Theatre and War E-Book

Nandita Dinesh

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Nandita Dinesh places Kipling’s "six honest serving-men" (who, what, when, where, why, how) in productive conversation with her own experiences in conflict zones across the world to offer a theoretical and practical reflection on making theatre in times of war. This timely and important book weaves together Dinesh’s personal narrative with the public story of modern conflict, illustrating as it does, the importance of theatre as a force for ethical deliberation and social justice. In it Dinesh asks how theatre might intervene in times and places of conflict and how we might reflect on such interventions. In pursuit of answers, Theatre and War adopts the methods of auto-ethnography, positioning the theatrical practitioner at the heart of conflict zones in northern Uganda, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Rwanda, Kenya, Nagaland, and Kashmir. No longer a detached observer, the researcher and practitioner has to be able to meld theory with practice; to speak to ‘doing’, without undervaluing the importance of ‘thinking about doing’.Each chapter approaches the need for a synthesis of theory and practice by way of a term of inquiry―Why, Where, Who, What, When―and each is equipped with a set of unflinchingly honest field notes that are designed to reveal some of the ‘hows’ from the author’s own repertoire: questions and issues that were encountered during her own theatrical undertakings, along with first hand reflection on the complexities, potential, and challenges that attended her global work in community theatre. Within these notes are strategies that give the reader a practical insight into how the discussion might find its footing on the ground of war.The range and scope of this book make it required reading for those interested in theatre―practitioners, researchers, and students alike—as well as those seeking to understand the applications of the arts for ethics, politics, and education.

Leseprobe

Theatre and War

Theatre and War

Notes from the Field

Nandita Dinesh

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© 2016 Nandita Dinesh

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Nandita Dinesh, Theatre and War: Notes from the Field. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0099

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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-258-5

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-259-2

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-260-8

ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-261-5

ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-262-2

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0099

Cover image: Tim Hallinan, untitled_23 (2014), mixed media (acrylic, paper on wood panel), https://www.flickr.com/photos/118785739@N03/12934595594. CC BY-SA 2.0.

All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified.

Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK)

To my Apoopa, K.S. MenonFor his unwavering support and loveTo DougFor everything

Contents

Introduction

1

1.

Why

30

2.

Where

56

3.

Who

84

4.

What

112

5.

When

140

Conclusions

168

Bibliography

190

Index

197

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Introduction

© Nandita Dinesh, CC BY 4.0http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0099.07

Notes from the field

My first time on stage was when I was three years old. As was the case with many ‘good’ South Indian girls in my hometown, my mother enrolled me in classical Indian dance lessons at an early age — lessons to enhance my extra-curricular portfolio, to expand my knowledge of Indian culture, and to possibly become a resumé-builder when the time came to find me a husband. So, between the ages of three and thirteen, I performed as much as I did anything else. Between dance performances and ‘fancy dress’ competitions, I can barely remember a time from my childhood during which the performing arts were not a part of my life. In retrospect, it was perhaps inevitable that the realm of performance would become integral to my way of being in the world.

“Do you need intelligence to do what you do?” my grandmother asked me when I first told her that I intended to pursue a life, a career, making and researching the use of theatre in places of war. Sharing my newfound interest (at the time) with a family that was used to accountants, businessmen, and engineers was its own mode of ‘coming out’. In the years that have passed since that ‘coming out’, my family’s questions have been echoed by many around me: “Why theatre?”, “Why theatre in war zones?”, “What do you want to achieve?”, “Can you make money doing this?” The questions have abounded… Growing up in a smaller city in southern India, I believed during my childhood that I would become a chartered accountant and help with the family business. Then, I considered becoming a banker on Wall Street. Then, when I discovered my idealistic tendencies, it was Development Economics that became my area of focus. Discovering a passion for the theatre didn’t only astound my family; it also took me by surprise.

