Volume II, No. 1, Spring 2003

state of the field

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Cultural Ecology in India:

An Interview with Stuart Cox

Conducted by Farley Richmond

Concern for the protection and preservation of performing arts and artists is not new in India. Principally since Independence in 1947, recognition of the importance of endangered performing arts to the cultural life of the nation has been the province of central and state governments and various federal and state supported arts organizations. In recent years these efforts have been joined by some international organizations, as well, which have sought to assist in the preservation effort.

What is new is the notion of cultural ecology.  It is entirely possible that thus far the preservation effort has let many endangered folk arts slip through its protective net. In particular, the numerous genres of village theatre, some of which are in a life and death struggle to survive.

In an effort to call attention to the plight of the neglected genre of folk performance of North and West India, in February 1998 a gathering was held entitled,  Conference Workshop & Festival of Performing Folk Arts Toward a Cultural Ecology.  The week-long event was held in Borunda, a village in Rajasthan. It was convened by Stuart Cox, an expatriate British actor and theatre director who now resides in Mexico. Cox produced a unique production for the conference as a means of demonstrating the need to revive and sustain traditional folk theatre arts among the people of Borunda.

Stuart Cox and this production is my subject. I caught up with Cox at the second  Conference Workshop & Festival of Performing Folk Arts Toward a Cultural Ecology  which took place in March 1999 in Dunlod, a small former princely state in northern Rajasthan.

Cox first visited India in 1987. Since that time he has been closely associated with the Development Action Society (DAS) of Borunda and its founder Inder Dan Detha, a local farmer and social worker. DAS is a self-help organization which attempts to eliminate the cause of communal divisions that have torn at the fabric of the rural communities in this agriculturally rich region of western India. Theatre has been used as a means to ease tensions and heal the deep divisions that have disturbed this otherwise tranquil land.

FR:   What is cultural ecology?

SC:   Well, we are aware that the world's natural resources are under threat and many species of flora and fauna are disappearing. This circumstance is mirrored by the threat to the cultural resources of the planet what could be most positively described as cultural diversity and the way that different continents, countries, societies and communities manifest their way of life through their arts, particularly the performing arts and, in my opinion, the performing folk arts which, since man first drew images on cave walls, have been integral to the daily life of a community for ritual, celebration, entertainment, and instruction.

Cultural ecology is a term I first heard in the 1980s and it struck a chord with me as I was then working creating theatre within Indian immigrant communities in Britain. In those communities it seemed to me that there was a tendency for the first generation to turn away from aspects of their cultural heritage so that their children could more easily integrate with the host community. Racism is obviously a factor here, too. But subsequent generations were beginning to investigate their cultural backgrounds and revive an interest in them.

But the reality of the situation, internationally, struck me very forcibly in 1998 when I was directing a performing arts project in a village in Rajasthan. As part of the project we were going to hold an International Conference and Workshop to share what we had been doing in the village. Working directly with folk theatre actors, I discovered that there were only two parties of folk theatre actors left in Rajasthan and that, with the decline of patronage since Independence in 1947, performances only now took place at camel or cattle fairs and the occasional religious mela.

This concentrated my thinking and I realised that there is not the general consciousness that cultural diversity is under threat world-wide in the same way that there is now a general awareness of the threat to the ecology of the natural world. I am not aware of a cultural equivalent of Greenpeace to do the consciousness raising! Consequently I called the week-long Conference and Workshop Towards a Cultural Ecology and added a festival element by arranging for performances to be held each night by local Rajasthani performing folk artists from gypsies to harvest dances by farmers and elderly men who could still remember and recite the local epic poetry in rhyming and rhythmical verse form. I also wrote an article as a keynote speech, also called Towards a Cultural Ecology. In this I compared the threat to the environment with the threat to cultural diversity and their common causes the effects of globalisation with its marketing and glamorizing of products and the internationalizing of the mass entertainment industry, both of which have the effect of homogenizing daily life for the sake of the maximum profit.

