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Making Sense: Reading the Production Notes of Dark Things
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2025
Abstract
This essay seeks to lay out the process that went into the making of Dark Things, which I co-directed with Deepan Sivaraman based on Ari Sitas's oratorio on the Silk Road, by repurposing the production notes of the performance, which opened in Delhi on 18 April 2018 at the Ambedkar University Delhi and later played at the International Festival of Kerala in January 2019. Both the method and the form of Dark Things, I suggest, were a collaboration. Collaboration as a method intimates collective creation, usually by means of improvisation, where authorship is distributed between theatre-makers (actors, scenographers, musicians) and materials (objects, site, landscape). Collaboration as form intimates that the performance's explicit grammar has been shaped by a sensuous give-and-take between the practitioner and the material. In this essay, I ask, from my perspective as a theatre-maker, how handling actual objects and tools obviously leaves an imprint on the performance, scenography, dramaturgy and mise en scène. In writing this article, I have retained the stylistic features of production notes – their provisionality and incompleteness; their sliding timescale; their looking forward to work that is to be done and backwards at work already done, marking failures, solutions and openings.
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References
NOTES
1 Dietrich Steinbeck cited by Erika Fischer-Lichte in M. Arjomand and R. Mosse, eds., The Routledge Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies, trans. M. Arjomand (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 71–98, here p. 79.
2 Ingold, Tim, ‘Making Culture and Weaving the World’, in Graves-Brown, Paul, ed., Matter, Materiality, and Modern Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 57–9Google Scholar, here p. 59.
3 An emeritus professor at the University of Cape Town, Ari Sitas is a poet, playwright and theatre-maker from South Africa. From being a founder of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company in South Africa in the 1970s to organizing the Workers’ Theatre movement in the 1980s, his involvement with theatre has been substantial. He is one of South Africa's best-known poets, also particularly known for his collaborations with musicians.
4 Ari Sitas with Kristy Stone, Greg Dor and Reza Khota, Notes for an Oratorio on Small Things That Fall (Like a Screw in the Night) (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2020), back cover.
5 Professor Sumangala Damodaran, formerly at Ambedkar University Delhi, is a practising musician and composer and has been doing teaching and research in popular-music studies for about two decades. Trained in both of the Indian classical music traditions, her performance and research have been around music in and from social movements in India, also involving collaborative work with musicians and researchers from South Africa, Tanzania, Ethiopia and China.
6 Scenographer, director, and theatre-maker, associate professor at Ambedkar University Delhi. Deepan Sivaraman is one of the leading theatre-makers of India, and his works have travelled widely in India and internationally.
7 Currently pursuing his PhD from the Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies (CTDPS), University of Cape Town.
8 Reza Khota is a practising musician and composer working in South Africa. Chandran V (1956–2022) was a musician and composer who worked in both theatre and film.
9 Ari Sitas's word, mentioned in a conversation during rehearsal, Delhi 2018.
10 Sitas et al., Notes for an Oratorio, p. 5.
11 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 49Google Scholar.
12 Sitas et al., Notes for an Oratorio, p. 1.
13 Richardson, Paul B., ‘Geopolitical Encounters and Entanglements along the Belt and Road Initiative’, Geography Compass, 15, 8 (2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, article e12583.
14 Sitas et al., Notes for an Oratorio, p. 1.
15 Tim Winter indicates that today the Belt and Road initiative needs to be understood as an enterprise much beyond the travel of languages, religions and commodities over long distances. He sees the Belt and Road initiative as the most ‘ambitious foreign policy’ ever imagined by any country. He sees its ‘geocultural and geostrategic’ conceptualization as a ‘world-ordering force’. Tim Winter, The Silk Road: Connecting Histories and Futures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 5, 135.
16 Richardson, ‘Geopolitical Encounters and Entanglements’, 2021, citing Klinke and ÓTuathail.
17 Ibid., citing Colás & Pozo.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ingold, Tim, Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 259–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Rayner, Alice, To Act, to Do, to Perform: Drama and the Phenomenology of Action (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Ibid., p. 2.
23 Ibid, p. 7.
24 Ibid.
25 Raymond Williams, Drama in Performance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 119–24.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., pp. 152–3
28 Ibid., pp. 119–24.
29 Arendt, Hanna, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 80–6, 91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Pitches, Jonathan, Vsevolod Meyerhold (New York and London: Routledge 2003), pp. 67–8Google Scholar, 72; Rayner, Alice, ‘Rude Mechanicals and the Specters of Marx’, Theatre Journal, 54, 4(2002), pp. 535–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Gabrielle Cody and Rebecca Schneider, Re: Direction (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 61, citing Worall.
32 Allain, Paul and Harvie, Jen, The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Ibid.
34 Braun, Edward and Pitches, Jonathan, Meyerhold on Theatre (London and New York: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016), p. 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 Erin Hurley, Theatre and Feeling (Basingstoke, UK and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 142–57, citing Lazzarato.
36 Hurley, Theatre and Feeling, p. 10.
37 Ibid.
38 William B. Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 149–50.
39 What is visible labour and, by contrast, what is invisible labour are most demonstrable as the visibility of the actor onstage and the invisibility of the stage crew who work offstage. Invisible work itself has two registers – that which happens before the show in order to prepare the workplace, and that which happens along with it, sideways or parallel, while the show happens. To elaborate a little: the performance space is measured and marked to be technically equipped for the staging by setting up lamps, rigging the lights, putting up simple microphones and complex sound systems, curtains and wings, pulleys and weights, wiring and taping, laying out the objects and props, making green rooms (and in times past the prompter's box). These arrangements are then tested by stage managers, lighting designers, sound designers and other backstage workers. Once done, the technicians disappear offstage: into the wings, the control rooms and the substages, depending on the nature and architecture of the performance site chosen, and pilot the show from these various locations. The stage manager and her assistants, the lighting person, the sound operator, the curtain puller, the electrician and the dresser work along with the show – a companion performance, as it were – while the carpenter, the props maker, the costumier, the make-up person and the tiffin maker usually finish their work before the performance. But all the ‘invisibles’ together work out an arrangement, rather like that of an orchestra, to keep the performance going. See Elizabeth A. Osborne and Christine Woodworth, eds., Working in the Wings: New Perspectives on Theatre History and Labor (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015); Theron Schmidt, ‘Troublesome Professionals: On the Speculative Reality of Theatrical Labour’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 18, 2 (2013), pp. 15–26.
40 Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, pp. 149–50.
41 Williams, Drama in Performance, p. 150.
42 Simon Shepherd, Theatre Body and Pleasure (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 36.
43 Calvin Taylor, ‘Performing for Affect? Immaterial Labour and Performer Training’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 5, 2 (2014), pp. 181–96, citing John Matthews, Training for Performance: A Meta-disciplinary Account (London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011), p. 227.
44 William B. Worthen, The Idea of the Actor (Princeton and Guildford: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 6; Matthews, Training for Performance.
45 Shepherd, Theatre Body and Pleasure.
46 Maaike Bleeker, Doing Dramaturgy: Thinking through Practice (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2023).