It was during my second theatre class in College — courses I had initially taken to fulfil the requirements of my liberal arts, United States education — that I had this epiphany. I remember sitting in class that day, in a circle. The professor asked each of us to talk about why we had chosen her class and why we were interested in studying theatre. As my classmates answered the professor’s question, I racked my brain for an answer that would seem appropriate. By the time it was my turn to speak, I remember being overwhelmed. I think I might have actually had tears in my eyes. I think I said something inane like “…because there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing”… I left the class that day, utterly perturbed. What had happened in there? What were those tears about? Rational answers are still difficult for me to provide when asked questions about why I make/research/write about theatre. But anyone who has encountered that passion — be it for a discipline, a person, or a cause — will know what I’m talking about. Discovering a passion for the theatre was my epiphany. Discovering, later, that it was not only a passion for the theatre but for studying the use of theatre in places of war, that was another epiphany; one that arose during a three month study abroad program in northern Uganda. This epiphany, the one about using theatre in times and places of war, is the one that has stuck with me for over a decade now. An epiphany that has catalysed innumerable dilemmas and insights. Dilemmas and insights that form the core of this book.

Why do I make theatre in places of war?

Where will I intervene?

Who am I creating work with/for?

What are the aesthetic strategies that I will use?

When might it be time to leave?

—

I keep six honest serving-men:(They taught me all I knew)Their names are What and Where and When And How and Why and Who.

Rudyard KiplingThe Elephant’s Child

Since my first encounter with theatre in places of war as a naïve undergraduate student in northern Uganda, I have come to rely on Kipling’s ‘six honest serving-men’ (Who, What, When, Where, Why, How) to guide my theatrical investigations. By placing these serving-men in conversation with my experiences in northern Uganda, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Rwanda, Kenya, Nagaland, and Kashmir, this book offers analytic and personal accounts through which the processes of envisioning, creating, and implementing theatre-in-war interventions might be explored.

While there are many books that deal with Community Theatre, Applied Theatre, Theatre for Development, and Political Theatre, a specific focus on the use of theatre in conflict zones is not as extensively explored. The In Place of War Institute’s work at the University of Manchester is an exception, with scholars and practitioners like James Thompson (2003, 2004, 2005, 2009a), Michael Balfour (2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2012), and Jenny Hughes (2007, 2009a, 2011) putting forth theoretical frameworks to understand the positioning of performance in places of war; and also highlighting the work of artists in various conflict/post-conflict zones. However, the form that these scholarly explorations take tends to be ethnographic in nature, largely positioning the theatre-maker outside that which s/he is writing about. The Self, the practitioner herself, is more silent; her voice, whilst occasionally present, does not capture the multiplicity of experiences that are inseparable from the work. Therefore, while existing works about theatre-in-war contribute powerful ideas to the realm of scholarship, there remains a need for a book that will speak in a language and form that resonate as much with ‘doing’ as with ‘thinking about doing’. It is this space between doing and thinking about doing that this book occupies.

From a methodological lens it is performance auto-ethnography that guides the writing in this book. Returning to what differentiates this book from other scholarship about theatre in places of war then, it is precisely a privileging of the personal that does it. To a more traditional academic audience that values certainty and objectivity ‘it is easy to understand why [auto-ethnography] would be looked upon with suspicion’. However, Sundar Sarukkai (2007b: 1409) addresses this concern by drawing from M.N. Srinivas (1996), who places an ‘emphasis on the self-in-the-other’ and demonstrates an ‘underlying unease with the exclusion of the subject from anthropological discourse’. Since theatre-in-war projects are fraught with instances where Self and Other coalesce and fracture, I share Srinivas’ discomfort with the exclusion of the subject from the discourse surrounding this work. Therefore, rather than erasing my own subjectivity in this book, I make a conscious attempt to include the ‘I’ that has been an unavoidable component in my attempts to unravel the complexities of researching and practicing theatre in times and places of war. By invoking Norman K. Denzin’s (2009: 258) idea of the ‘Mystory’, the writing in this book is ‘simultaneously a personal mythology, a public story, a personal narrative and a performance that critiques’. In this vein, the auto-ethnographic writing in this book does not only include prose but also consists of ‘quotations, documents and texts, placed side-by-side, producing a de-centred, multi-voiced text with voices and speakers speaking back and forth’ (ibid.). In writing this work as auto-ethnography I seek for it to perform ‘struggle, passion, an embodied life’ (Denzin, 2009: 255). And in performing this ‘embodied life’, it is important to acknowledge that while my auto-ethnographic notes draw from ‘truths’, from ‘reality’, writing about experiences in retrospect always comes with the risk of embellishment and of mis-remembering. I try to be as honest as I can in writing about my past work, but since memories can be faulty, fragmented, and interpretive, my Notes from the field present my ‘truths’ as I remember them. And it is for this reason that I maintain the anonymity of the individuals and organizations that I speak about in this book, lest my interpretive recollections of the past place my collaborators at risk in the contexts of conflict in which they continue to live and work.