To put it in an extreme way if things continue in the direction they seem to be going then one day everyone in the world will watch the same film, followed by a Big Mac and a Coke. It s not a world I would enjoy living in! As I say that s an exaggeration but you get my point. And I am now using this term towards a cultural ecology because, as yet, I am not aware of any unified consciousness or action and so this is only, at the moment, a movement Towards a cultural ecology. I also organised a second International Conference, Workshop & Festival again in 1999 in Rajasthan and with the right funding I want to make it an annual event an event where artists from different parts of the world can share their traditions and skills through workshops and performances and support and encourage each other instead of working so much in isolation and, increasingly, without recognition even within their own communities. It s also an attempt to build a network of those with similar ideas who are aware of the threat to cultural diversity and are working, as many are, to support the artists as their numbers dwindle.

In Rajasthan, we are hoping to undertake a folk theatre project each year and also to persuade the authorities to finance a school for Khyal [the indigenous genre of performance of the state] performers, similar to what has been successfully accomplished in Gujarat with Bhavai [a genre of performance found in both Gujarat and Rajasthan], so that a new generation of artists can be trained before the skills are lost forever. If a network can be established, then maybe in a few years' time there may be a more general awareness of the need for cultural ecology to support the diversity of traditions and, at least, slow down their erosion. What I have come to realise is that if a community no longer supports their performing folk arts then they will disappear. And that's fine, that's how it is. But my concern is that they should have the opportunity to make that choice. For this to happen an increase in the awareness of and support for the concept of cultural ecology is vital.

FR:   What inspired you to become involved with India and Indian theatre?

SC:   It was essentially a series of natural progressions, but it all began with one of those conversations which, at the time, seem to be of no great importance but, in retrospect, you recognize as a turning point in your life. In 1982, another British actor/director, Nigel Watson, asked me to direct him in a solo performance and we were thinking about suitable material to work with.  Around that time I was acting in London in a British pantomime playing the cat in Puss In Boots. In a telephone conversation with Nigel I said that I was fascinated by the audience reactions during the pantomime. Attention was always highest when the narrative was being driven along. They seemed to take great pleasure in watching this fairy story of a talking cat unfold in a way that was like a return to childhood and the bedtime story.  Nigel then mentioned that he had just read a modern translation of Panchatantra stories from India, a cycle of stories within stories which are probably the oldest to have been recorded in writing.

We decided to work on rehearsing these stories as a solo performance and from the very first rehearsal it was clear we'd stumbled upon something special.

This material was ideal for both of us as we had first worked together in a very physical experimental theatre company in the early '70s and shared a fascination with theatre and performance from around the world, especially non-Western and particularly from India. Together we created the more than thirty characters for Nigel to play in telling the stories, including animals, and suddenly we had the perfect vehicle for being physically expressive in finding different ways to dramatize the stories. We were able to use our own backgrounds in non-naturalistic performance techniques and also to incorporate mudras [stylized hand gestures], movements from Indian dance, and aspects of what little Indian folk theatre we had seen from the few productions that had come to Britain. In many ways we were guessing and the surprise is that we guessed so much of it correctly.

FR:   Where was this?

SC:   Our company was based in Cardiff. We called it Theatr Taliesin Wales after Taliesin, the first known Welsh bard, magician, and shape changer as a metaphor for the style of performance we were pursuing. The show had the title A Word in the Stargazer's Eye and was so well received by every kind of audience that we toured with it on and off for two years ending up with a music theatre version, collaborating with  musicians from Calcutta who played sitar, tabla, and tambura integral to the performance.

FR:   Is that how you got involved with Indian theatre?

SC:   At this point in time two things happened. The first was that we were approached by British Asian actors, dancers and musicians who said that they would like to work with us on something. The second was that, even when we were performing the show with the musicians in a place where there was an immigrant community from the sub-continent, people from those communities never came to see it in the theatres in which we were playing. And why should they? because at that time in the mid '80s there were few steps being taken to invite them to these places as theatregoers. They were not made to feel welcome, even for something with which they had a cultural affinity.

FR:   What did you do to rectify the situation?

SC:   It just seemed obvious that if these communities felt unwelcome in conventional theatre situations then why not invite them to actively participate as performers and with all the other aspects of a production? Consequently, in 1986 we put together a mixed company of professional British Asian and Welsh actors, dancers and musicians and invited people from the various South Asian communities and also indigenous Welsh to join us as performers. Without any auditions, so that anyone at all interested could be included, we attracted around 30 adults, teenagers and children, nearly all of whom had never previously performed in public.

