We are not British
I can explain my absence for the past few weeks from the blog but Ram wants to have some fun at my expense, so I am being gracious about it. Not that I have much choice in the matter.
Your post set me thinking, Harriet. And it has personal resonance for me. As someone who attempts to teach creative writing in Bangalore, I often wonder whether creative forms of writing can ever be taught. And if one does dabble in it, is it at all possible not to inflict and impose my own frameworks on students. The consolation I draw is that I must be often falling into the trap of 'teaching,' but that's only part of the picture. The students on their own are smart enough to internalise what they want and discard what appears to be useless to them and linking what is useful to them to their own individual voice.
As to whether the court imposes its own form and style on international students and tries to take them away from more indigeneous forms of theatre; that is a debate that can never be settled to anyone's satisfaction. At least India has been so eclectic and in many ways adaptive to new art forms over centuries that every invasion brought with it, it is difficult to any longer own the Natya Shastra as the only Indian treatise on theatre. It is the most ancient Indian treatise on theatre, but I am sure there are others. Infact it is akin to saying Shakespeare is the only English playwright who has influenced theatre in England.
In some ways I also see this as a regressive debate. Contemperory theatre all over the world deals with the same issue- war and terrorism, ecology, human relationships, existential loneliness etc etc, then why is it that only in the Indian context do we refer to ancient texts. At a very subliminal level, is it one more attempt to let India remain "exotic." ( read primitive). I wonder whether Ira's protests have something to do with this.
What I found objectionable during the workshop were the regional writers getting translated by "amateurs" and then this half baked text getting theatrical interpretation. There's no use saying some of the actors were doing a very fine job of translating. Translating is in some ways much more difficult than original writing. It was very very hard sometimes to sit through rehearsals of Marathi plays and discovering the trainers and the writer not at all being on the same wave length. That's something we need to fix.
Your post set me thinking, Harriet. And it has personal resonance for me. As someone who attempts to teach creative writing in Bangalore, I often wonder whether creative forms of writing can ever be taught. And if one does dabble in it, is it at all possible not to inflict and impose my own frameworks on students. The consolation I draw is that I must be often falling into the trap of 'teaching,' but that's only part of the picture. The students on their own are smart enough to internalise what they want and discard what appears to be useless to them and linking what is useful to them to their own individual voice.
As to whether the court imposes its own form and style on international students and tries to take them away from more indigeneous forms of theatre; that is a debate that can never be settled to anyone's satisfaction. At least India has been so eclectic and in many ways adaptive to new art forms over centuries that every invasion brought with it, it is difficult to any longer own the Natya Shastra as the only Indian treatise on theatre. It is the most ancient Indian treatise on theatre, but I am sure there are others. Infact it is akin to saying Shakespeare is the only English playwright who has influenced theatre in England.
In some ways I also see this as a regressive debate. Contemperory theatre all over the world deals with the same issue- war and terrorism, ecology, human relationships, existential loneliness etc etc, then why is it that only in the Indian context do we refer to ancient texts. At a very subliminal level, is it one more attempt to let India remain "exotic." ( read primitive). I wonder whether Ira's protests have something to do with this.
What I found objectionable during the workshop were the regional writers getting translated by "amateurs" and then this half baked text getting theatrical interpretation. There's no use saying some of the actors were doing a very fine job of translating. Translating is in some ways much more difficult than original writing. It was very very hard sometimes to sit through rehearsals of Marathi plays and discovering the trainers and the writer not at all being on the same wave length. That's something we need to fix.
posted by Anonymous at 10:13 pm
1 Comments:
Yeah! Thanks. I am particularly interested in what you say at the end about translation. It'd be good to hear what the translated ones think about that.
H
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