension. Shahid how is the situation in Pakistan how artists supported now are they in danger it seems less traumatic than in India? Yeah well about this image of thousands and thousands of people walking for thousands of miles I'm reminded of the images I've seen about the partition of India in 1947 when sort of hundreds of thousands of people with their families and with their cattle and with their belongings they had to move from one place to the other in some cases walking in some cases being killed so anyway I would say that this is something which in our living memory it is really a game changer or a turning point but as theater people we cannot abandon the space which we had developed after a lot of struggle especially in Pakistan where theater was considered as something un-Islamic something which was not part of Pakistan's new found Islamic culture so we can't surrender that space we have challenged in the times of military dictators or in the times of this Islamic militants they tried to snatch or this space occupy it or push us away and now this strange enemy has entered and we have to find ways how to combat it along with helping people who are being very horribly affected by it especially people who are in need of food or in need of medical attention but as theater artists I think apart from going out and reaching out to people who need our help we also have to develop tools to comprehend and represent this strange experience in our living memory so we have been discussing it among theater artists but at the moment people are confused and at a loss and afraid and wondering what is the way out because it seems that this the turning point is actually maybe it's going to be there for many many years so it's not just six months five months so we'll have to learn to sort of meet this challenge especially for theater artists but other performing arts also which require live interaction with our audience and although right now we don't have an answer but we in Pakistan the theater community we are determined to find a way by which we can still provide theater a socially meaningful theater in whatever way either in theater halls if they are not available like they were not available during the time of military dictators then house lawns where we already had a performance if that is not possible then through zoom or skype or google or whatever so I think this is a challenge for creativity also that although the new technology and new media is not a replacement or an eternity for our centuries or the thousands of years of theater heritage but we should make use of that and develop a form like when new challenges come then new forms of art have to develop so we hope with the learning from each other's experience we can find a sort of way out how to bypass this further created by this invisible enemy yeah yeah I still remember your play you did at the seagull of the courtyard of the families living together already under such complicated conditions and wonders you know what are they talking about now we had black playwrights with us in New York and they said their families are preparing their wills you know they still know they're going to survive they don't have money they don't have health insurance so many work in the service industry it's a bleak time it's a time where we really have to question ourselves the tailor mac who is from also from the queer community said you know we protected ourselves from AIDS all these years and now a handshake can kill us you know what does that what does that mean and abhishek your work and remember your work on climate change we got also got a comment online here from someone said you remembered your your work so well john schultz and that's great of you to participate you did the great work on kashmir also the jinx of aida and others do you feel that theater has really changed something is there something that in the bleak outlook you have on the government is that did cedar even work as a tool of social change both of you and on the willpower you know also as we has that hasn't been effective we have the trumps and your president in in in pakistan and charlotte you know is that has it really worked has it been do it does it have to be different then what did it fail yeah when i think if i may speak i think definitely i think theater has been extremely problematic for the governments which is a good thing last year i had this strange experience that one of my plays was stopped in india jinzo bigo was stopped in india it was banned for a big story and three months later the other play i did was banned in china which was to do with tibet and really the only redeeming thing about this was whenever now some of my students talked to me about you know what is the theater good for i keep saying you know ask the governments because they they seem to know what it is good for they they seem to be absolutely sure that it is something very you know something very dangerous and something that needs to be stopped although many you know big movies they there is they have such a bigger audience than anything that that i make you know i mean i mean the the play i did on tibet was seen by 5000 people it's nothing you know compared to the sort of bad press that china gets the rest of the time or you know the play on kashmir maybe so far 20 000 people all over the world have seen it it's nothing compared to you know everything that has been said but there is something about the combination of having a person standing in front of people being able to deliver a story like you you're compelled to empathize with that person and calling out a contradiction in society which governments which governments find it very hard to digest when people start listening to other people calling out contradiction and not simply saying that you know this is great about alternative or this is great because that's how that's how electoral politics works right i mean right now we're in a in india we're in a world where the only reason for this government to be there is people asking so what other option do we have and you go to the theater and you suddenly see oh my god there is like 2000 years of alternatives in front of you from theater around the world which is telling us that there are not just two ways of thinking there are 200 million ways of thinking and that is fundamentally a risk to you know a modi or a trump or anybody like that and their their parties so i