Notes from the field

My articulations surrounding why I do what I do have been vastly different in each of the contexts where I have worked. The ideas that I present in the first chapter, Why, therefore come from critical analyses of past projects: what I have done, and more importantly, what I wish I had done. The Notes in the first chapter use my work in northern Uganda as a point of departure to consider evolutions in my articulations of intention in subsequent work.

I include, below, a timeline of my various theatre-in-war interventions over the last decade — alongside brief overviews of my intentions in each of these projects — so as to situate my repertoire for the reader of this book:

2005, northern Uganda: To research the use of Theatre for Development (TfD) in the region2006–2007, Guatemala/Northern Ireland/Rwanda: To research the role of theatre during and after the years of the civil war/the Troubles/the 1994 genocide2007–2008, Rwanda: To use theatre as a tool for peace building and post-conflict reconstruction2009, Nagaland: To gain an insight into young people’s interest in theatre in Nagaland (a state in India’s north-eastern region)2010, Kenya: To showcase experiences of Diaspora communities in India (Ahmedabad) and Kenya (Mombasa)2010, Mexico: To conduct community-based theatre workshops, to explore the idea of the Global South, and to see if connections might be made between my projects in Mexico and my work in East Africa/the Indian subcontinent2011–present, Kashmir: To create theatre across opposing community lines, in the grey zones between civilians, militants/ex-militants, and the Indian armed forces in the region

I first landed in northern Uganda in 2005 because I was on a semester-long study abroad program in the country. In my naiveté I didn’t know, when I first arrived in Kampala, that there was a war going on in the northern part of Uganda. Bruised by my own ignorance, I went north to Lira to assuage my ego; I went to Lira, in part, to complete an independent project that was an academic requirement of my semester abroad; I went to Lira to ‘do something’ with theatre. In Lira, I met a number of northern Ugandan artists who were engaged in theatrical efforts to mitigate the consequences of a war that has consumed much of the region since 1986. In Lira, I witnessed the use of theatre in Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) camps, in rehabilitation centres for ex-child soldiers, and in bars. In Lira, I witnessed the passion and courage that it takes to make theatre in an active conflict zone: where one’s actions as a theatre practitioner are predicated not only on a consideration of possible repercussions, but also on having to be incredibly entrepreneurial in order to make a living as a theatre artist in a war economy. In Lira, I witnessed the politics of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and the ethics of humanitarian aid. In Lira, I witnessed rage against the international community and against people like me, who showed up wanting to see, wanting to listen, and wanting to ‘do something’, but who rarely ever did. Choosing to go to Lira was accidental; a choice that I stumbled upon given the circumstances in which I found myself. An accidental choice that, while immensely educational, was also problematic and ill informed. Unfortunately, my haphazard approach to choosing sites of intervention continued in 2006–2007 when I made the decision to visit Guatemala, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda as part of a traveling fellowship. While choosing Rwanda was slightly less arbitrary — in that I had visited Kigali for two days during the semester abroad in Uganda and it only seemed natural to return there and to learn more — Guatemala and Northern Ireland were tokenistic choices, I am ashamed to admit, to fulfil my desire to travel to as many diverse regions as possible. Africa: check. Central America: check. Europe: check… I spent two and half months in Guatemala, two and a half months in Northern Ireland, and was set to spend two and half months in Rwanda before spending the last two and a half months of the fellowship in Serbia.

