BA (Hons) Acting

In the changing landscape of contemporary globalising India, as protest movements have entered the new public spaces of online digital media, new forms of performative protest are emerging.  Mobilising dispersed participants through social media, these performance actions have sought to question and challenge conservative social norms relating to gendered bodies, identity, social rights and citizenship, by playing at the borders between the private and the public.  This paper examines recent case studies of Indian protest actions in which bodies have become the performative sites for such activism.  I argue that these cases represent an extension of what Judith Butler (2015) has termed ‘concerted bodily enactment,’ and ‘plural performativity’:  By deploying concerted assembly via the public spaces of digital media, these performances render private, personal embodied actions into public, concerted and political ones.

In India the human body has long been deployed as a potent site for social protest; bodies are also frequently the ground onto which questions of national identity, tradition, ethics and power are frequently projected.  In the changing landscape of contemporary globalising India, as protest movements have entered the new spaces of online digital media, new forms of performative protest are emerging.  Often mobilising dispersed participants through social media, these performance actions have sought to question and challenge conservative social norms relating to body, identity, social rights and citizenship.  In this paper I examine examples of collective actions from the past decade in India in which bodies – both present and absent – have become performative sites for protest: these include actions by the Blank Noise arts collective, Delhi-based Genderventions, the Kiss of Love campaign and Pink Chaddhi campaign. 
In differing ways these protests and collective actions each use performance to address questions of bodily rights, national identity and the relationship between society and the individual, by playing at the borders between the private and the public.  Drawing on Judith Butler’s Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) I examine how these performing bodies, acting through modes of public assembly and plural performative action, raise questions around the bodily rights of citizens in contemporary India.  Playing at the borders between the public and the private, these actions and protests each explore notions of the private within public urban spaces, placing them under the gaze of both onlookers and the media.  In this respect they present a challenge to embodied experiences of privacy, demanding visibility, and enacting their own embodied claim to both public space and discourses of national identity.

Drawing on archival and qualitative research into the evolving history of flash mob performance in contemporary urban India (Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai), this paper addresses the recent trend of ‘flash mobbing’ as it has entered into an online archive of popular performance, with specific attention to the politics of public space in Mumbai. Flash mobs in this context are a form of popular intermedial performance, staged in public spaces, but performed for a mediated public online. As such they no longer represent the form of fleeting, subversive public performance that early scholars of the genre described. Instead, these flash mobbers rehearse and refine their performances, negotiating with authorities to ensure the successful filming of their ‘unexpected’ public act. They are staged at landmark historic sites of the city, or in the new globalised, public-private
spaces of shopping malls and airports, and as their video documents enter global circulation online, they contribute to narratives of Mumbai as modern, energetic, youthful, digital: the vision of a ‘World Class City’ that city authorities seek to fulfil. But while selective narratives of ‘New India’ – young, modern, global – are valorised through these performances, what other narratives and which other performers are obscured? Focusing on the case of Mumbai Airport, and drawing on Lee and Yeoh’s (2006) formulation of the “politics of forgetting” as an integral aspect of processes of globalisation, I consider the active role that performance can play in these processes of inclusion/exclusion. If social media sites such as YouTube act as an archival space for performance(Gehl 2009), this paper asks what kinds of cultural memories may be preserved and which forgotten, as elite performance makers stake their claim to these ‘public’ spaces and their representations in a public domain online.

In the field of flash mob performance, we see moving bodies becoming re-mediated as moving images, and mobilised into the flow of global circuits of online reception. My underlying concern when approaching this research is: who is mobile in these contexts? Who becomes visible through movement, and by extension, who may disappear in these same moments?

I approach this session by examining what is enacted through the movements of flash mob performance, focusing on the more recent phase of the genre in which flash mobs become mobilised through online video-sharing practices. I argue that they perform mediated representations of “New India” for an online national and international audience, valorising the new “non-places” (Augé 1992) of Indian supermodernity, through the acts of a mobilised “digerati” (Keniston 2004). If we consider that performance can play a role in the construction of cultural memory (Roach 1996; Taylor 2003), and that the Internet as an archive can become a repository of performances and thus memories (Gehl 2009), I ask if online performance in these contexts may be seen as an aspect of the processes that structure a “politics of forgetting” (Fernandes 2006) in globalising India. Which narratives are rendered visible and which invisible through these performances? Who appears and who disappears? Movement on the Internet thus becomes a political question concerned with comparative mobilities, visibilities, and participation in the narratives of “India” that are constructed for global circulation.

Outdoor promenade theatre for walkers and runners, adapted from Angela Carter's classic tales 'Company of Wolves', 'Wolf-Alice', 'Peter and the Wolf',  'The Werewolf' by Burn the Curtain and Shiona Morton. 
Exeter, 2014.
Brighton Festival and Salisbury Festival, 2015.
ACE funded tour in partnership with the Forestry Commission to England and Wales, 2016.
http://burnthecurtain.co.uk/

In March 2016 Burn the Curtain created ‘Desperately Seeking Shakespeare’ as part of the Shakespeare Weekender at the Barbican, London:  A street-game and story hunt between the Barbican and the Museum of London, based on Shakespeare's life lodging in East London's Silver Street.

Interactive promenade theatre - on bicycles. 
Exeter & Fremington, N. Devon, 2012
ACE-funded tour to England & France, 2013.
“An inventive form of theatre, a different kind of bike ride and a great way of introducing youngsters to a classic tale.” The Guardian

“Hi. I’m Hollie. If you hang up by mistake or we lose contact just call back. If you chose to hang up and not call back the show will end. For the next 45 minutes I will be with you. We can do what we like. We can play, talk, sing, dance, watch, listen. The phone call is not being recorded. This is our time. We can say what we want to each other. You can trust me.