think theater has been extremely successful in doing these things and at the same time we are aware that there are these people who are empowered in the world right now what a time what a time that there's modi trump bolson our this is this is like the the right wing you know dream coming through in the world and if anything i think the fact that so many plays around the world from Tehran to you know turkey to india i don't know i i suppose in pakistan as well that are getting stopped it just shows us that the governments are absolutely certain about the power of our medium i think even more than we are uh yeah that's the great answer theater is a model for something if interesting this theater always it is a model for something and if it's real on stage it could be real in life i guess that is frightening and yes i mean this is this is true it's a fact that even you know the nazi censors when they did the big exhibition of that degenerated art they picked artists they weren't even famous yet you know the naldis and others but they saw something in it that was subversive and we said we do not want others to see that and so it has an effect but ana rupa coming back to your thoughts at the uncertainty of meredith's monk who was on the program said you know don't be afraid of uncertainty she she told us and to be open and what are you what are the stories you're going to tell the i guess the ones you show now for the fundraisers are existing plays you are redoing but what might be the stories you think about could be of of importance to to the audience in india so one of the things that i've been really excited about in the last decade and a half i mean a little bit longer is how in india the epics are you know an area where you have this control over people's thoughts it's a big political tool and it's something that our mainstream media and the powers that we are constantly using to play people and one of the things that that excites me about the epics is they really don't belong to anyone and they're not meant to give you answers these are stories which have existed for years and years and years and one of the things that we have been very consciously doing is uh revisiting the epics to if not ask big political question is to embed some very deep doubts about what is being told to you because if you can doubt something which has been given to you as the gospel truth by telling you another aspect of the story then there's a chance that we can make people question what is the reality that is being presented so for in india one of the key tools for the current government has been a very big loud press especially television press and online presence which is selling one kind of narrative very interestingly the idioms the stories in this are of the epics so one of the projects we worked on was the mahabharat and one of the reasons for doing the mahabharat was this text lends itself to constantly plant very firmly in the minds of people especially the people i feel one can't always access because you don't agree with them otherwise you have completely different political views is to somehow embed a seed of doubt about what they have heard and what has been told to them and that i find is a very exciting space um and fortunately with puppets uh you get away with a lot of blasphemy because it's just a bit of foam or wood or styrofoam it's not really a human being and so often people will come and watch it and be offended by the but at the end of it feel very stupid about being offended or we have have seeds of doubt and then be like oh not really it couldn't have been that important so this is a space we are trying to stride very actively and so the mahabharat is one of the stories we are going to stream and one of the things that i've been doing is continuously having conversations with puppet masters who are eight or nine generations of storytellers because in india what has a real hold over people's minds is our television televised versions of the epics which were a major source of propaganda for a while and interestingly one of them is back on air and it's very timely and i so one of the things we do is we immediately after the shows have conversations with these masters who are the carriers of oral narratives and what they manage to do is immediately say yes so this is the story but this is also the story this is the bad guy but he is not really the bad guy if you knew his backstory he's not really the bad guy so interestingly because it comes from this really rich oral narrative and heritage it's able to it's able to i think have this bridge with people so one of the examples is we performed in kurukshetra which is really can be a big right wing hub and in our audience were about 400 members of a very extreme right wing group and we were performing this particular version of the mahabharat and we were a little bit worried about what would happen at the end and our car was stopped because we were leaving in our theater van and we were going away and it was stopped by these students and we had this moment of oops anything could happen now but interestingly there were 150 students and they stopped us to say don't go anywhere we want to spend some time listening to the stories no one has ever told us before so we spent four hours narrating the stories that nobody ever tells so it is in a way a return to the mythical stories who in a way contain the truth contain everything in it in just the way we look at it you know do you find them and we have to take them back frank yeah make a quick point about what abhishek was saying that certain movies are getting good like hundreds and thousands of viewership and our plays or such products are seen by only a few thousand people i think still then he followed up with this the power of storytelling if you are directly talking to your audience it's almost sometimes like a live like we are now interacting so sometimes you forget that you are not sitting in one room so i think theater on line if it is presented in such a way that you can give the feel of theaterness to your audience and convey your messages and give them this feeling that this is a live interaction with them then even if we have a few thousand viewership still i think they will have a much lasting much deeper impact on them than what we the impact of these stupid movies i think the last episode of a popular tv show in america which was called friends was watched on the