FR:   Where was this?

SC:   The base for our rehearsals and performances was the Shri Kutchi Leva Patel Samaj, a Gujarati community centre in Cardiff's docklands, historically an area of settlement for immigrants and one of Britain's earliest multiracial communities.

We took the Celtic story of Trystan and Essyllt investigating the similarities of aspects of the story with Indian folklore and rehearsed a production which was then performed for ten nights by a cast of 44 in folk theatre style with music, song, comedy and dance as ways of telling the story as well as dialogue. As well as moving towards a genuinely popular folk theatre way of creating performances, how this model of combing professional and community performers in a Celtic and Asian mix worked so well was both unexpected and very exciting. Audiences appeared genuinely surprised, thrilled, and delighted by this little bit of the magic of India exploding before their very eyes in a Gujarati community centre in the back streets of Cardiff.

FR:   Was there a critical reception of the production?

SC:   The theatre critic of the Guardian newspaper echoed the general reaction. If you don t mind, I ll read you some of the commentary: "It's difficult to imagine a more enjoyable theatrical event than this remarkable production from Theatr Taliesin Wales at the Samaj Centre in Cardiff's Grangetown: not merely for the work itself, a cross-cultural blend of dance, drama, and music, but for the occasion, the complete experience of the evening. There was tea and samosas instead of spirits and peanuts in the interval and an atmosphere of excitement and unalloyed pleasure from the performers and those of the Centre who have played host to the public performances and weeks of rehearsal and community involvement. The story is the familiar one of Arthurian romance and the involvement of the Asian community is made the more comprehensible by Theatr Taliesin's continuing exploration of the links between Celtic and Indian legend. The story of Western chivalry and love is told in the fashion of an Indian folk story; with the dance and music, the style never seems artificial or academic."

FR:   I still don t understand. What drove you to go to India?

SC:   I m just coming to that. Just before rehearsals began I had been introduced to Inder Dan Detha, a Rajasthani farmer, who was in Britain for a short while. Inder Dan is also a writer with an extensive knowledge of Indian folk culture who works actively for social change in his village. He joined us as our advisor on Indian folklore and the common ground shared by the story of Trystan and Essyllt. He also performed in the play and was so fascinated by what we were doing that, on his own initiative, he undertook follow up research into the effect of the experience on the community participants, discovering that members of previously separate communities Hindu, Muslim, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi (both Indian and Pakistani) and indigenous Welsh had been meeting, interacting and forming friendships for the first time through the focus of taking part in Trystan and Essyllt.

My first visit to India was in 1987. I went to seek out and experience folk theatre performances in the villages first hand. After an extensive tour of the countryside by train and bus I was led to the Bhavai folk theatre artists of Gujarat. The following year with the support of the Centre and what support the artists could extract from the Government of India we were able to bring the artists to Cardiff to create with us a joint folk theatre production with Welsh performers and our community company.

On that first trip I also went to visit Inder Dan in his home village of Borunda, in just about the dead centre of Rajasthan, and into the Kathar desert about halfway between Jodhpur and Ajmer. On that and subsequent visits to Borunda, Inder Dan always remembered his Cardiff experience and kept suggesting that I go to Borunda and work with the local Khyal folk theatre artists and Borunda villagers in the same way as we had done in Cardiff. He told me that thirty years ago villagers used to perform their own Khyals, sometimes with the professional artists, but that the tradition had fallen away. He also said that divisions of caste and religion had increased noticeably in that time and that, from his point of view, it was possible the Borunda community would be enriched by participating in a folk play in the same way that he thought the communities in Cardiff had been. It would also revive the lost tradition of Borunda Khyals.

In 1996, I felt the time was right for me to pursue this idea. I went again to Borunda to see if and how it would be possible. Inder Dan and I talked with some of the Khyal folk theatre actors, members of the Borunda Panchayat the village council and teachers at Borunda schools about the involvement of children. It became clear to me during this exploratory trip that there was no reason why the model of combining professional artists and community performers developed in Cardiff would not transfer to Borunda and we decided to go ahead. Back in Britain, I raised the funding required for what had become the Borunda Performing Arts Project and returned to Borunda to begin working on the project there in the village on January 1, 1998.

