Performances in India resist mediatized disappearance and challenge dominant narratives on issues like sexual violence.
Authors
Anita E. Cherian, School of Culture and Creative Expressions, Ambedkar University, Delhi, India
Gargi Bharadwaj, Associate Professor of Practice, Jindal School of Liberal Arts & Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India
Summary
Our article problematizes the relations between the politics of performance, media and disappearance. Moving away from an influential strand of discourse on disappearance that claims that performance exists and is exhausted in the moment of its enaction, we work with disappearance as a recurring (affective) phenomenon in performance, referring to that which is obscured from view, or is forgotten, but still continues to exist. Disappearance is therefore a generative context within which performance is seen, understood and analysed. We posit that performances in the Indian context cannot be disengaged from the material – mediatized situations from which they emerge and which they reference. We show that context generates the ground, the material, and the strategies of ‘disobedient’ performance; as scholars of performance, this is a significant analytic method. The performances we are working with might be read as acts of resistance against (mediatized) disappearance.
The performative strategies employed in the works examined seek to forge resistant modes of thinking and acting. These are acts of disobedience that delineate the issue of sexual violence through distinct modalities of citation and repetition. The performances considered here do not re-construct violent events, but inaugurate embodied forms of thinking in public on constitutional rights, matters of sexual violence and their specific conditions of possibility. These are disobedient performances that reflect, that slow the pace of action and of recall, thereby reconstituting affect through a strategic disobedience of the codes of dominant nationalist narratives. In terms of performance method and aesthetic, we see a deliberate use of obsolescent media forms. We propose that this ‘aesthetic of obsolescence’ allows a ‘tactical’ use of the analogue to forge a language of dissent.
Published in: The Performance Studies Reader: Fourth Edition
To read the full article, please click here.