evening when it was screened by 23 million was probably half a billion people in the world have seen it but if i get we don't i don't remember maybe i don't think i saw but i wouldn't remember i do remember what i saw and theater is something different but yes the numbers are are shocking i remember the new york philharmonics that we exist for a hundred years i mean i've reached a million people and it's a big number and then you think what a small number but what it means and what it creates is of significance and maybe are we coming to a close you know let us know what are you listening to reading to and if there's something you can say to fellow artists around the world whether they are in south africa and belgium and chile or in germany what is something you would say from where you are right now in pakistan or in india what they should be doing or to our listeners what do you feel is a good advice what to what is demanded of in that time so um maybe anrupa we start with you and then go back to the shahid at the end um i think i think uh what is happening some some of this is going to be irreversible and this is going to last a very long time i think we uh we'll probably need to think what is our relevance in the world today and uh if we can't perform for people live as much as as we could and in the format that we could then how and in what ways do we reach out to people is is a key key question but i also think it's very exciting because i'm able to sit and talk to uh shahid madhim ji in pakistan and to you in america and we wouldn't have done this if this hadn't happened and on an everyday basis i'm talking to artists across the world artists across india we just don't have the time to really sit and talk about our practices why we do what we do and those conversations are as important as creating work and i think that is something i've begun to value very very very much thank you abhishek yeah i think say to other theater artists is you know is to is to do what we do in theater all the time which is that we deny death its moment we we create place we go to the theater to basically deny death its moment we we extend it we we do all kinds of things with things with death and we are living in a time right now where everybody every day the newspaper the magazine is talking about the internet is talking about how many people died in italy how many people died here so on and so forth and this is the time to be alive more than ever because if a handshake can kill someone uh we also must remember that you know we have lost a lot of time looking at our gadgets and this and that when we were not alive when everything was sort of peaceful in one sense uh but this is the time again as theater practitioners to absolutely deny death to live completely as much as one can socially politically and in all other spheres whether that is on the internet or by meeting the person next door i don't know but i suppose denying death would be the thing i would have to say yeah shade well i would say defy death because that's how theater is that we you defy the whatever is the given whatever is the status score whatever is the challenge and in terms of the the message or the challenge at this stage i think this corona sort of factor is going to have a deep impact on our relationship with each other i mean this concept of staying away from each other even from your loved ones i haven't hugged my son or my daughter-in-law for for a long time so so this fear of each other we have to defy that and we have to re-establish contact that contact is not just physical contact or to cherish the the moments when we had that physical contact so i think as theater people we can build ways by which we can break this fear or suspicion of each other or of the society we are living in and bring people together through art and through stories and through future maybe future post corona society so i would say that we have to we have to break this wall of fear and re-establish our humanity through spiritual and cultural and online methods and let's have such interactions which we are having today let's have more of them by more countries and more organizations and make a chain of these death defyers yeah and i hope that also the the system that obviously doesn't seem to be working that it will be shaken that the cage will be rattled it's shocking to hear what you reported from india i've never heard that anywhere that 600 000 people march on foot out of cities possibly a thousand kilometers away who's carrying the children that you say there are 1200 people in your neighborhood abhishek or and i don't know about that you care for it is incredible and existential and at a time where we live in truly is unprecedented we have to also be reminded part of the human dna the rna is virus-based to be carry viruses in a way we are come out of virus but now this virus which is invisible and small attacks us we have two or three trillion body cells but they come it invades us if we produce this and kills us and we i think we lost frank yeah frank are you still there yeah and can you hear me again yeah we can hear you yeah so i said you know this is this invisible virus access and it's a doministic struggle we are back but it also hopefully unites us and but we need better questions and we need real solutions solutions to work and artists i think are on the side of to us so thank you all and tomorrow we have a great theater from poland it's the tr m barsova and grego sirzina will talk to us with his team poland also is experiencing a difficult time political time now also in lockdown great nation of theater one of the great ones super powerful also a while after world war two and still again very much present and things are changing there too next year and next week we have a milo rau the great milo rau from switzerland richard schekner will talk to us basal jones from the great handspring south african company the puppet company also and we were asked on as you see it was you see it from france and the great Guillermo calderon from from chile will be with us who wrote a play when chekov died the revolution was outside on the street and nobody knew what would happen and let's see what all these artists will have to say to us so thank you all and see you tomorrow and thanks to a hall round for hosting art as emerson college and for thea and vj the seagull team san jen may and jackie so thank you all and hopefully you bye