FR:   How did you proceed to mount the production?

SC:   Using this model of working with professionals and community performers, you have the different elements to bring together. An added element, in this case, was that the Khyal artists who had never rehearsed a new Khyal before. Khyal artists have a fixed repertoire that is always performed. They tend to learn their roles from watching an actor playing that role in performances.

FR:   Did you create a new piece?

SC:   Inder Dan wanted us to do Trystan and Essyllt in Khyal style in Borunda. It is his opinion that the plays in the Khyal repertoire, being mainly based on Rajasthani historical episodes, tend to reinforce traditional attitudes towards caste and the social hierarchies in place before Independence when Rajasthan was 22 separate kingdoms. Now, although Trystan and Essyllt takes place in similar kinds of Celtic kingdoms and, therefore, transfers perfectly into a Rajasthani historical episode, the main characters in the story are caught up in a purely human dilemma which anyone can relate to, whatever their social status, and, in fact, the villains are the high born courtiers who are continually creating problems and causing trouble because, as a leisured class, they have nothing better to do. So first came a new script. Before rehearsals began, Beni Dan, a poet from the village with a great knowledge of Khyal translated the script developed in Cardiff in 1986 into Khyal rhyming couplets.

FR:   How did you proceed?

SC:   Out of the six week rehearsal period the first two weeks were spent in Beni Dan dictating his text to the Khyal artists, who were, incidentally, very impressed with the quality of the verses he had written as they were perfectly in Khyal style in terms of rhythm and the rich use of language, and then setting the verses to music as Khyal is over 80 per cent sung. Technically, the singing in Khyal uses folk raga and many people think that these existed first and that Indian classical music developed the folk raga into the classical system.

FR:   How was the music created?

SC:   The musical director, Jamaluddeen Khan, who is a master of Western Rajasthan Khyal and folk music, would look for the most suitable rag to fit the rhythms of a particular set of couplets. Originally, it seems that only one rag was used in Khyal Rag Launi until the last major writer of Khyals in the early part of this century, Lacchiram of Kutchaman, innovated the use of up to thirteen raga in his plays. We wanted to have as much variety as possible and ended up using well over twenty raga, as well as a number of folk melodies.

FR:   Who acted in the show?

SC:   In addition to the four Khyal actors I brought in two young men and one young woman, semi-professional actors from Jodhpur who were sufficiently enthusiastic about our project to spend two months with us in Borunda, to play main parts and rehearse full time with the Khyal performers. One of them, Ajay Karan Joshi, who was only 20, was to play the hero, Trystan. It was a huge task for him to learn Khyal techniques almost from scratch, especially the singing. He was the right age for the part, looked like a story book young hero and had one of the best attitudes I've ever come across in a young actor eager to learn, full of energy and a strong stage presence, but the humility of an Indian student learning from masters. He made enormous progress throughout rehearsals in both understanding Khyal and creating the role of Trystan. Finding him, or he finding us, was a great blessing for the project.

FR:   So you used female performers as well. I thought there were no female players allowed in Khyal?

SC:   Women still do not perform in Khyal, although in other North Indian folk forms, like Nautanki and Tamasha, female performers have been included over the last thirty years. So although Essyllt was played by Mangilal, a Khyal female impersonator, having Geetanjali Sharma as the servant, Branwen, was a break with Khyal tradition which didn't appear to worry too many people, maybe because she was from a city and it was in a community context. A number of women from Borunda, however, also wanted to participate, but pulled out due to pressure from the men of their families who felt there would be shame attached to this kind of performing in public. Whatever might occur in the cities, in the Rajasthan countryside such a taboo remains strong, as does purdah and the strict separation of the sexes on both public and private occasions. The same rules do not apply, though, with pre-pubescent girls. We gathered over 30 boys and girls more girls than boys taking some from each of the Borunda schools, and from all the castes, including so-called untouchables. A number of Borunda men, the oldest being 74 the youngest child was his four-year-old granddaughter, were also involved, both performing and helping out in other ways.