But when I got to Rwanda, something shifted. Perhaps this ‘something’ was the embarrassment that came from realizing I had leeched off my colleagues in Guatemala and Northern Ireland but not really given back to them in any significant way. Perhaps it was Rwanda herself, with her natural beauty and lovely inhabitants, which drew me in a way that the other places didn’t. Perhaps it was because by the time I got to Rwanda, I was ready to see what I could do instead of researching what other people were doing. Whatever the reason, my intended two and a half month stint in Kigali lasted five months. Five months in which I found myself connected to a place — as trite as that might sound — unlike any other. I remember writing to my family and friends at the end of that sojourn talking about how I planned to return there; how I intended to move to Rwanda once I finished the MA that I had taken time off from in order to pursue the fellowship.

Returning to Rwanda in 2007–2008 was perhaps the first time I made a choice of place that was backed up by a firm intention. While my initial returns in 2007 were for only a few weeks at a time — since I was still in graduate school — when I returned to Kigali in mid 2008 after my MA, I intended to move there. I was going to live in Rwanda for the unforeseeable future, I told myself, an idea that was cemented in the belief that I could do something in the ‘land of a thousand hills’ that I could not do anywhere else… This certainty did not last for very long though and while the intricacies of my choice to leave Rwanda will be described in a later chapter, it was there that I made the decision to return ‘home’: to India.

Going back to India and looking to work in conflict zones in/around the sub-continent led to one of two larger possibilities: of working in one of the seven north-eastern states (Assam, Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, or Meghalaya) that have histories of separatist struggles, or of looking for possible projects in the region of Jammu and Kashmir, which has been at the focal point of many inter and intra state conflicts. While my projects in Nagaland and Kashmir have become significant to my trajectory as a theatre-in-war researcher-practitioner, returning to India after having lived in Rwanda also meant that I was constantly on the lookout for ways to link what were, to me, my two homes.

As a result, the notion of Diaspora entered my thinking and I began to investigate the narratives of the Asian Diaspora in East Africa and the African Diaspora in the Indian sub-continent. My work in Mombasa (Kenya), therefore, was a consequence of these investigations and resulted in a theatre-based exchange programme between two groups of high-school students from the regions in question. Manifesting as a Documentary Theatre project, students from western India interviewed African Indians in the city of Ahmedabad in western India, while students in Mombasa interviewed Asian Kenyans in their city. Months of preparation led to a weeklong devised workshop in Kenya, with both groups of students weaving together the knowledge they had gleaned from their interviews. Subsequently, this experience of encountering the narratives of Diaspora and thinking about the historical and cultural linkages between East Africa and India brought the idea of the ‘Global South’ into the purview of my research interests: what would it mean to look for theatre-based collaborations between Asia, Africa, and Latin America? And when my interest in the broad notion of the Global South grew stronger, given that I had spent much time in East Africa and India, I decided to take a trip to Mexico. While Diaspora was a theme that brought Africa and Asia into conversation with each other, was there an African Diaspora in Mexico? What were the narratives of the Asian Diaspora in this Central American context? Although interesting questions glimmered under the surface of this line of research, I gradually found that these questions were often so large and so abstract that I could not get a glimpse of answers to them. Ultimately, after six months of working with these questions in Mexico, I began to question the re-articulation of my work in terms of the Global South and returned, once again, to a more ‘pure’ focus on the use of theatre in places of war.

And it was then, upon my return to India from Mexico, that the most intentional of all my theatrical interventions — my choice to work in Kashmir — commenced. Casual theatre projects with organizations and individuals I was able to contact in the region morphed into a doctoral project which sought to work across the victim/perpetrator binary in the region; work that continues today, years after my first visit to Kashmir in 2010. It is this work in Kashmir that has most significantly clarified my thinking on what is and is not possible, for me/as me with theatre in a place of war.

