Sharmistha Saha (Theatre Director & Faculty, IIT Bombay) will deliver her talk on 'Staging Real Life'  in Prof Ashutosh Potdar's class on Friday, August 16, 2019 from 12.00 to 2.00 PM In her talk, Ms Saha would discuss the process of narrativization in theatre with reference to the creation of her theatre work 'Romeo Ravidas Aur Juliet Devi'. If you are interested, please come.

Venue: RNJ002 

Synopsis:

The lecture demonstration would primarily look at the process of narrativization in creating the theatre piece 'Romeo Ravidas Aur Juliet Devi'. The play interweaves a series of newspaper articles about and interviews of the activist Kaushalya whose husband Shankar was murdered by her father and a newspaper report on the death of Pradeep Rathod. What if the reported dead, those that have been long forgotten, are resurrected and came alive to interact with our world today? How would they react to those fighting their cause? Do the dead and long forgotten seek justice or are they comfortably gone? How would we imagine an encounter of those who were victims of social apathy and atrocity and those who seek justice for them? Can we have such a duality of the dead and the alive or do these past forgone narratives define the subjectivities of those who fight for them? What is the relationship between the oppressed and the activist? And what is the relationship between the activist and the oppressor? The lecture demonstration would primarily look at the process of the making of the theatre piece finally trying to address the question of truth in fiction and especially fiction in theatre.

 Bio:

Sharmistha Saha is a theatre scholar and practitioner based in Mumbai. Her book ‘Theatre and National Identity in Colonial India’ was published Aakar/Springer in 2018 and she is currently working on an edited volume ‘Performance Making and the Archive’ to be published by Routledge and one more edited volume on English Theatre in Eighteenth Century and Early Nineteenth Century Bombay to be published by Manipal University Press. She is the recipient of the Asia Art Archive/Inlaks Art Grant 2017-18. Saha completed her doctoral and postdoctoral studies from Freie Universität in Berlin before joining Indian Institute of Technology Bombay as faculty in 2016.