FR:   Where did you live while you were working in Borunda village?

SC:   Some outbuildings opposite Inder Dan's house on the edge of the village which used to house his buffaloes were converted to an office and sleeping accommodation and the large open courtyard in front was filled in with sand for the rehearsal space.

FR:   How often were rehearsals?

SC:   I worked each day with the main actors, staging the play. In truth, this was not a difficult process as, with the singing and dancing in circles between couplets a characteristic of Indian folk theatre individual to Khyal to the best of my knowledge combined with the everyday physical gesture language of India heightened for performance, scenes almost directed themselves. Which is a tribute to the skills inherent in Khyal as well as a confirmation of how well the Celtic story of warring kingdoms, an arranged marriage, a love potion taken by mistake, deceit, jealousy, exile, tragedy and reconciliation, itself transferred so easily to the desert culture of Rajasthan. The actors fully understood the many levels of the narrative and seemed to genuinely enjoy immersing themselves in the process of staging it.

FR:   Could you explain the major characteristics of Khyal for us?

SC:   Khyal has three pillars. I ve already spoken of two of them: song and dance. As with all the folk forms, comedy is the third pillar. In Khyal, the clown is the one who links the stage and the audience with a lot of direct address and improvisation and, rather like the oil in an engine, keeps the performance moving along with momentum.

In Raju, the clown, I had the pleasure of working with an extremely talented comedian with a naturally funny stage presence. I encouraged him to be part of any scene and improvise whenever he wanted to, in addition to the roles he was playing. For me, this was a key element and Raju's timing, taste and judgement on stage meant that his interventions, which increased as time went by, were always appropriate and added to what was already there, keeping and extending that direct link with the audience.

We gained permission from the schools for the children to join rehearsals for two or three afternoons a week. Maybe because they do no creative arts in the schools, concentrating on literacy and numeracy, the children were full of enthusiasm and, at times, almost over eager. In a country where punctuality is a very loose concept some of them were turning up for rehearsals up to an hour early. They were integrated into a number of scenes in the play, the boys enacting a battle, the girls a flight of swallows and together dancing in the courts, creating a physical jungle in which Trystan and Essyllt hide in exile, playing a group of refugees fleeing from a man-eating tiger as examples. Khyal usually only has half a dozen performers which is why I keep saying that elements of this production were in Khyal style, although the central scenes between the main characters could be from a Khyal.

Working with this model of combining professional and community performers gives you a very much larger cast with the result that the stage pictures can also be much larger in scale. This means that instead of dramatic action being only reported on the stage you have the resources to enact it. And to me, the folk theatre or, what might be called in the West 'popular theatre' recognises that the performers are only playing or pretending to imaginatively enact a story. The audience are accomplices in this pretence as opposed to the naturalistic theatre, taking place indoors in a building created to focus individual concentration on the illusion that there is a reality to what is happening on the stage the suspension of disbelief. In the folk theatre, outdoors in a large noisy crowd, the emphasis and pleasure lies in the unfolding of the story, the way it is being told and the skills involved the singing, dancing and the rough immediacy of the comedy, both verbal and physical. So anything is possible, any action or location in the story can be played out. This is why I love the broad sweep of a story like Trystan and Essyllt which, as literature, is played out in the mind's eye. On stage you can take the imagination of the audience along with you as you show a larger-than-life tiger, where the limbs of the children become the entwined branches of the jungle through which the lovers must make their way, or a dance creates the swallows flying through the high-roofed castle.

Essentially, however, the central dramatic scenes could have been taken out and performed as a Khyal because it was never my intention to change, in any way, the performers' playing of Khyal. As I was working with them in rehearsals, I was learning very directly from them about the essential qualities and skills of Khyal with the intention that the extended cast and stage pictures should blend in stylistically and not appear to be from an alien genre stick out like a sore thumb is the best way to put it.

FR:   Are there any special incidents that were particularly striking to you during the rehearsal period?

