Events

March 14 – March 31

Performance as Counterforensics in South Asia and its Diasporas

Convened by Zuleikha Chaudhari, The Alkazi Theatre Archives, New Delhi; and Shayoni Mitra, Department of Theatre, Barnard College, and South Asia Institute, Columbia University

Sponsored by: The Alkazi Theatre Archives; Presidential Research Award, Barnard College; Movement Lab, Barnard College: Department of Theatre, Barnard College; South Asia Institute, Columbia University

Venue: Movement Lab, Barnard College, Columbia University

Open Rehearsals: March 14, 28, 31

Research Symposium: postponed

Registration required (as below)

Performance as Counterforensics: 

“Mobilizing the political potential of performance as a form that harnesses the etymological connotations of ‘forensics’ – from the Latin forensis, ‘in open court, public’ or ‘place of assembly’ - a  feminist performance forensics uses the performance space as a site that ‘makes public’ the evidence necessary to hold governments to account.” 

Natalie Alvarez and Keren Zaiontz, “Feminist Counter Forensics,” 2018

Contemporary performance is preoccupied with questions about how truth is identified; with the processing of evidence, with means of detection, with the packaging of information and with how knowledge circulates. 

We explore, in this symposium, the possibility of performance as ‘counter’ to the empirical demands of forensics in the contested boundaries of South Asian countries and its diasporas. What role can performance play as a means of knowledge production?

How can embodied, and artistic practices articulate the web of ecological, cultural, economic, historical and political relations as legitimate (legal?) narratives and destabilize state sanctioned-standards of evidence?

At the heart of these twinned juridical and the performative questions is the idea of belonging, of claiming a home, establishing subjectivity and, offering instant, contingent and often collaborative models of citizenship.

Centered around the artistic residency of director and performance maker Zuleikha Chaudhari at Barnard College through a series of four public rehearsals, we convene a symposium at the end of the fourth week, of artists and scholars who have worked on the limits of law. 

Public Rehearsal Program:
Dates:  Fridays, March 7 (postponed), 14 (past), 28, 31 (see below), April 4 (postponed)
Location: see below

The Untitled Trilogy unfolds at Barnard and the South Asia Institute as a series of public rehearsals foregrounding a process of thought and consideration that makes visible that which would otherwise remain hidden backstage. In the context of performance, rehearsal is repetition - this means continual reproduction in order to represent reality. A rehearsal allows the possibilities of connecting not only ‘what is’ and what ‘should be’, but also what ‘might be'.  The rehearsal proposes the audition as a witnessing and a social testimony to a proposed court of law towards mechanisms of accountability outside the reach of the courtroom or the ambit of the state.

The three parts of Untitled Trilogy comprise: the re-staging of a historical trial that took place in pre-Independence India; an enactment of a post-Independence People's Tribunal; and a theatre text that contemplates an alternate national future.

Following Public Rehearsals 1-6 at Black Box, Okhla, New Delhi, 2024, Untitled Trilogy unfolds through March 2025 as Public Rehearsals 7-9. The rehearsals foreground the fragmented and untidy processes of thought and related notions of contingency, interruption, augmentation, repetition, version and rupture that are usually obscured by the 'real thing' of performance.

Friday March 28 , 6.30-8 PM:  Online only.

Public Rehearsal 7 of Untitled Trilogy with Manan Ahmed, Columbia University

Public Rehearsal 7 with historian Manan Ahmed uses a second fragment from Saeed Naqvi's play, The Muslim Vanishes to investigate how and why the Muslim has vanished. Is it possible to determine the immensity of what happened from within the contradictions, silences and differing perspectives between a state and its citizens, different communities, and among different groups? 

Zoom link: March 28 Public Rehearsal 7 Registration

Friday March 31, 6.30-48 PM:  Online only.

Public Rehearsal 9 of Untitled Trilogy with with Kalyani Ramnath, Columbia University

Public Rehearsal 9 with legal historian Kalyani Ramnath uses a third fragment from Saeed Naqvi's play, The Muslim Vanishes to proposes cultural, economic, historical and political relations as legitimate narratives in a judicial context allowing us to imagine and give voice to visions of alternative sovereignties.  

Zoom link: March 31 Public Rehearsal 9 Registration.

Past event:  Public Rehearsal 8 of Untitled Trilogy with Chaumtoli Huq, CUNY, Law
Friday March 14, 2.30-4 PM

Venue:  Room 208 Knox Hall, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont

Public Rehearsal 8 with lawyer Chaumtoli Huq considers the legal trial as a staged event employing dramaturgical elements and theatrical devices: trials have their peculiar scenography, their scripts and roles assigned to each specific actor and  their audience composed of the public, the media and their critics.

Public Rehearsal 10 (originally scheduled for Friday, April 4) had to be canceled due to logistical problems.  We hope you will be able to attend one or more of the other rehearsals.