Chronicles from Kashmir: An Annotated, Multimedia Script
Chronicles from Kashmir: An Annotated, Multimedia Script

Author: Nandita Dinesh

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2020-09-14

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 180064020X

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‘What is happening in Kashmir?’ Chronicles from Kashmir explores this question through a site-adaptive 24-hour theatrical performance. Developed between 2013 and 2018 by the Ensemble Kashmir Theatre Akademi and Nandita Dinesh, the play uses a durational, promenade format to immerse its audience within a multitude of perspectives on life in Kashmir. From a wedding celebration that is interrupted by curfew, to schoolboys divided by policing strategies, and soldiers struggling with a toxic mixture of boredom and trauma, Chronicles from Kashmir uses performance, installation and collaborative creation to grapple with Kashmir’s conflicts through the lenses of outsiders, insiders, and everyone in between. Due to varying degrees of censorship and suppression, the play has not been performed live since 2017. This book is, therefore, an attempt to keep Chronicles from Kashmir alive by including filmed scenes, a script, contextual questions, a glossary, and illuminating introductions by Nandita Dinesh and EKTA founder Bhawani Bashir Yasir. A valuable Open Access resource for practitioners, educators and students of performance and conflict, this book is also stimulating reading for anybody who has asked, ‘What is happening in Kashmir?’ This playscript includes: Twenty filmed scenes of the play in performance A range of contextual questions to stimulate discussion on staging site-adaptive theatre in places of conflict A helpful glossary

After the Miners’ Strike
After the Miners’ Strike

Author: Paul Farmer

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2023-09-27

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1800649150

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In this rich memoir, the first of two volumes, Paul Farmer traces the story of A39, the Cornish political theatre group he co-founded and ran from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. Farmer offers a unique insight into A39’s creation, operation, and artistic practice during a period of convulsive political and social change. The reader is plunged into the national miners’ strike and the collapse of Cornish tin mining, the impact of Thatcherism and ‘Reaganomics’, and the experience of touring Germany on the brink of reunification, alongside the influence on A39 of writers Bertolt Brecht, John McGrath and Keith Johnstone. Farmer, a former bus driver turned artistic director, details the theatre group’s inception and development as it fought to break down social barriers, attract audiences, and survive with little more than a beaten-up Renault 12, a photocopier and two second-hand stage lights at its disposal: the book traces the progress from these raw materials to the development of an integrated community theatre practice for Cornwall. Farmer’s candour and humour enliven this unique insight into 1980s theatre and politics. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in theatre history, life in Cornwall, and the relationship between performance and society during a turbulent era.

Creative Writing and the Experiences of Others
Creative Writing and the Experiences of Others

Author: Nandita Dinesh

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-05-28

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 104004123X

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In times that are rife with complex manifestations of identity politics, writing classrooms across the world are hosting heated debates about what it means for authors to write about experiences outside their own. This book focuses on writing as the act of witnessing when the writers themselves were not present to witness in person. It seeks to answer the questions that come along with these experiences, such as what might it mean to write in order “to watch,” “to try and understand,” “to never look away,” and “to never forget” when the writer is an outsider to an experience? What might it mean to write about others in ways that do not essentialize or sensationalize, and in ways that are as humble, ethical, and responsible as possible? What might it mean to bear witness through the written word while engaged in a constant (re)negotiation with one’s own positioning i.e., to cultivate a condition of critical empathy that doesn’t also have the consequence of creative paralysis?

Writing in-Between
Writing in-Between

Author: Nandita Dinesh

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-11-22

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1003846203

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Writing in-Between lies at intersections: between theory and praxis; between fiction and non-fiction; between author and reader; between the personal and the political. Beginning with a conceptual glossary that prepares readers for their journey through the book, Dinesh offers two central texts to invite readers to become co-creators. The first, F for _____, is written as an “academic novella” and culminates with an interactive section that is composed of guided invitations for the reader/co-creator. The second text, Julys, takes the form of a “dramatic memoir” and intersperses invitations for readers/co-creators between each of its chapters. Dinesh brings these threads together in an entirely interactive concluding chapter, where her hopes for collaborative meaning making take centre stage. In all of its unique invitations to engage, Dinesh’s readers/co-creators can either choose to craft their creations in personal notebooks or blank spaces in this work’s physical copy, or to engage more publicly via virtual forums that can be accessed via QR codes and accompanying links that are scattered throughout the book. Guided by questions about writing can “do” — questions that have shaped Dinesh’s work as an artist, scholar, and educator for almost two decades — Writing in Between embodies one central tenet: that the significance of performative writing might be most powerfully experienced through a collaborative process of meaning making between a text’s author and its readers turned co-creators.