—

Given the centrality of auto-ethnography to this writing project it is pertinent to explore some of the existing ideas surrounding this genre and to frame my own approach to auto-ethnography in this book. Corinna Brown (2013: 122) proposes that auto-ethnography might be seen as ‘research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political’. In this vein, approaches to auto-ethnography might be said to contain permutations and combinations of the common characteristics that Carolyn Ellis (in ibid.) proposes: ‘action, emotion, embodiment, self-consciousness, and introspection’. My blend of these auto-ethnographic characteristics is included within the sections entitled Notes; notes that can be foundin each chapter and that are interwoven amidst texts that more closely follow the conventions of ‘academic writing’. Although my initial inclination was to be more experimental in my use of auto-ethnography in this book, there are two reasons that guide my more conservative approach. First, I do not want my use of auto-ethnography to create a layer of obscurity that might prevent a reader from being able to access the text. Rather, I hope to invite readers to engage with my experiences in the Notes as being in conversation with the ideas from scholarship that accompany them. Second, as this is my first book, I chose to heed advice that more extensive experimentation with writing might need to wait until I gain more ‘legitimacy’ as a scholar i.e., as one publisher told me, until I have a tenured position at a University and have published other books. While I certainly could not wait for a tenured job to manifest before writing this book, I have (gradually) come to accept that in my desire to participate in academic conversations just as much as to contribute to dialogue on theatrical practice, I need to find a balance: a balance between following some of the established conventions of academia while staying true to my own way of inhabiting the world of theatre-in-war. It is this understanding of balance that finally led to the particular auto-ethnographic strategies adopted in this book.

In speaking to auto-ethnography that involves the creation of/participation in/intersection with forms of performance, Denzin (2003a: 12) proposes that ‘[a]utoethnographer-performers insert their experiences into the cultural performances that they study’ and extends an idea from Toni Morrison (in ibid.: 20), that ‘the best performance autoethnographies, like the best art, are “unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time”’. While Denzin uses Morrison’s statement to refer to auto-ethnographer performers in particular, I would like to extend his argument to my questions surrounding writing about theatre in times and place of war. How can I write about my work in a way that does justice to the politics involved in theatre-in-war interventions, while simultaneously creating writing that is beautiful? Can beauty, in writing, emerge through the quest for an embodied way to talk about ideas from scholarship? Can beauty, in writing, be found in an articulated humility that faces a daunting array of political, ethical, and aesthetic challenges? Can beauty, in writing, arise from an honesty that speaks lucidly — that does not seek ‘to simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple’ (Roy, 1999)? Performance auto-ethnographies are said to be composed with ‘reflexive, rhizomatic’ qualities and Denzin (in Sermijn, Devlieger, and Loots, 2008: 646) calls these works ‘messy texts’, i.e. ‘reflexive texts that try to break with the representational technologies that are typical for the traditional, realist writing forms’. Jasmina Sermijn, Patrick Devlieger, and Gerrit Loots (2008: 646) further propose that this approach to writing might appeal to writers who consider their writing to be ‘a way of framing reality’. Messy texts thus invoke a polyvocality that tends to be ‘many sited, intertextual, always open ended, and resistant to theoretical holism’ (Sermijn, Devlieger, and Loots, 2008: 647). In the messy text approach to this book therefore, I use auto-ethnographic elements so as to not ‘impose meaning on the reader’ and, in contrast to traditional texts in which the writer remains concealed like an ‘unobtrusive camera’, to visibly make myself ‘a part of the writing’ (ibid.).

That said, it is important to clarify that while ‘auto-ethnography contains elements of auto-biography, auto-ethnography goes beyond the writing of selves’ (Denshire, 2014: 833). As such, I do not discuss elements of my lived experience in this book as a form of autobiography, rather, I seek to use Mystory, my auto-ethnography, as a springboard from which to consider larger ideas surrounding theatre-in-war interventions. In this vein I must also confess to the reader that sharing elements from my personal repertoire is not a strategy that I am particularly comfortable with. I have found discomfort to arise when considering how the writing in this book might or might not fit within particular disciplinary frameworks; I have also felt a significant sense of uneasiness in making decisions about what/how much of a particular experience I might/can/should share with my readers. But, as DeLysa Burnier (in ibid.: 834) has said, ‘to write auto-ethnography you cannot feel completely at home in your discipline and the discomfort experienced at stepping outside your own received frame is part of the auto-ethnographic task’.

