Our Stage

Theatre practice in India is like the country itself – vast, diverse, pulsating. Theatre in India happens anywhere and everywhere – in badly designed auditoria, in schools and colleges, in parks and gardens, in restaurants, on rooftops, in the open fields, on the streetcorner, and even, sometimes, on moving trains. At times, it gives pure delight and touches aesthetic peaks, at others, it is brazen, rude, outspoken, blunt – or both simultaneously.

And yet, surprisingly, the actual practice of theatre in India – beyond the work of this or that practitioner – remains vastly undertheorized.

In Our Stage: Pleasures and Perils of Theatre Practice in India, leading theatre practitioners, administrators and scholars, social scientists and activists interrogate theatre practice in India around the themes Locales, Experiments, Assertions, Pathologies, New Realities, and Training and Institutions. They also interrogate the implicit and explicit premises and projections of the 1956 Drama Seminar. Together, they give a fascinating insight on how theatre happens in India, as well on the most important issues animating this practice.