Kankhowa

Kankhowa

is a frequently used name by Samudra Kajal Saikia, art historian, writer and alternative theatre practitioner, to signify the working agencies of The Disposable Theatre. 

Samudra Kajal Saikia, (and --Kankhowa (talk) 08:07, 5 March 2010 (UTC)Kankhowa) has been engaged in promoting a new kind of theatre named as Disposable Theatre. If theatre or performance is essentially time and space specific, no theatre can repeat itself. It is wrong that theatre always take place in a spectator-performer communication. Mostly the art mediates between these two entities. We see artist to art, art to spectator, or spectator to art, art to artist relation. We deliberately search for a theatre where an artist-spectator relation would come first before the art comes. The Disposable Theatre tries to negate the grandiose ‘product’ to deliver from one creator’s side to a receiver’s side. More than a ‘thing-provider’ it tends to be a ‘context provider’ . It negates theatre by simply doing it. Instead of imitating any grand-theory of theatre, the actors will prefer to adopt elements from the ‘everyday’, what John Berger says “theatre of Indifference” . Noteworthy, all the major performances of disposable theatre were experienced as a part of some national and international seminars. So, it is seen that some theory and practice interface is always there. All the performers of the disposable theatre are not necessary traditional or professional performers. Neither the audience of it is regular audience of the so called performing arts. So some ambiguity regarding conceptualizing the target audience is always there. Furthermore, all the spaces belong to nontraditional urban space where an assimilation of multiple linguistic cultures was available. So a pre-structured communitarian spectatorship was not available in these instances.

The disposable theatre at each and every moment make the audience aware of “what are you looking at”, “who are you looking at” and “from where are you looking at”. The questions may sustain, but the event/performance disposes itself. By negating its own presence, the disposable theatre challenges the crucial power relationship of the spectator and performer.

some major works under the Disposable Theatre Project

OPHELIA, a site specific installation-cum-performance project, during the National level workshop on Gender and Sexuality in the Disciplinary Paradigms, organized by the Department of Art History and Aesthetics, M S University of Baroda, Jan 9-11, 2007 RAVANA KATHA, a site specific DISPOSABLE theatre project, during the National Level Seminar on Cultural Practices and the Discourses on the “Minor”, held in the Department of Art History and Aesthetics, M S University of Baroda, Feb 2007. THE CHAIRS: THE PRIVATE AND THE PUBLIC, in the national level seminar on “Religion and the Visual Arts: Representations and Contestations”, 2nd and 3rd March, 2008, Kalabhavana, organized by the Department of History of Art, Kalabhavan, Viswabharati, after presenting a paper “City of God: The Performer in Exile, the Spectator in Exile”. THE MISSING PAGES, an installation-cum-DISPOSABLE THEATRE project during the international seminar on “The Tourist Audience: Redefining the audience and Performers in Traditional Dance and Drama” in Kathmandu, Nepal, 26-28th December 2008. LINE CROSSES NO BOUNDARIES, an installation performance at Kaleidoscope Gallery in Baroda, 18th Aug, 2007, as a part of the Exhibition-Workshop-Performance program with the Bengal Pata-Painters, Changing Paradigms of the Folk. Karengar Ligiri: Defining spaces into spaces, a site-specific architectural installation performance on Jyoti Prasad Agarwala's Birth centenary celebration in Rabindra Bhavana, Guwahati, 26th Oct 2003, based on the mostly celebrated play by Agarwala. THE CLOTH NARRATIVE, A workshop based site-specific theatre-venture (12th Aug 2007) with theatrical forms and installation programs at the campus of Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU. This project was a part of the student’s protest around the events after 9th May 2007.

The major concerns of the Dosposable Theatre are:

The DISPOSABLE THEATRE of KanKhowa is rooted into some discomfort with the ongoing practices and some disciplinary queries. Where the spaces are constantly shifting in a rapid manner due to globalization and cross-culturalism, as a practitioner of theatre-arts we are bound to think about - what would be appropriate/suitable language for theatre.

The DISPOSABLE THEATRE explores the scope and limitations of the interdisciplinary practices. The DISPOSABLE THEATRE works in the Interface of the institutional space and the larger public domain, the Interface of the public and the private, the Individual and collective, the interface of the conventional and the radical, the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘alternative’, the ‘local’ and the ‘multicultural’, and definitely in the Interface of theory and praxis.

Working with the interfaces DISPOSABLE THEATRE undergoes a constant shift in its works. The proposal for a DISPOSABLE theatre is by and for him, who shifts space.

The DISPOSABLE THEATRE rejects the notion of a “product” to deliver from a creator’s side to the spectator’s side since it constitutes a give-and-take power relationship.

DISPOSABLE THEATRE is not an idiom; it is a language that can adopt varieties of idioms according to the circumstances.

An actor of DISPOSABLE THEATRE simply rejects to enact. S/he waits for something to happen at a particular time and space. Actors of DISPOSABLE THEATRE mostly prefer to confront, not with an imposed ego, mannerist method-acting or masculine showmanship, but with the ordinariness of our ‘everyday’.

The DISPOSABLE THEATRE problematizes the narcissistic disorder is commonly seen in the actor’s training in the mainstream national theatre. In DISPOSABLE theatre actors are put in a more inward journey, from the self to the inner self.

DISPOSABLE THEATRE can be done with any literary text, from Hamlet to Ramayana, or without any written text.

The DISPOSABLE THEATRE can take place anywhere, inside an academic institution, an art gallery, a market place, a village fair, a national auditorium and so on.

You cannot “do” DISPOSABLE THEATRE; it “happens” or “takes place”. What you can do is initiation. The DISPOSABLE THEATRE happens in a relationship of the performer and the spectator, and hence it can be repeated neither in the same space, nor in any other space. The DISPOSABLE THEATRE is always site specific. Truly ephemeral. The performing space determines the nature of the performance, and hence, there is no pre-determined acting method. Actors are ready to confront with their own identity.

Spectators in The DISPOSABLE THEATRE are not asked to switch off their mobile phones, neither are they restricted to any definitive seat-arrangement. Spectators in The DISPOSABLE THEATRE are always free to move around, take a physical position, and have a perspective, from where s/he can have a look.

The spectators are free to move around, speak out, receive a mobile call, and take a yawn or hiccup. Audience as a constantly moving crowd remains the most organic part of the happening.

The performance and the circumstance turns to the text, as the performance gets over, the text are collapsed. Everything is disposed, only a memory remains in the DISPOSABLE THEATRE.

DISPOSABLE THEATRE adopts a theory of no resistance. KanKhowa resists nothing.

The process of DISPOSABLE THEATRE starts at the moment you think of doing it.

Essentially the arts of performance and theatre need a process, a continuum of exchanging experience. The creator-author-artist-centered modernist discourses maintained a hegemony which so far exiled the spectator from its location.

Only the DISPOSABLE THEATRE, a theatre that takes place in between the ordinary everyday and the phenomenal one, a theatre that is built up with the “body of the spectator” instead of the “actor” can claim itself a theatre of our times.