Revelling in my discomfort then, there is one last piece of framing that I would like to put forward to clarify my approach to auto-ethnography in this book. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner (in ibid.: 835) offer two methods of studying the genre: ‘evocative’ and ‘analytical’ approaches, ‘where evocative auto-ethnography foregrounds the writer’s personal stories and analytical auto-ethnography connects to larger structures that lie beyond the personal encounters’. I consider the auto-ethnographic writing in this book to occupy a space between the evocative and the analytical and as such, the Notes always begin with reflections and analyses of personal experience. However, in so doing, the texts seek to use these ‘sociological introspections’ in a systematic way that might facilitate an understanding of what Ellis and Bochner (in ibid.: 835) call, ‘a way of life’. Perhaps it would be best then to call this book an attempt in ‘post-structural auto-ethnography’ where the writing seeks to be ‘simultaneously personal and scholarly, evocative and analytical, descriptive and theoretical’ (ibid.: 836). Furthermore, the reflexivity that I aim to invoke through this post-structural auto-ethnography might be seen as akin to what Kamala Visweswaran (in Denzin, 2003b: 269–270) proposes as a ‘deconstructive ethnography, where the observer refuses to presume a stable identity for self or other’ by ‘unsettling the notion of an objective, reflexive ethnographer’. Ultimately, my approach to such a post-structural, deconstructive auto-ethnography does not seek to question my knowledge but rather, in the words of Joe L. Kincheloe and Peter McLaren (in ibid.: 270), consciously aims to ‘forfeit its authority’.

Notes from the field

Given the centrality of identity when intervening in any context of war, the second and third chapters on Where and Who explore two streams to identity politics: the positioning of the theatre-in-war researcher-practitioner herself and the positioning of co-creators and spectators in a context of war.

In 2005, in my initial step into the world of theatre in places of war, it was the role of ‘student’ that seemed to most define my positioning in IDP camps and rehabilitation centres in northern Uganda. An experience that occurred at a time when I was ignorant about how to perform my own presence in such a fraught context, I wandered around Lira with a notebook in my hand; oblivious to what Thompson (2005: 11) says:

Firstly, when I did take out a notebook, it immediately changed the relationship between those to whom I was talking and myself. You can watch the respondent sit up and change tone and body posture. Their performance changed — and therefore their replies became an enactment of the expectation of what would be ‘noted’ rather than a free-moving discussion. [...] The experience of visitors who take notes in moments of crisis for reports that respondents never see produced a distrust and a cynicism about this process.

Glued to my notebook and unaware of how this action impacted the ways in which I was perceived and responded to, it is perhaps no surprise that I could not see past my own role as a student in northern Uganda. I did not see, until many years later, the various kinds of relational acts of violence that exist within the large group of northern Ugandans that I had uniformly identified as ‘victims’. I did not see the hierarchies between northern Ugandans who occupied different social and cultural standings. I did not see the tensions between different lived experiences of child soldiering. I did not understand the sheer layers of politics to how funding was provided for the theatre work that I witnessed.

Instead, I saw the conflict in northern Uganda as a simple dichotomy between the ‘perpetrators’ from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the ‘victims’ of their acts of violence. In overlooking nuance, in overlooking the ‘grey zones’, I believe now that I performed a disservice in 2005.

A disservice to the people I met. A disservice to the stories I heard. A disservice to the larger quest of understanding theatre’s role in places of war.