Artists in Times of War
Artists in Times of War

Author: Howard Zinn

Publisher: Seven Stories Press

Published: 2011-01-04

Total Pages: 63

ISBN-13: 1609801679

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"Political power," says Howard Zinn, "is controlled by the corporate elite, and the arts are the locale for a kind of guerilla warfare in the sense that guerillas look for apertures and opportunities where they can have an effect." In Artists in Times of War, Zinn looks at the possibilities to create such apertures through art, film, activism, publishing and through our everyday lives. In this collection of four essays, the author of A People's History of the United States writes about why "To criticize the government is the highest act of patriotism." Filled with quotes and examples from the likes of Bob Dylan, Mark Twain, e. e. cummings, Thomas Paine, Joseph Heller, and Emma Goldman, Zinn's essays discuss America's rich cultural counternarratives to war, so needed in these days of unchallenged U.S. militarism.

Chronicles from Kashmir
Chronicles from Kashmir

Author: Nandita Dinesh

Publisher: Bombaykala Books

Published: 2018-07-24

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9788193835319

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nformation for/from Outsiders: Chronicles from Kashmir has been in development since 2013, as a collaboration between Dr. Nandita Dinesh and the Ensemble Kashmir Theatre Akademi in Srinagar. Chronicles from Kashmir uses Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro's (1992) Information for Foreigners as its point of departure; it takes place in the promenade and is site-adaptive. Chronicles from Kashmir seeks to create a sense of "balance" between differently positioned voices that emerge when speaking about Kashmir; between differently placed narratives on the "victim"/"perpetrator" spectrum. While there is an inevitable streak of political commentary that runs throughout the work, a political current that cannot be escaped when talking about Kashmir - Chronicles from Kashmir does not espouse any one political ideology. We see ourselves as being artists and educators, using aesthetics and pedagogy to engage audiences with diverse perspectives from/about the Valley. Chronicles from Kashmir, like any other performance, has its limitations. It can never do justice to all the narratives that compose Kashmir. It's a step, though, a small step toward engaging audiences in stories and experiences that mainstream media might never share with them; a small step toward sparking more educated, and less polarized, opinions about what is happening in the region.

Theatre and War
Theatre and War

Author: Nandita Dinesh

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2016-07-27

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1783742615

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Nandita Dinesh places Kipling’s "six honest serving-men" (who, what, when, where, why, how) in productive conversation with her own experiences in conflict zones across the world to offer a theoretical and practical reflection on making theatre in times of war. This timely and important book weaves together Dinesh’s personal narrative with the public story of modern conflict, illustrating as it does, the importance of theatre as a force for ethical deliberation and social justice. In it Dinesh asks how theatre might intervene in times and places of conflict and how we might reflect on such interventions. In pursuit of answers, Theatre and War adopts the methods of auto-ethnography, positioning the theatrical practitioner at the heart of conflict zones in northern Uganda, Guatemala, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Rwanda, Kenya, Nagaland, and Kashmir. No longer a detached observer, the researcher and practitioner has to be able to meld theory with practice; to speak to ‘doing’, without undervaluing the importance of ‘thinking about doing’. Each chapter approaches the need for a synthesis of theory and practice by way of a term of inquiry―Why, Where, Who, What, When―and each is equipped with a set of unflinchingly honest field notes that are designed to reveal some of the ‘hows’ from the author’s own repertoire: questions and issues that were encountered during her own theatrical undertakings, along with first hand reflection on the complexities, potential, and challenges that attended her global work in community theatre. Within these notes are strategies that give the reader a practical insight into how the discussion might find its footing on the ground of war. The range and scope of this book make it required reading for those interested in theatre―practitioners, researchers, and students alike—as well as those seeking to understand the applications of the arts for ethics, politics, and education.

Religion and Politics in Jammu and Kashmir
Religion and Politics in Jammu and Kashmir

Author: Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2020-05-25

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1000078795

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This book examines the shifting, non-linear relationship between religion, nationalism and politics in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, India. In the wake of the revocation of Article 370, the state’s plural and relatively harmonious society has come under multiple strains, with religion often informing day-to-day politics. The chapters in this volume: Trace the formation of the political entity of Jammu and Kashmir and the seemingly secular politics of its three regions Discuss the rise of militancy and resistance movements in the Kashmir Valley Highlight the intersection between everyday life, nationalism and resistance through a study of the literary traditions of Kashmir, contemporary resistance photography and everyday communalism located in the changing food practices of Hindu and Muslim communities Religion and Politics in Jammu and Kashmir will be an indispensable read for students and researchers of religion and politics, democratization and democracy, secularism, sociology, cultural studies and South Asian studies.