SC:   Now a fascinating situation occurred with the Khyal artists just towards the end of rehearsals. They had rehearsed so well, often coming to rehearsals with the couplets firmly learnt and a great attitude to creating the various scenes above all, we had so much fun putting it all together. I remember one rehearsal as being inspired. When Trystan and Essyllt return from their time in the jungle, I suggested to Bashilal, playing King Marc who is Essyllt's husband that he aim a kick at Trystan as he kneels to him in obeisance. This was the first time we had looked at the scene and it just took off and soared from beginning to end. It was that kind of totally fresh discovery of a scene which, when it happens and it happens so rarely, reconfirms your belief in the magic of theatre. And yet, as we began to run the scenes together in final preparation, there was no life in them. It was not Khyal, though all the elements were in place. Fortunately, when I was looking at how to open the performance after the usual invocation to Ganesh, I asked them to show me how they would usually open a Khyal. This was with a sung and danced invocation to Hanuman which they did for me and it had all the life of a Khyal that was missing in these final rehearsals. When I asked them why they were not performing Trystan and Essyllt with the same kind of life and energy, they told me that they were afraid to make a mistake. And, of course, because rehearsals had been so much fun and had gone so well, I had almost forgotten that this was the first time that any of them had created and rehearsed a new play from scratch, and they were looking to me for conformation that they were doing it right. Well, from that revelation, it was easy to explain that they couldn't actually do anything wrong. They were Khyal artists performing a Khyal, so whatever they did would be right; they should now forget all about me and just perform Trystan and Essyllt as they would a Khyal. Then we ran the play straight through and it exploded into life. It had become a play in Khyal style.

FR:   Is there anything you would have done differently?

SC:   Yes, in connection with the music. Khyal is performed with the music master playing harmonium to accompany and give the key to the singers, plus the very vital element of the naqqara. The naqqara are two drums, one large, one small, whose sound is loud, sharp and piercing - ideal for open air performances. The naqqara really drives the performance, giving the rhythms for the singing and dancing. A really good naqqara drummer will also lift and inspire the performer and we had a great musician with us in Nizamuddeen Khan. I had heard that originally Khyal had also used a sarangi. So, being a romantic Westerner, I wanted to extend the instruments into a small orchestra of desert sounds. Accordingly I brought in some traditional Rajasthani folk musicians, Langas. The Langas are incredibly good folk musicians who over the last couple of decades have begun to be taken to perform abroad and have built a world class reputation. The instruments I used were two sarangis, kamachaya a gut-stringed instrument which pre-dates the sarangi, bansuri flutes, and kurtal small blocks of wood clicked together in the hands.

In retrospect, I would have stuck to just the harmonium and naqqara. Firstly because the Khyal and Langa traditions, although both folk, are slightly different and some tensions arose between the two sets of performers maybe to do with personality or professional jealousies and also perhaps because they come from different regions of Rajasthan. Whatever, all were totally professional in rehearsals but I detected strains socially which were not apparent in any other cases of the mixture of elements within the project. But the second and more purely practical reason is that in performance with the fairly rough microphone and sound system, these additional instruments could barely be heard above the naqqara. So, in future, although this orchestra of the desert sounded beautiful to my ears in rehearsal, I think it will be wise for these reasons to keep the musical accompaniment as it is in Khyal itself. It's also a timely reminder to stick to my declared principle of not interfering with or changing Khyal.

FR:   How were the performances received?

SC:   In the first place, our presence in the village became common knowledge during rehearsals as anyone was able to come into our sandy compound on the edge of the village and watch what we were doing and the numbers of those doing so increased as the weeks went by. Two incidents are worth recalling. One time a group of women labourers and women field workers approached Ajay (Trystan) and told him he should escape before he was badly hurt. Whether this was concern for Ajay the actor as he rolled around in the sand, or for Trystan the character as he underwent his trials and tribulations, or a combination of the two is open to speculation. Also, two elderly farmers made a pact with each other that they would meet at a certain time each day and come together to watch the rehearsals. They were to be seen each day leaning on their sticks and frozen in concentration. By the time we did our dress rehearsal there were maybe a thousand sitting and watching.

FR:   Can you describe the performance space?

SC:   We built a 35-foot square stage on open ground near the centre of Borunda by first building a dry stone wall three feet high with a slight slope from back to front, filling it with hard packed sand and stretching canvas over. A canopy, a traditional shamyana, covered the whole of the stage and the audience was on three sides. Because Borunda is prey to frequent power cuts, especially in the evening, we used a small generator to power three halogen lamps and a sound system.

