Page 300 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Street Theatre in Maharashtra 275

the spontaneity tends to extend the performance towards secondary
themes through lack of mental and emotional control. Such rambling
cannot be avoided by writing down the text for two reasons: the
actresses (often illiterate or quasi-illiterate) are not used to reading
or learning the text by heart, like school-going children; second, such
recitation of a text would for sure kill spontaneity and creativity. The
only solution is that preparatory sessions must concentrate on learning
the key phrases and remembering their location at the right moment of
the performance. This is the only way to: (a) reduce apprehension and
mental tension; (b) to respect and enhance the creative spontaneity of
the oral tradition of peasant women who have hardly gone to school;
and (c) to safeguard the lively pace of the performance. In any case, the
spectators themselves do not have either the habit of concentrating on
the linear logic of verbal dialogues, especially as the performances are
always given in the open; key gestures, keywords, typical practices and
values have to be projected well and quickly, in chosen and calculated
words, to be effectively received.
The relevance and novelty of such experiments and investigation
of feminine spontaneity must be understood in relation to five para-
meters:

1. The street play, by its very name, points to a form of expression
belonging exclusively to groups of urban youths. It had never
existed in villages for the simple reason that there were no action
groups to perform there, barring local exceptions, before the
1970s. Even male villagers have never performed in the lanes
or squares of their village in the name of modern concepts of
structural transformations. Peasant women have everything to
learn, the boldness to begin with, let alone the right to perform
in public.
2. Modern media (films and TV) propose and validate forms of
expression and content that prove to be rather a handicap to
their desire for autonomous expression.
3. Social, cultural and even political movements have resorted to
various traditional forms of folk theatre as these latter could
legitimize their effort in the eyes of the public (three examples are
well known in Maharashtra: ‘Tamasha’ with J. Phule, ‘Jalsa’ with
A. Sathe and B.R. Ambedkar and ‘Bharud’ for moral and religious
purposes). But first, common peasant women as a whole are