When I went on after northern Uganda to Guatemala, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda, the requirements of the fellowship I was on were simple: I had to travel alone, to any country outside of India and the United States. While the earlier notes have explained the (problematically) tokenistic reasons behind my choosing Guatemala, Northern Ireland, and Rwanda as my sites of intervention, it was on this ten-month long trip that more insights into my own auto-ethnographic positioning began to emerge. In Guatemala, I found that it was being a woman that most impacted my presence in interviews, workshops, and performances. When speaking to ex-guerrilla fighters and accompanying these men on a countrywide theatre competition, my being a woman created a very gendered positioning in that Central American context. In contrast, in Northern Ireland and Rwanda, it was my race that became the most significant marker in my interactions. From being called a “Fucking Paki” whilst walking down a street in Londonderry to being told in Kigali that, “I didn’t know Indians could be nice till I met you”, race impacted both how I was seen and how I saw myself in those contexts. I must contextualize the latter instance though, and mention here that it was during my time in Uganda that I began to notice the complex relationships between Indians who live in the East African region and their non-Indian counterparts. The tensions that simmer between these racial groups was palpable and this tension was one that followed me into my work in Rwanda. While I had, through my experiences in the United States and Northern Ireland, become hyper-aware of my race from the point of view of the ‘oppressed’ i.e., the post-colonial subject, as it were, it was in East Africa that I was suddenly on the other side; of being a (perceived) ‘oppressor’. When I returned to Rwanda for the second, third, and fourth times between 2007 and 2008, however, the racial dimensions to my presence there significantly diminished. I began to be positioned, and to position myself, as someone who could design programmes and raise funds for community-based theatre initiatives, and this standing gave me a position of power. Until, of course, the work hit a standstill and my house of cards collapsed — a string of events that I will discuss later on in this book.

It was also in Rwanda that I began to understand the importance of locating the politics of identity amongst my collaborators and spectators. Like many do, I initially thought of the population in Rwanda as being divided along tribal lines as Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa; as being divided between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ in relation to the events of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. After a while though, I began to see some more layers to these identity affiliations. While no one used tribal associations to refer to themselves in public spaces in 2007, I slowly realized that new words had emerged to replace Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa: words like ‘survivor’ and ‘returnee’. Words that indicated the identity group that the individual in question belonged to. Words that if unused, well, that silence was an identity tag all its own — indicating that the individual was somehow associated with the ethnic group that had perpetrated the genocide. Eventually troubled by my own complicated positioning in Rwanda and by how to negotiate identity politics with relation to my intentions there (more on this in Where), I decided to go back ‘home’, to India. The thought of being in a place where I was more insider than outsider seemed incredibly appealing at the time. Not to mention the comfort that came from knowing that I would (most likely) be able to speak at least the same second language as my collaborators and spectators; the fact that I would be able to understand many of the cultural codes… Upon realizing how inept I was at navigating my positioning in Rwanda, going back to India seemed the best thing to do.

“Thank you for coming all the way from India”, I was told toward the end of a workshop in Nagaland; a statement that marked my Indian-ness as being somehow foreign to the actors and actresses that I was working with in this north-eastern state. Upon returning to India from Rwanda there were many such poignant moments in my interventions in the sub-continent; moments in which I had to encounter the experience being an outsider in ‘my’ country; moments of simultaneously being inside and outside (many) Indian contexts. These moments have been stimulating, educational, and inspiring. Just as much as they have been devastating, fracturing, and surreal.

“Thank you for coming all the way from India”.

“No, I can’t cast someone who looks like you. I need to cast someone who looks like an Indian from here”.

“Yes, but you’re not really Indian are you. I mean, you’re more American now”.

“You are like a man, you know. I don’t really think of you as a woman. Indian women act differently”.

I am clearly using the notion of identity quite loosely here, as a means through which I seek to situate my collaborators and myself in the contexts of various theatre-in-war interventions. As such, the ruminations and reflections on identity in Where and Who are not based on a particular methodological apparatus or framed by a central theoretical framework. Rather, in the spirit of practice-based research that has to employ a ‘bricolage’ of techniques based on what is available in a context, considerations about the performativity of various identity markers has become one of the tools I use extensively as a ‘bricoleur’ (Barrett and Bolt, 2007: 127) who makes/researches theatre in places of war.