I’m with you. I can see you. Do you think you can see me?”

You With Me is about you, your place in the world and the world’s place in you. But it will be different for every audience member.

The show is a 45-minute phone conversation between an audience member and a performer. It is a genuine conversation. Whilst on the phone, the audience member is invited to be playful and explore the city centre.

The performer allows the audience member to command the content and focus of the discussion, whilst gently guiding the audience member through the flexible structure of the show.  The content can fall along a vast spectrum of topics from favourite sandwich fillings to love and relationships.

You With Me is a unique experience for each individual audience member. As a non-traditional format, it could be perceived as a daunting or risky experience for new audiences. We intend to work with partners where appropriate to develop their audiences to engage with this new form of live performance, as well as engaging with other potential audiences from across the city, such as the video gaming community.

We believe that the joy of a story is in the sharing, so we created The Story Exchange. Our roaming story barrow engages everyone in the act of story making.. and exchanging, through fun games and spontaneous performances. From the young, to the very young and the young at heart, we have something for everyone.
A walk-about interactive performance for festivals and city spaces.

We set up a table and two chairs, with a table cloth and a victoria sponge, in the middle of a busy shopping centre in Exeter. Then one of us sat in a chair, and the other was left empty. It was a simple invitation.

Then we waited....

We were not selling anything, we had no agenda. We just wanted to see if someone, anyone, would sit and talk to us. Talk about anything, everything, or maybe nothing at all. If we were honest with ourselves, we did not expect anyone to sit down.

But they did....

Resaerch and development supported by the Bike Shed Theatre Exeter

As part of Devon's Cultural Olympiad processions for the 2012 Olympics, I guided a group of performers from the University of Exeter to create street theatre performance.  Students worked on movement, puppetry, characterisation, and the improvisatory challenges of street performance.

Company member during the developmental phases of Hotel Medea, 2008-09.
Education & Outreach projects co-ordinator, 2009-09.
Drift Participant 2008.
Hotel Medea tour to: Arcola Theatre, London / CPC Gargarullo, Brazil / Museum of Contemporary Art, Spain / LIFT Festival, London / Salisbury International Arts Festival, Salisbury / Shunt, London.
A Lament for Medea tour to: Arcola Theatre, London / Montepulciano / Lisbon.

KHAOS celebrates what it is to be woman, drawing on ancient stories and
oppressive archetypes to bring audiences of all ages a highly energetic, stirring and visceral dance performance that rejects order in favour of complexity and chaos. Live musicians join six contemporary dance artists to revel in the joy, tenderness and the power of wild women.
Arts Council funded R&D, Dartington Arts June 2018.  Touring internationally 2018-19.

A challenge for performers working in interactive and participatory performance forms is a need to navigate between the position of the ‘Architect’, designing and structuring an audience’s experience, and that of the ‘Clown’, sustaining a performance state that is present and responsive to the particularities of individual interactions. While design and structure can preoccupy the development of new work, rehearsing for participatory performance proves a challenge when the pivotal ingredient – an unpredictable audience – is absent. How can training support performers to attend to both performance structure and the immediacies of interactive exchange? How can it support them to think critically about the aesthetics, ethics and politics of both?
This article reflects on my pedagogical process of working with a group of undergraduates in spring 2017, exploring training approaches to support their devising process as they created a self-directed interactive theatre piece. It offers an ethnographic glimpse into the studio work and students’ responses, as we investigated approaches to developing the performer as ‘Architect-Clown’. Drawing on 10 years’ experience as a performer-deviser in this field, I sought the tack between these two training zones, applying pedagogic methods that work to develop performance qualities of listening, presence and improvisation, alongside methods aimed at developing a critical and reflexive approach to experience-design. Are the two roles as distinct as is suggested? How might they interact, and what might be gained (or lost) from this cross-training studio approach?

This paper examines the recent trend of flash mobbing in contemporary urban India and asks how notions of the ‘global’ are reproduced through a nationalist imaginary within this popular performance practice.  Historically, discourses of globalisation have envisaged cultural forms moving along two broad trajectories: either, the homogenising path of ‘global culture’ in a post-nation era; or, the intense localisation of resistance to these processes.  However, Leela Fernandes (2000) proposes a shift in perspective, away from debates over how the nation-state is being reformed, toward a question of how the production of ‘the global’ occurs through a nationalist imaginary.  Though flash mobs are often analysed as a ‘global’ performance genre, I argue that studying their adaptation within India reveals these processes of ‘nationalising the global’ that Fernandes has identified.  I propose Remix Theory, as developed by Navas (2012), Navas et al. (2015) and extended by Annette Markham (2013; 2017), as a framework that allows us to understand how these processes occur.
The paper is based on my doctoral research which has documented and analysed the history of flash mob performance in India between 2003-2015, with a focus on the cities of Bengaluru, Delhi and Mumbai.  The research comprised online archival methods combined with qualitative research and participant-observation of the performance practice in these cities between 2014-15.  Flash mobs were initially banned in Mumbai and several other Indian cities in 2003, with police citing potential risks to urban security.  But in a second wave of the performance genre from 2011 onwards, the flash mob form has become remixed with Bollywood dance and popular Indian film music.  In this recent and nationalised avatar, the Indian flash mob has gained mainstream cultural status, appearing in election campaigns, protests, shopping malls and Indian cultural festivals abroad.