FR:   And your audiences?

SC:   I had been told to expect large numbers, but was still unprepared for the size of the audiences. On the first night there were 4,000, on the second 5,000, the third had to be canceled due to a wind and rain storm, on the fourth there were 6,000 and on the fifth and final night there were 8,000. I can honestly say that in almost 30 years of working in the theatre I have never known fear until then. I suddenly realised what I had done in creating a performance for these people who had come in such large numbers. It would be the first time that they had seen a folk theatre performing a story which they did not know. What if the story was not clear? What if they weren't interested in it? What if they were expecting one which they already knew, as was usual, and didn't want to be bothered to follow some new narrative? At any point they could have stood up en masse and gone home. They would not stay for politeness, but only if they wanted to. In the event, a few did wander off but 99 per cent stayed each night till almost 1:00 a.m., which was the time we finished.

But I used the fear to my advantage. In any new production,  the transition from rehearsal to stage requires adjustment cuts, additions, the fine tuning of scenes and this was no exception. So each night I literally prowled in and around the audience to feel their reactions. This was so useful because I was able to sense their restlessness when a scene was going on too long. The local language of this region of Rajasthan, Marwari, and Khyal verse composition in particular, tends to be very florid with great use of metaphor and simile and a great elaboration of description of events and emotions felt. This meant that whilst, in Cardiff, a performance of Trystan and Essyllt took two-and-a-quarter hours, in Borunda it was four hours. But I felt that, in the same way as the pantomime audience of Puss In Boots in London were focusing on the narrative thrust of the story, in the same way the Borunda audience, being totally unfamiliar with the tale, wanted, first and foremost, to know what was going to happen next. Accordingly, each day I cut back on some of the elaborations to move the story along at a good pace. This appeared to work as I felt the restlessness disappear as the performances progressed. However, the length stayed the same, at around four hours, because this also gave the space for the clown and other characters to develop the improvisations which the audience loved so much and actually increased their concentration for the more fixed dramatic scenes.

One of the most pleasing aspects of the performances was that so many women were part of the audience. At the present time Khyal is now only mainly performed at cattle and camel fairs. The audience is composed of often drunken men who demand rude songs demeaning to women and comic interludes with women as sex objects. This excludes women from the audience in terms of both subject matter and personal safety. Many, many women expressed their gratitude that here was a situation that they felt able to watch the folk theatre. In the same way that the young girls performing on the stage were obviously safe and being treated with respect, so the women seemed to feel safe and respected as part of the audience. In fact, I would estimate that women and children made up slightly more than half the total audience each night, with, as is the tradition, the women all sitting as a separate group.

It was the women who showed a particular fascination with a woman, Geetanjali, as Essyllt's servant, Branwen. Each time she sang or danced the women would actually stand up and press forward for a closer view as this was the first time that they had seen such a thing. But I didn't feel a strong sense of disapproval. It seemed more like a strong curiosity. Then again, in this sometimes fiercely traditional rural society, having a man playing the heroine, Essyllt, meant that Trystan and Essyllt, as characters in love with each other, were able to touch and show outward signs of affection in a way that would not have been possible with a woman playing the part. These are the rules of the community in which you are the guest and trying to put on a play as successfully as possible.

Working within communities I have found that how you move towards the end result a performance is the most important thing. If everyone involved has a lot of fun and enjoys the experience, then when you share that with an audience, how can they not have fun and enjoy it too? It is theatre as a communal celebration of being alive. For four nights in Borunda, we were able to share with 23,000 others how our lives can be comic and sad and joyous and celebrate together our common humanity.

For further information on this subject, please consult the website for Celebrating Cultures at http://celebratingcultures.net.

Farley Richmond is a professor of drama and department head at the University of Georgia, where he has been employed since 1987.  He is also a member of the board of editors of Project South Asia, a digital library of teaching resources for colleges and universities.

Copyright  2003 Teaching South Asia (ISSN 1529-8558) and Farley Richmond.  All rights reserved.  No part of this article may be reprinted in any form without written permission from Teaching South Asia or Farley Richmond.